I and many others find the UX to be worse, the tutorials/lessons definitely way less interactive (usually consist of just a text dump) and the sheer number of games where the opponent doesn’t make a single move to be extremely frustrating.
It’s also impossible to discuss anything related to chess.com on here or Reddit because lichess people tend to downvote and brigade anyone who doesn’t praise it.
UX is probably a matter of habit, I for one find the chesscom UI unintuitive and I can never find what I'm looking for, but Lichess certainly also has its problems.
The free and (to me) intuitive analysis tools on Lichess are the killer feature for me.
I very much disagree. Chess.com has analysis being more human-readable, the Lichess graph of move strength is amazing for zooming in to your major gamechangers.
The people I've met from chess.com were straightforward and focused on their craft. The product they work on doesn't seem to hurt anyone and I haven't see any exploitation common to tech companies. I heard they don't pay Bay Area salaries, which is probably makes them more sustainable over the long-term.
I wonder if the peaceful co-existence of lichess and chess.com co-existing somehow disturbs some esoteric ideology.
Their website also came out at a time when it was common for competitors like ICC to charge people to play chess online, chesscom being his huge well featured free website helped push forward the popularity of online chess, and their for-profit model is what allows many of the aforementioned streamers to make a living.
I don't hate lichess but I hardly see chesscom as evil.
> for-profit model is what allows many of the aforementioned streamers to make a living
The streamers will be fine. Eric Rosen is one steamer who refuses to sell out to chess.com. Chess.com is beginner friendly but not fee, doesn't even let you analyse your games properly without a subscription.
I do see harm in it, considering their competitor is a non-profit which has done great things for the chess community. Including open sourcing many things like icons and webassembly chess engines.
I just sort of see Chesscom as expanding the chess market overall more than it's constraining the expansion of lichess. I'm pretty sure many of the people who eventually make their way to lichess end up at chesscom first.
chess.com's popularity is derived from their SEO and twitch. They have a deal with nearly all chess twitch streamers which forces them to only play on chess.com and prohibits them from saying anything negative about the platform.
Combine that with their competitor being a non-profit organization which has created numerous open source[1] chess tools like engines, icons and boards and I would call them pretty harmful.
Lichess has quite decent interactive tutorials these days, although not as interactive as the named bots at chess.com.
Personally never had issues with people rejecting games on lichess.com. But lichess is a non-profit that has done great things for the world of chess and open source and open source chess. You'll find almost all better players there, with the exception of those who are payed by chess.com to only play on their platform. Part of the reason is that chess.com has some latency issues.
It's hard not to like lichess, considering their competitor needs to pay dozens of twitch streamers to stay on top, and require you to pay for a subscription just to have a decent game analysis.
I play short time controls like blitz in lichess. But for rapid I prefer chess.com as lichess has too much cheating. I find lichess UI/UX better and faster than Chess.com.
"None the wiser" is indeed an appropriate username! Please, tell us, by your snark I can assume you're most displeased with this collection of adjectives. But which ones in particular and why?
Do hippies frighten you because they represent a more egalitarian and prosperous ideology than your narrow minded brain can conceive of?
Do communists make you quake in your boots because you don't believe you could get on in a society where you might not be able to solve all of your problems with money? indeed, imagine if you might have to rely upon people liking you; I also fear for your ability to get on.
Is it the "drug fueled" portion, because you perhaps feel some right to tell other consenting adults (whom probably know much better about their bodies and their own lives than you do about yours) what to do on their spare time?
Or are you waking up to the fact that we, as a society, are becoming more secular[0], and thus you see the advance of atheism as an attack against the institution of your personal sky daddy?
And these are all reasonable things to think of you, since you only wave vaguely at a collection of adjectives while expressing some nebulous form of disdain. Perhaps either clarify the nature of your disagreement, or continue to persist in the shadow of intellectual doubt and fear you appear to be laboring under... which is a disease very common to people who appear to believe as you do.
I love this comment! It exposes all the hate. I wish I had the ability to respond like you. Good writing! (oh and if I wasn't clear, I agree with you. OP needs to back it up, examine himself, and stop trying to control or hate others)
Perhaps, but then again, I find that typically only people who find those terms odious would care enough to quote that particular passage from the github and then refuse to elaborate on their own personal opinion of it. I also find that people who engage in such hit and run tactics are, typically, not very courageous in their own beliefs, or they'd be full chested about it.
Thanks for the warning. My male cousin tried playing on Lichess once. She now wears knee-high socks and listens to catgirl-emo music while puffing “the reefer” and praying to Karl Marx
It's painful to play on lichess due to wide spread cheating and people opening new accounts. I've been playing on chess.com as a paid user and having much better experience. I don't know what changes chess.com made in the past year but they are definitely moving in the right direction.
The best I’ve found.
It’s also crowd funded and they talk about their interest tech as well.