Do we really need a chess.com for Go?

[pwsiegel]

@JethOrensin

It could be argued that the non-paying members could still be getting banner ads, but that was not the premise of the subscription idea at the time. I am not sure that every paying member would like the idea that other, non-paying members, would get banner ads. The altruism that “you are paying to make OGS ad-free for everyone” was a main selling point at the time, if my memory serves correctly.

That’s the Lichess model, which is fine - I’m a Lichess patron! But I appreciate that there is another company out there which is doing more to market and promote the game.

@JethOrensin

Well, that would be most unusual and I can assure you that I’ve not seen anyone be averse to money or growth for the western Go community. The ways to get there are usually open for debate, though.

“I want to recruit business partners to help fund our growth plans” has to be the least controversial approach to scaling imaginable. If this thread is emblematic of how the community responds to attempts at funding growth (hopefully it’s not), then there’s no real hope.

@JethOrensin

I am sorry, but someone mentioning that slight posibility does not make “this thread” “all about that”. I’d be more keen to say that this was mostly a comment that would have “just happened” and would have been left far behind and mostly unnoticed, if you didn’t pick it up and make it the main point of discussion.

Fair enough. The main objections raised before that were about lootboxes and betting, apparently derived that gomagic claimed “gamified tools and exercises” as one of its competitive advantages. Gomagic does not have lootboxes or betting.

@JethOrensin

Hmm… are people really being called to alleviate your suspicions/assumptions?
And even if we accept that some do have that unwillingness, what do you care or mind?
There is no project that ever has 100% support of any group.

As an experiment, I just fed chatgpt the contents of the thread before my first post and asked it to estimate community sentiment. It’s estimate was 65% negative, 20% supportive, and 15% neutral / explanatory. My goal in participating in the thread was to improve these numbers by emphasizing the potential upsides of greater investment and calling into question some of the more… speculative objections.

@JethOrensin

I think that this might be the main difference with the chess analogy.
Chess dot com might be considered by some as a site whose mission is to grow revenue and that the game of chess just happens to be what they sell.

Fair enough. Gomagic wrote “The goal: becoming the number one platform for learning and playing go. In other words, become the chess.com in the world of go”. If we grant your proposed possible characterization of chesscom’s motives, is there an evidence-based case that gomagic shares the same motives?

@JethOrensin

Since the issue of unwarranted worries is coming up by @pwsiegel , I’d like to point out a few slides:

First off I appreciate that your subsequent objections are rooted in the actual specifics of gomagic’s proposal, rather than speculation about a bunch of things that they didn’t propose!

I agree that there are problems with the deck, though I am not as concerned about the grandiose claims and sensational numbers - good or bad, that is often an effective way to talk to investors. (I presume the XXX’s would be replaced with numbers in an actual pitch meeting - I wouldn’t make those numbers public if I were in their shoes.) Mainly I am excited that somebody is actually pitching something ambitious to investors.

[pwsiegel]

In an attempt to provide greater objectivity, I copied and pasted the contents of the thread before my first post into chatgpt and asked it to summarize community sentiment about the “chesscom for go” proposal. It estimated that the community was 65% negative, 20% supportive, and 15% neutral / explanatory. It gave the following breakdown of arguments for and against:

---

Arguments For the Proposal

• Could boost Go’s popularity: Like chess.com did for chess, a centralized, polished platform might bring Go into the mainstream, especially in the West.
• Gamification may drive engagement: Features like objectives or cheering (as seen on Fox) could motivate players and increase viewer involvement.

Arguments Against the Proposal

• Risk of community fragmentation: If GoMagic gains traction and then moves to proprietary servers, it could siphon off players from OGS and fracture the existing Go community.
• Commercialization concerns: Users fear monetization tactics like loot boxes or gambling features would harm the culture, especially by excluding younger players or encouraging toxicity.
• Cultural mismatch with chess: Go and chess have different player bases and traditions; copying chess.com may overlook what Go players actually value.
• Loss of open-source ethos: Replacing or overshadowing OGS — a semi-open, community-driven platform — with a company-controlled one could be seen as a betrayal of core values.
• User experience skepticism: Some dislike the “attention economy” design of chess.com and worry GoMagic could follow that model, undermining focus and play quality.

---

So fair enough, my “all about” remark was hyperbolic. But my point survives: the response in this thread was mostly about the threat that gomagic’s proposal poses to OGS and go culture more generally. If that is how we respond to attempts to attract investment to the go community, it’s probably not going to happen.

[Groin]

@pwsiegel

If we grant your proposed possible characterization of chesscom’s motives, is there an evidence-based case that gomagic shares the same motives?

What matters here is how chess com is perceived, even if go magic underestimates it and could have different motives

[pwsiegel]

@shinuito

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

My argument was not “removing ads proves that OGS is opposed to investment”. It was “attracting investment requires tradeoffs, so let’s not jump down gomagic’s throat for stuff they didn’t even propose”.

[shinuito]

Unfortunatley asking an LLM isn’t a way to provide greater objectivity. LLM’s greatly vary in how often they hallucinate based both on the task at hand and how they’re prompted.

One can bias them based on the initial prompt even (not saying you did it here, but it’s a point to be aware of).

Generally I believe we’re pushing toward blocking these kinds of AI summary posts that don’t add much to the discussion.

I will defer to other moderators for that decision, since I’m actively involved in the conversation here and I don’t want to come across like I’m just censoring something for the sake of it.

Basically though, if you want to summarise or sum up the posts, do it yourself.

We can’t generally trust an LLM to accurately say 66% of something has some tone when it generally can’t even correctly count the letters in a word.

[pwsiegel]

@Groin

What matters here is how chess com is perceived, even if go magic underestimates it and could have different motives

That would matter if chesscom was planning to create a go server, but so far as I am aware it is not. Chesscom entered the discussion because gomagic cited chesscom’s role in the online chess community in order to clarify its brand vision. I’m not saying that I’m sure they AREN’T doing all this just to make a buck, but is there any reason to believe they ARE? Or is it just cynicism?

[pwsiegel]

@shinuito

Basically though, if you want to summarise or sum up the posts, do it yourself.

I resorted to this approach because my own objectivity was called into question. I have a lot of professional experience using these tools and I know the risks, but the numbers and summary looked more or less accurate to me, and that’s why I felt comfortable posting it.

[Groin]

I dunno why you put filters like that. There is nothing difficult to see that they wrote “we want to be the chesscom of go”, to understand what this means for many go players (especially on the ads side) and that if it’s a buzz , a mistake or a real objective doesn’t really matter.

[shinuito]

I appreciate that, and I’m not saying that you do or don’t have experience with this stuff.

It has come up in other threads, and decisions are being made about whether this is good or bad for the community and discussion as a whole.

I don’t think users generally getting AI to summarise threads is going to be the way forward, from what I’ve seen discussed, unless it becomes some built in AI tool to the discourse software. (Tbh it’s less about getting AI to help you summarise, and more so posting it wholesale back into the thread)

Again though, I’ll defer to other moderators for judgement on that.

[Groin]

Something I really hate with these resume is how they infere new ideas each time which were not mentioned before (or discard some), and this one is not an exception at all.

Just one exemple:

@pwsiegel

Cultural mismatch with chess: Go and chess have different player bases and traditions; copying chess.com may overlook what Go players actually value.

Did we ever talk about this?
Should I argue with an AI?

@pwsiegel

Users fear (…) gambling features would harm the culture, especially by excluding younger players

Not what I wrote at all, and not a good resume. Excluding may do more as harming the culture of the younger. What about their fun? Communication? Brain?

I stop here, but there is more.

It’s painful to go and rectify the “resume” myself. It would take quite some space and may be just a kind of “hygienic” necessity more as something enriching the debates.

[JethOrensin]

@pwsiegel

“I want to recruit business partners to help fund our growth plans” has to be the least controversial approach to scaling imaginable.

Yes, and noone has a problem with that idea itself.
The debatable part is:
a) What those plans might be
and
b) Whether they might be beneficial or not, for the game overall

@pwsiegel

The main objections raised before that were about lootboxes and betting, apparently derived that gomagic claimed “gamified tools and exercises” as one of its competitive advantages. Gomagic does not have lootboxes or betting.

For the time being. Since the game-i-fication is a vague term, someone worrying that it might contain lootboxes or betting is not invalid, especially since other people pointed out that some Go servers do provide gambling (albeit with “non-valid currency” - I had inquired about that before).

@pwsiegel

I just fed chatgpt the contents of the thread before my first post and asked it to estimate community sentiment.

I’d hardly call that idea very useful since the medium we are in has a selection bias towards presenting and expanding an argument, which an AI might consider “negative”, but in reality, it is the basis of existence of most discussions.

I am almost always in favour of any idea that might add even one new player to the game, however if I agree with the idea I will probably just put a “heart” under the post. If have feedback for it (which is usually, by definition, something that needs improvement and can be conflated as something negative by a lot of people, let alone the AI), then that’s the only case I place my fingers on the keyboard.

So, do keep in mind that fora, in general, appear to be negative places, but they are not.

@pwsiegel

If we grant your proposed possible characterization of chesscom’s motives, is there an evidence-based case that gomagic shares the same motives?

If I make a company and declare that I want it to be “the Amazon dot com of our field” then I’d say that people voicing the question whether we plan to have the same “work ethic” towards our workers as Amazon does, is not an unreasonable question or worry.

When you declare that you want to be like someone as a person or a company, then you have to take the good, as well as the bad reputation that comes with the claim, unless you have a roadmap on what you plan on doing differently/better (which was not present in the pitch, as far as I could tell).

@pwsiegel

good or bad, that is often an effective way to talk to investors.

No argument there. Money is the only language some people talk.
Which is why the Xs are a bit of an issue, which brings me to my next point…

@pwsiegel

(I presume the XXX’s would be replaced with numbers in an actual pitch meeting - I wouldn’t make those numbers public if I were in their shoes.)

…I wouldn’t make them public either, however with some “basic math” as they say later, you can extrapolate backwards. Let’s see the slide again:

Let’s take the best assumption that the conversion rate and the average monthly payment are the same as the positive projection (they are probably lower, else the projection wouldn’t have aimed for those numbers as improvement, but let’s be generous here). This means that the remaining “hidden” numbers are:

800 paying users
9600 dollars MRR
115200 dollars ARR.

…which are respectable numbers, until we remember that slide 9 claims that there are 10 team members. Is that really a “small team” for such revenue? I do not know.
Again, for simplicity’s sake, if we assume that they are all equal partners, and we assume that there are no taxes, no upkeep, no expenses and all that money just goes straight to the people involved that is 11520 dollars per member of the project.

Again, that is not bad, and even if we add all those factors we left out and if we had the real convertion rate and average monthly subscription, it certainly might be profitable in the strict sense of the term, as slide 9 claims, but are those numbers something that an investor would look and go “hey, I want in on that action”?

I am not really sure about that…
Slide 13 seems a bit like a self-atari, in terms of “let’s talk money to the money-minded people”…

If they took that pitch to some reality show for business pitch like Dragon’s Den or whatever (I do not watch that stuff, but I’ve seens some memes/clips on the internet), I am not sure that they’d let that slide, well… slide.

[PRHG]

@pwsiegel

I’m gonna go ahead and source a few quotes from the thread, to respond to your “fictitious subtext” remark. Not trying to call anyone out, everyone is entitled to their opinion!

I find it kind of weird that after getting accused of straw manning you decided to quote me to support your point. You quoted a little joke I made to another user, I wonder why you didn’t quote this:

@PRHG

I don’t really have strong feelings on it. If it ultimately helps popularise Go more in the west I think that’s a good thing.

@PRHG

I have the same concern. However, if Go Magic is able to help popularise Go more then we’re not talking about a fixed pie. Lichess still exists and it’s doing fairly well. I’d imagine a significant portion of the Lichess user base is aware of chess.com but they continue to use lichess. As long as OGS has something different and enticing enough to offer compared to Go Magic then, instead of its player base migrating there, OGS might benefit from the growth of the western player base, if such growth does happen.

Yes, I expressed my dislike about their gamification plans, and yes I acknowledged that I do have some concern for how this might affect OGS. But on the whole I saw the potential it might have to further popularise Go, and I argued that it not only has the potential to help the Go community grow but that such growth could have a positive effect on other servers. You cherry picked my comment.

We’ve seen a pitch about some things Go Magic plans on doing. Decisions made by companies can be good, and they can be bad. I’ve seen sites use reasonable advertising, and I’ve seen sites use extremely obtrusive advertising. I’ve seen companies implement features users love, and I’ve seen companies ruin the very things that made people love their products. Given this, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to express both some skepticism as well as hold on to some hope that it may turn out well. I’m not surprised nor upset to see that both of these opinions have been expressed in this thread.

@pwsiegel

Fair enough. The main objections raised before that were about lootboxes and betting, apparently derived that gomagic claimed “gamified tools and exercises” as one of its competitive advantages. Gomagic does not have lootboxes or betting.

No, they do not have loot boxes, but it was in their pitch. When I read it yesterday, on slide 17 it said “Superior Gamification: skins, loot boxes, etc”.
It has now been changed to “Superior Gamification: skins, characters, etc”.

I also never claimed it had betting, I said Fox is the most gamified server I’ve played on and I hate that aspect of it. I don’t see why it’s that crazy that betting was then mentioned. Sometimes conversations take slight tangents. In fact, did anyone in this thread clam that Go Magic has betting, or that they intend to implement it?

@pwsiegel

In an attempt to provide greater objectivity, I copied and pasted the contents of the thread before my first post into chatgpt and asked it to summarize community sentiment about the “chesscom for go” proposal. It estimated that the community was 65% negative, 20% supportive, and 15% neutral / explanatory. It gave the following breakdown of arguments for and against:

OH GOD PLEASE NO. I ALREADY SAW ONE OF THESE YESTERDAY.

[Groin]

@PRHG

OH GOD PLEASE NO. I ALREADY SAW ONE OF THESE YESTERDAY.

Me too

[Counting_Zenist]

I see the discussion has moved on to include many topics and directions, so I just want to clarify that I brought up ads, because you asked first in your post about what the downside

@pwsiegel

So… what are we actually worried about here?

And I’ve also replied that “Go servers” for profit don’t use ads (for those that are still up). Not that any Go-related platform (they can be Go news side, Go lessons, Tsumego, etc.) doesn’t run ads, or in the past Go servers didn’t try or attempt to run ads. In fact, KGS technically still has an advertiser section, and the KGS java client still has a “banner bar” but all the ads linked are mostly dead, and almost all these “ads” banners still have banner icons are Go-related sites (like polgote.com for Go lessons, Yunguseng.com Go school, even KGS donation page itself).

The most notorious historically was the Yahoo! games Go in the early 2000s. And Yahoo! relied on advertising extensively. It was more like Yahoo! as a portal website wanted to fit in as many options and games as possible to increase online traffic, and just happened to add Go into their online Gaming section. The result is expectedly bad, where they had no intention of running Go servers, but just to have them there, so no moderation, no established ranking/rating algorithm but the most basic ELO (thus creating the beginner’s hell), no proper matching. However, due to their leverage power at the time, it did attract and diverge substantial players there (IIRC, like at the scale of about 1000 players concurrently). And as part of the portal, obviously Yahoo! ran ads on them (in fact, you can still see the ads block on today’s Yahoo games, and in the past they ran ad banners, and even pop-ups, those “key features” of the early 2000s ads). Obviously, Yahoo! games Go got backlash from the Go communities very quickly, and shot it down soon after in 2007. You can say ads weren’t the downfall of the Yahoo! games Go or even the issue for it (but probably didn’t help), but more of the lack of attention, and just focus on profit regardless of what services provided (as minimal as possible). This is one of the problems of for-profit service when they are up in scale and overtime - enshittification

As to your comment about if GoMagic will be running ads

@pwsiegel

Reminder: not even gomagic is talking about using ads for that, for now they’re just looking for business partners!

The first line of benefit for GoMagic’s premium is “no ads”, they are already implementing or considering running them for free users in their current services (I haven’t seen the ads, but clearly they had ads in mind)

Go Magic Premium

[Groin]

@Counting_Zenist

“Go servers” for profit don’t use ads (for those that are still up).

You forgot goquest which runs a banner. The ads reduced their size, moved to the bottom and are no more flashy as they were at times before. (I had to hide it with a piece of paper )

[Counting_Zenist]

RIght, I always categorize GoQuest more as a Go app than a Go server in my mind . If we count mobile Go apps, there will be lots of them with ads. Are there any other Go servers almost exclusively on mobile apps?

GoQuest seems to to be unique on this with no other function than just quick match. Like does Badukpop count as a Go server? Since most are about tsumego and playing against AIs, and there are several smaller Go apps, like

play.google.com

Go Baduk Weiqi Master

Optimized Artificial Intelligence and Baduk...

Free

play.google.com

The World GO

If you don't know Go, the world isn't boring, but if know Go, becomes more fun...

Free

But they are all not exclusively just for playing games as “Go servers” but more like reviewing or learning apps, where just happen to have match function (and often very minimal). Maybe we need a subcategory of Go apps separated from dedicated Go servers which has more to do with community and playing games as the main service.

[Groin]

Goquest although missing chat ability is a place where an existing public play go. It includes a few bots but that’s not the main activity there, you can only add them or not in the pool of potential opponents. It has some more functionalities like a watch mode,a rating system, a edit mode and a (limited) game archive.
For this I think it’s enough to be called a go server and to have some attention, it’s not an empty shell.

App made for playing with AI, using AI for learning/ reviewing or getting problems and lectures (like go magic btw) are something different in my eyes.

Until they meet some level of existing use for games between humans, they are not what I call myself a go server. There are enough players on GoQuest to get a game quickly, let say at least within the time it takes on other go servers.

I don’t use the other apps you mentioned, maybe some could be relevant?

[Counting_Zenist]

GoGuest in the uniqueness that it shouldn’t have worked, as its functionality is similar to Go servers, but its UI/UX tried to mimic mobile games, very fast and short games to kill time at any moment. However, at the very beginning, when there are few initial players, this wouldn’t work. And the same developers create a ChessQuest app as well the exact same interface with almost no one on it.

So the question is that somehow there was a momentum where a group of players was constantly on there to seed the games, and then somehow others are content with playing with bots. And it could have stayed as a pure playing against bots app, and slowly died out like ChessQuest but it didn’t.

[Groin]

That’s history! Some years it’s running and I see there many times pretty strong players 2700 and up in their own rating (even sometimes beating the AI, would you believe?!), those players we don’t get on OGS.
Maybe chess has more go servers offers already fulfilling what “Chess quest (?)” is offering? I know far too few about the Chess internet world

[benjito]

@Counting_Zenist

RIght, I always categorize GoQuest more as a Go app than a Go server in my mind .

I fail to see how mobile-only client makes a server less of a server haha