if go.com looked more like chess.com it would be so much better,
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Not sure what you mean? This site looks very clean and modern, and the neat look suits the game of go just fine in my opinion. Also this site has plenty of functions that you need to pay for on chess.com like doing unlimited amount of puzzles (and users can upload their own) and a great peer review system.
Im sure there are things that can be improved, but this is honestly the best site for me to play go on. I think the focus should be more on promoting his site to existing go players, as I guess other go server clients are still more densely populated…But for me as a relative beginner I find all the good games I need right here.
Just my two cents as a beginner though!
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I am sure that it is a good idea to look at particular features of successful chess sites and see if they would improve this site, and I would be happy if you explained some of these features and asked for them.
But the argument “chess.com has millions of members, so it must be better than online-go.com” implied by the title is flawed. Among the obvious comparison of number of chess players in English-affine countries, there is also the issue that for example I am a “member” of chess.com. After starting to play go, people like you pointed out features of chess.com, so I registered there purely to have a look. Somehow, I doubt that chess.com members register at ogs purely to have a look at the site functions.
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Maybe the original poster wasn’t criticizing this site, but was rather just expressing a desire that specifically http://go.com was a website about the game of go rather than being the website of the Walt Disney Company.
However, if that’s not what he meant, I also disagree with the idea that OGS should emulate chess.com.
I think the closest chess-community analog to OGS is http://lichess.org/
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- the rating methods on chess.com match up suitable levels…a player with 2 hours experience will not be playing a player with 6 months experience
How is “6 month experience” more suitable than the rating?
I was 16 kyu after 2 weeks whereas chessai was 10 kyu after two weeks. Would you have matched us?
I specifically stayed at ogs as a beginner because it would match me with people of the same strength. (Note that I came after the site-wide rank adjustment, I have heard that things were different before.)
Have you had a negative experience with finding well-matched games on ogs?
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I’m pretty certain our developers realize that level-appropriate bot players would improve the site. It’s a matter of applying development time and energy to coding and debugging and hosting the bots. This is a bit difficult because, as you point out, OGS is a lot smaller than chess.com and the revenue is also a lot smaller. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
If you’re serious about having better bots on OGS, I recommend making feature-request on our development site, ogs.uservoice.com
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We also allow users to create and run their own bots which we are more than happy to have you do that. I’ve never personally been happy with the look and feel of chess.com. As @yebellz said… we’re huge fans of lichess, those folks really know how to build and run a chess site.
We’re pretty happy with how matchups are going currently. Looking at your profile @AsokaNelson it looks like you haven’t had a lot of success but that’s totally normal as a beginner. There are a lot of resources around the internet and here on the site that can help you to get past that beginners slump. We also have a lot of great community members that are willing to give teaching games and reviews. chess.com will start you at 1200 elo regardless… we’ll at least try to stick people close to where their actual skill level is.
Definitely let us know if you can talk Disney into giving us go.com. Bonus points if you pay for it and donate it to us 
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never personally been happy with the look and feel of chess.com…they only have 13 million users so they must be doing something wrong