Chess.com has the somewhat unique property of being a chess server run by people who aren't good at chess and aren't good at technology. I think they used to hire devs off Fiverr.
However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org.
They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, which is good for chess since it allows more chess players to make a living.
I don't know much about all of this but it seems to me that owning chess.com is 99% of their success if it's not great at the game or great at the engineering aspect.
The game reviews are really nice to quickly see the key points of the game. Plus the UI all over is better than Lichess. That and network effects explain the rest.
this is a sad fact of life. a great project in terms of engineering can be beaten by a job that is just a wordpress page but great in terms of marketing.
> Bad at the game, bad at engineering, but good at marketing. There's a lesson in here. Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.
Maybe now we can get rid of Byzantine tech interview processes and instead just focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together.
Most competitive sports & games are much more cruel than chess, but chess is still very cruel. Can you imagine achieving recognition or winning money as the 3000th best Fortnite player? Or the 3000th best League of Legends player? If so, you'd be winning on personality during streaming but certainly not on competitiveness.
"People" on the planet? If that's accurate it's not super impressive, considering that probably 95-99% (or more) of people don't take chess very seriously. I used to be the top 99-99.5% of Counter-Strike players (_very_ roughly obviously), and that wasn't very impressive at all even though it's way past top 99.9% of "people on the planet".
I'll admit it, I subscribe to chess.com. I pay $31 / year.
I mainly joined for the unlimited post-game analysis and puzzles. I also like the app, it's fast and intuitive. Lichess is great too, nothing against them.
I did not realize lichess was so much better. I just switched. The UI was a little off putting for some reason when I first started getting into chess.
I prefer their analysis over lichess’s and I think they are a lot more feature rich. Also, I think the company in general is pretty good at chess? I’m an 1800 elo player for reference.
I signed up to a chess.com membership a long time ago because the puzzles were behind a paywall and at the time lichess didn't have a puzzle rush mode. lichess now has similar puzzle modes to chess.com but it wasn't always like this.
Chess.com strikes me as a domain squatter who decided to try to make something of their site instead of selling it off once it was popular. Kudos to them, but at the end of the day they’re still domain squatters.
Chess found its way into my YouTube feed and that got me back into it. I wonder if this is just some bizarre case of the outcome of some thing like that.
“Oops we accidentally put chess in front of everyone for a week and now they’re all playing it.”
I found that as well. The cheating controversy seemed to have kicked off some interest and then chess started appearing in my YouTube and TikTok feed have started recommending interesting creators. For the first time I've been passively watching content learning chess more formally.
One interesting event can kick off feed recommendations and start this fly wheel effect.
Same. It also happened for my son (though oddly not my daughter...) and now he's really interested in learning chess and has been self-teaching through internet resources, so I guess that's a good thing.
Me too. I read a couple of articles about the Niemann/Carlssen debate, then I saw a guy talking about chess on youtube, and eventually I created a chess.com account.
I was going to post that I suspected this was due to some sort of automated or bot activity... a couple months seems like way too short a time for that much organic growth.
However, Google Trends also indicates a doubling of interest in chess as a search term over the past three months. Interesting!
Don't forget the cheating scandal and Carlsen declining to defend the WC title. Both made it into the mainstream news which at the very least caused people to search for chess.
For some reason, my perception is that random player selection on lichess leads to much stronger opponents than on chess.com in the lower ranks. Probably this is due to the more informed player base on lichess and a large influex of causals on chess.com
The problem is that this only fuels the cycle. Casual players are scared away from lichess, possibly extending the rift between both sites...
Individually the reasons given sound weak, but they make some sense if you see it as some self-reinforcing trend: the 2020 chess spike fueled by Corona and Queen's Gambit has put chess back into public consciousness and caused content creators to produce more chess content. That set the scene for the next wave, which was catalyzed by the cheating scandal bringing chess into mainstream media for a couple weeks, and creating narratives for people to follow. This has lead to chess related gifts and chess related social media posts, which reinforces the chess trend. Events like chess boxing probably helped, but are mostly a symptom of chess being more mainstream right now.
Readit News
However they are somewhat good at business as they've convinced thousands of people to pay $17.00 per month for something that can be found for free at Lichess.org.
They do pay a ton of money to streamers to use their site exclusively, which is good for chess since it allows more chess players to make a living.
There's a lesson in here.
Similar to how most of the software that runs the internet is poorly written and has bad fundamentals.
"#20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."
https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
I don't know much about all of this but it seems to me that owning chess.com is 99% of their success if it's not great at the game or great at the engineering aspect.
Microsoft Teams? Good lesson to startups and companies in general.
Or is that the same thing here?
> 20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
Maybe now we can get rid of Byzantine tech interview processes and instead just focus on hiring people that are capable of hacking things together.
To be fair, Danny Rensch is a 2402 FIDE rated player. That's better than 99.9% of people on the planet.
(that being said,
I mainly joined for the unlimited post-game analysis and puzzles. I also like the app, it's fast and intuitive. Lichess is great too, nothing against them.
“Oops we accidentally put chess in front of everyone for a week and now they’re all playing it.”
One interesting event can kick off feed recommendations and start this fly wheel effect.
https://archive.is/Sbhnk
However, Google Trends also indicates a doubling of interest in chess as a search term over the past three months. Interesting!
There's a few possible drivers that are no doubt helping but it does appear that between one thing and another, chess itself is going viral.
The problem is that this only fuels the cycle. Casual players are scared away from lichess, possibly extending the rift between both sites...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
None of their explanations sounds at all plausible though.