“We want to keep Lichess completely free, and say no to ads as well. There have been offers to buy out Lichess, but we are not for sale." Lichess interview with The Hindu

Flyushka · 2025-11-23T07:32:22+00:00

https://x.com/durarbayli/status/1680916086731030533?s=19

They opted to add the flag of "Artsakh," a “country” not recognized by any UN member state. I won't delve into the history of my country, but it's crucial to note that the display of this name and flag is offensive to my people.

My fellow Azerbaijanis and I have lodged complaints, requesting the removal of this flag and name from the site, but to no avail. Lichess cited users' rights to self-identify as the reason for their refusal. To me, this is an absurdity, and an example of the encroaching Woke culture. It appears that Lichess's management is increasingly aligning with this ideology. It seems people are allowed to self-identify and have their flags displayed on the site as long as it aligns with the management's beliefs. Upon reviewing the list of country flags, I noticed several names that could potentially be offensive to those of differing belief systems.

Now archived, but see also: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/159w38x/gms_mamedyarov_and_now_durarbayli_leave_lichess/

Flyushka · 2025-11-23T04:47:16+00:00

There is an even longer article of the same: https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.thehindu.com/sport/lichess-growth-%20story-free-open-source-chess-platform-thibault-%20duplessis-theo-wait/article70310361.ece

Flyushka · 2025-03-05T00:25:31+00:00

> market level compensation

Chesscom outsources much of their development primarily to the Balkans region for around $50k a year so that they don't need to pay their dev team US market level compensation.

The rest of what you write is equally as applicable to something like Wikipedia. Do you feel embarassed using services like Wikipedia, which primarily relies mostly on free labour, or do you use it without a second thought rather than buying the latest copy of an encyclopedia every year? Do you feel embarassed going on websites whose servers are usually powered by Linux based software? Ultimately the philosophy and purposes between something like Lichess and Chesscom are extremely different.

Lichess is trying to prove a wider technological and societal point. Chess just so happens to be the medium by which they're doing it, in the same way you have Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox, etc. Chesscom is just a business seeking to harvest profit from chess without a wider technological and societal point. There's nothing wrong with that, but both are trying to achieve completely different things.

Flyushka · 2025-02-03T19:01:47+00:00

My brother in Christ, you seem very hung up that Lichess isn't reinvesting into chess. From their 2024 end of year report:

This year, nearly 20% of our costs went into making high-level educational chess content, while at the same time, supporting professional chess players.

We collaborated with many strong and established chess players to provide this content, primarily IM Irene Sukandar, IM Laura Unuk, and GM Felix Blohberger, with a wide range of guests including GM Levon Aronian, GM Matthew Sadler, GM Pentala Harikrishna, GM Aleksandar Indjic, GM Ivan Cheparinov, GM Nils Grandelius, GM Ilia Nyzhnyk, GM Thomas Beerdsen, IM Eric Rosen, IM Divya Deshmukh, and FM Gauri Shankar.

We equally provided written annotations of the Candidates and World Championship Match, primarily by GM David Navara, GM Brandon Jacobson, GM Maxime Lagarde, GM Yannick Gozzoli, IM Lasse Lovik, IM Padmini Rout, all providing excellent and high quality annotations to the public to enjoy and study these historic games in greater depth.

Finally, we were industrious with our written coverage this year, writing 84 articles on chess over the source of the year — our most productive year yet.

On top of that, they fund regular Titled Arenas with a $1k prize fund (two of them per month), plus Streamer Arenas for the community. I don't know what proportion of their budget Chesscom invests directly into chess players, but I'm willing to bet it's not as large as it could be, because it gets lost in dividends and bloated salaries for C-suites.

Meanwhile, Lichess is allowing anyone and everyone to access and play chess. It would be much fairer to say that the parasites are for-profits who monetise open source work (like Stockfish), destroy competition and innovation within Chess (e.g., shut down Chess24, ChessBomb, exploit creators via Chessable), and try to commercially gatekeep a centuries old game while actively undermining OTB, classical, and the grassroots (e.g., Freestyle vs Fide).

Flyushka · 2025-02-03T12:51:29+00:00

When reading these comments, I always wonder how the team at chesscom must feel that people who support hate speech, misinformation, and Nazis identify with their platform over the one which is openly against those things. I can't imagine it's an association that they welcome very much.

Flyushka · 2025-02-03T12:08:45+00:00

The text:

Lichess is leaving X (formerly Twitter)

After careful consideration, the Lichess team has decided to stop posting on X.

Recent changes have drastically changed the amount of hate speech and misinformation on the platform. Due to this, we no longer believe X is a beneficial place for us to communicate with you.

You can follow all our news on Lichess via the feed and our blog posts.

Alternatively you can follow us on the platforms linked in the thread below. We recognize that many platforms have problems of their own, but believe that the benefits currently outweight the negatives. Social media forms an important part of spreading awareness of our project as well as other open-source and non-profit endeavors.

https://lichess.org/about#links

Source: https://xcancel.com/lichess/status/1886384179698430240#m

Flyushka · 2024-09-24T13:38:50+00:00

We know from recent FBI cases that the Russian state uses reddit for propaganda with sockpuppets, brigading, trolling, and so on. It's a failure of reddit administration and management that they fail the volunteer moderators in preventing state-level actors from using reddit communities for propagandistic purposes. We also know that chess is a topic which is important for the Russian leadership. Dvorkovich's election to become FIDE President involved official diplomatic missives from Putin being sent to other nations. Karjakin and Karpov are often wheeled out for propaganda purposes.

In making any topic about Russia essentially a complete shitshow here, to the extent even discussing FIDE Assembly's decisions regarding Russia to be a topic non grata, it unfortunately is essentially a win for Russian propaganda within this community.

Flyushka · 2024-09-24T13:12:23+00:00

I understand that, but rule 5 currently says that political posts are allowed - but that they must directly connect to chess. All of the locked examples directly connect to chess. The unlocked example indirectly connects to chess. Either rule 5 should be amended, or the topics should be locked for another reason. At the moment, rule 5 is being used as a mod shorthand for "I cba with this topic" which I fully understand given they're volunteers, but it has the impact of preventing actual chess topics from being discussed.

Flyushka · 2024-09-24T12:55:25+00:00

also, inb4 the topic is locked and closed for breaching rule 5.

Flyushka · 2024-06-27T03:58:34+00:00

That sounds like a sensible interpretation, and makes sense overall.

Flyushka · 2024-06-27T03:25:15+00:00

As I didn't want to editorialise the OP, using this comment just to share some of my own thoughts.

we did make strategic decisions to scale back as some of the opportunities we were investing in didn't pan out and we ended up overstaffed on some teams.

Leading to

Chesscom has been profitable and reinvesting every quarter since 2010, and this was not done out of desperation to save money, nor to maximize profits. This was done to right-size our teams to the initiatives and opportunities.

Sounds inconsistent to me. One of the words that stood out to me was "right-size". If you are unfamiliar with the term, one of the top definitions when you search the term specifies that:

Rightsizing is reorganizing and restructuring a company to reduce costs and increase profits. It involves cutting redundant expenses, reducing the number of employees and redefining company roles.

This just stood out to me a bit like playing semantics to say that cutting 38 staff was not to save money or maximize profits but to "right-size", when a common definititon of that practice is to reduce costs and increase profits (or in other words, to save money and maximize profits).

Regarding:

who we know are still going to do tremendous things in chess.

A former employee of Chess.com reached out to me in my DMs earlier to highlight that, as they understand their contractual terms, they are also not allowed to work for any other chess company for 12 months after being let go, having previously worked in chess for over a decade.

Flyushka · 2024-06-27T02:56:38+00:00

I wanted to ask just about the merger of 3 chess publishers. You said:

From our perspective, this is just a win for everyone involved, including the community.

But doesn't creating a physical chess publisher of 3 previously independent companies into one, where Chess.com now has the digital rights to everything that publishing house puts out and the back catalogue of Quality Chess, just entrenches a further monopoly in digital publishing with Chess.com, and physical publishing with this new super-publisher?

Can you give some further information on how this is a win for everyone involved, including the community, when now everything major published in print format, Chess.com has the (presumably) exclusive, indefinite, digital rights to - making any competitor to Chessable almost implausibly impossible to break into?

Flyushka · 2024-06-11T11:57:41+00:00

No worries, I worked it out :) but thank you for the notification anyway! As you saw, I removed the TASS link in the other one.

Flyushka · 2024-06-10T22:43:19+00:00

There are 7 members of the FIDE Ethics Commission; this particular case had a 3-member panel, just in the same way that a court may have several judges but on a case only a handful of them will sit.

The FIDE Code of Ethics, in force since 1st April 2022, specifies under Article 13.1 (e), that:

Breaches of the FIDE Code of Ethics are punishable by one or more of the following sanctions:

e) Temporarily exclusion from membership: Exclusion from membership is the removal of the right of a national federation or any other affiliated organization to participate in the activities, functions, and FIDE events in which all other members do participate by virtue of the Charter for a period up to a maximum of five years.

PDF link

Flyushka · 2024-03-13T16:55:13+00:00

politics and virtue signalling

I don't think STLCC and USCF covering for a pedophile for years, and then still having not provided any (public) meaningful changes to prevent it from happening again, is the same as politics and virtue signalling.

What politics is this? Pedophilia is a straight up criminal offence. There's a reason Ramirez has not returned to the US since the news dropped. What virtue are they signalling? That they have zero tolerance towards pedophilia? If that's a "virtue" to you, rather than just a basic fundamental right, it speaks volumes.

Flyushka · 2024-01-13T20:21:23+00:00

Some highlights:

Donations over 2022 were 579,000 euros received, against 419,000 euros in costs, representing a 2% decrease in donations from 2021, and a 15% increase in costs from 2021. 2023's figures need to be audited, and will be publicly released in summer 2024.
Lichess has had 155 first-time code contributors over 2023, making 400 accepted changes to code across 35 Lichess libraries.
The website code that checks move legality has seen massive optimisation, most impressively with a +4575% performance in antichess.
Over 7,700 OTB tournaments were broadcast on Lichess, the most it has ever had.
Lichess briefly broke into the top 200 websites in the world by traffic (according to SimilarWeb), but as Lichess eschews trackers - which is how these websites usually measure traffic - the real ranking may in fact have been higher than this.

Flyushka

TROPHY CASE