Do we really need a chess.com for Go?

[shinuito]

If we’re properly on the topic of ads, and funding for the betterment of Go, look at the motivations for removing ads originally from OGS:

@anoek

tl;dr - OGS is slow outside of the United States. We want to make it faster, but it’s going to cost money. We want your opinion on placing an optional ad on the game page to improve better serve those regions. (And like all ads on the site, it would not be present for site supporters)

→ should we run ads to better the site

→ general consensus was sure go for it

@anoek

So we put forth the proposal, the general consensus was “Go for it”, and we did. Then we used our site, like we do every day, slept on it, and re-realized we really hate ads. They’ve been a “necessary evil”, but we got to thinking about it, and their necessity is shrinking.

→ the plan, get more supporters to remove ads

@anoek

The new plan is as follows: We’re going to try and turn off ads site wide for everyone until the end of October. We will be able to keep them off if we can get 2.5% of our non-site supporters to become supporters in that time frame. Once we hit that target, we can bring up servers in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere for a 1% increase for each location.

If you think about what the community came together to do there was to increase their support so we could get better servers up and running, and remove ads for everyone, even though the site supporters themselves wouldn’t get ads.

Sure they get a few benefits here and there from it, but they didn’t just do it for themselves on the whole. I think this predates the AI reviews even.

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It’s quite hard to believe given that that

@pwsiegel

People here aren’t opposed to gomagic specifically, they’re opposed to the very concept of raising money to grow the western go community. That DOES affect me, and I strongly disagree.

This seems like a very bad inference, and it’s not clear at all what it is being based on.