Not a beginner, but I just played 4 automatch games, keeping note of the wait time. 9x9 only - I understand it’s niche, but that’s what I like and I think @Clossius1 covered the benefits pretty well in this thread.
Now try custom games with the same settings and compare times!
Different time of day, but much faster! 5-15s so far
While I agree that the abundance of short time controls is critical to solve the time investment requirement issue (which is actually one of the reasons I have a GoQuest account, because I know I don’t need to use more than 6 minutes on a game just in case I get called on to do something or can use it while I’m waiting on someone else), I think the issue is far more complicated than that
Because around the time it started turning around was about the time Pogchamps was getting launched to attract gamers on twitch by featuring their favorite streamers playing the game, and then there was the Queen’s Gambit, attracting the average TV-watching player by showing a dramatic story featuring the game, and where a lot of them got funneled in on YT and got shown that it’s not that hard of a game to get into was GothamChess, who not only gave out beginner concepts, but highlighted drama and summarized professional games quickly and in ways that are easier for beginners to understand, while making them seem exciting. (Hence the meme about shouting whenever you sacrifice THE ROOOOOOOOOK)
It was a multi-pronged thing, but media outreach was a major part of it
Interestingly, an East Asian Go player new to OGS once remarked to me that they enjoy the community and ambiance at OGS much more than Fox, where there are rarely as many discussions, reviews and chats in games.
Another East Asian player also remarked that the environment on OGS seems to have a better ‘feeling’ than Fox.
(If memory serves, they both mentioned the players being nicer in general, and one mentioned bad manners/attitude being more common on Fox and the community there, as well as willingness to review together/comment after a game being very rare.)
Fox Better Than OGS
Nope.
How very constructive 
I mentioned “football and basketball” comparison to point out that “two perfectly good professional sports can have a totally different result in their success depending on each country’s perception of them” and you went to “football and chess”, sorry but I am not keen on wasting my time. If you want to be snide, feel free, but I am not participating in that. If you want to be snide, feel free, but I am not participating in that.
I’ll say this again and that is my point for the topic:
THESE ARE NOT PROFESSIONAL EFFORTS.
I am not “complaining about money”, as you claim, and I do not, personally, want any money out of Go, as it has been practically proven. On the contrary, right as we are speaking, I am negotiating about printing and shipping 100 copies for the newest translation, paid out of my own pocket and given for free. It doesn’t matter though, it is a drop in the ocean.
As long as Go is in the hands of hobbyists like us, it shall remain a hobby-level activity. We can pretend otherwise, but that won’t change reality. That is all.
See you all next year, in a similar thread
And I don’t disagree with this, but basketball has a profesional support behind, has sponsorships, and so on, is not so big like football here, but is big in the world. Is not comparable with Chess and Go, and I talk about chess because I mentioned to learn about what did chess to be from totally elitist and niche game, to be so popular as it is this days. I talk about chess because you said people play chess because is popular and don’t play chess because you like chinese and makes jokes on you. This is half true. yes, is not popular, is one of the main reasons new players growing is slow, but people who try Go, and don’t keep on it, is not because chess is popular as is, is because don’t keep interest on it.
Right now, I talk about what I think we can do RIGHT NOW to try to make Go more popular in west. Maybe I’m wrong, of course, and I open to debate it in other thread, but on a conversation like this, the point is to work with the available resources you have, not how cool would be if you had what you don’t have, in this case, a big organization and money behind, like Korea/Japan/China has.
I’m not being snide, I’m just trying to tell you that solution is not cross arms and wait some japanese/korean/chinese company to put millions to grow Go in west. And what I try to work and help with my resources, share what I see and how some little things can change to help IMHO, instead of complaining because there are not a big organization with a lot of money behind. This, will not happen in short term, because companies wants ROI (return of investment), and if it’s fast better, and will not happen in long term either if Go don’t gets sooo more popularity. For this, NOW, is in hands of the community and those who wants to put efforts to help.
For this reason, is in hands of the community to do things to change in the future, or keep like it is right now. We have platforms like OGS where to play, have sites like gomagic or awesomebaduk and others and free content in youtube where to learn, local clubs to help those new players, and so on…we didn’t had this 20 years before.
What we need, is to spread that, and retain the new player, and for this reason, is important the new player don’t gets scared in the first impression of the game, and for this should be fun, that was the main point of all my conversation. Some new players will like the game and will keep here, and others not, is easy.
A simple example. Forgot chess and football. 2 friends on a bar see a couple playing Go on a table. They approach the table and asks about it, and there are 2 possibilities.
a) player starts to talk about the simple rules, take a 9x9 board, and start to show and play 5 or 5 games with the curious players, leting learn the game by itself with the basic rules, making it fun and enjoyable experience. Talking about 9x9 and 13x13 are boards to play faster games, and 19x19 is the big experience to longer games and so on…
b) player starts to talk about eyes, tsumegos, snapback, fuseki, joseki, tesuji, ladders,and play one 19x19 game over 30minutes crushing the new player, explanining at the end how to count the +100 points he won, talking that exists a 9x9 board but is for newbies and is not worth to play, and is the most complex, difficult and needs several lifes to learn the game.
What do you think will work better?
“The best way to predict the future, is invent it” - Alan Kay
I think I’ve been actively on OGS about 4 years now?
It’s not the first time we all are having this conversation.
Can we just be honest and say if western Go wanted to change, it would have changed already. Western Go is OK with how it is and just enjoys complaining for the fun and for pretending it cares.
By the way, being a volunteer doesn’t mean someone can do a half-assed or even bad job and whoever hides behind that excuse it says everything about themselves and nothing about volunteering. They probably are bad as employees and employers too, they just hide it or pass responsibility so they get paid.
You either are a responsible and reliable person or you are not, it’s not about the task it’s about the person.
I’m not talking about reasonable constraints (because we have to spell it out always in here) I’m talking about excuses.
This is a rule in I have in life: if someone really wants to change, they just do. Stop chasing promisers who never become doers.
There has been a lot of discussion about everyone’s opinion of what would or would not make go and ogs more popular, and this might or might not lead anywhere.
Meanwhile, there have been two suggestions made by @Clossius1, which both sound extremely sensible to me and could have a huge impact:
This one I don’t think will be as good of an experience as it sounds, not all beginners are the same, some might be actually 40kyu, and others will be 26kyu, and it’s not that magically starting them at 40kyu will make them win more, it’s that there’s a good chance they get pushed even lower than 40kyu by stronger beginners.
Again there’s no point messing with the entry ranks, when you can just deal with how matchmaking works. At the moment new players can play with new players whenever both queue up, [?] vs [?] and when that doesn’t happen you still have to deal with the problem that you have to decide either to not give them a game where they’re likely to lose, i.e. don’t play and come back some other time, or just deal with the fact that you can’t win every game. If you lose a couple of games you get a reasonable guess at your rank and then you can get more even games quicker.
My first post directly responded to many of the things clossius said. Chinese rules or AGA rules may be a better experience, but I disagree that superko is better, only easier to state as a rule.
I totally disagree with that. Although I have to make extra effort (from my language to English and then to various terms) I am prepared to do it because it belongs to the framework of properly learning a new game, terminology and all. Also, I imagine other language speakers will want to do the same in other language contexts and then Go commentaries will be totally unapproachable to me. As is, I can follow videos and articles in a couple of languages, aided by the widely- accepter terminology.
I find 9x9 extremely stressful. I joined a ladder solely because it was an advice given around the forums and I now regeret it. I am 25k (real 40k I think) and largely prefer a 19x19, not because I am ‘‘good’’ but because I can “see it”. To me, 9x9 feels like reading an abridged version of a book in a given timeframe for a strict exam session.
I haven’t really followed the discussion, but the Japanese terms are not obvious from a Japanese perspective either. “Ko” and “seki” literally have no semantic meaning (at least none related to Go), “joseki” literally means determined stones, “atari” means to (be) hit, “keima” is a shogi piece and would not make sense without knowing shogi first. Japanese go players also have to learn the Japanese terms before understanding commentary, so, for English players it’s not difficult because the words aren’t translated, it’s because every practiced discipline has a vocabulary to learn before understanding what people are talking about.
You’ll have to learn terms anyways to understand what people are talking about. Think about it in chess terms, if that’s more intuitive; would it be good practice to teach people in terms of “front pieces”, “sideways mover”, “straight mover”, “one-space mover” etc. or does it make more sense to talk about pawns, bishops, rooks, kings etc. Why does a knight move like a knight moves? Because that’s what everyone calls that kind of jump, and you learnt it, not because it’s the intuitive shape that knights tend to move.
Thank Zeus for @Vsotvep, we had neglected to bring linguistics and we almost reached 100 posts.
This isn’t linguistics yet, but we’ll get there 
Meta-pedantry about what even counts as linguistics! Even better!
I still don’t get why not.
It really seems like it would be a much better system to simply ask new players “are you a beginner?”
If yes - here is our tutorial (can be skipped if desired) (your rank is ?(25k))
if no - your rank is ?(6k)
But this is impossible, and will set fire to the ranking system. 
This is what chess.com does AFAIR, 3 or 4 differents provisional elo starting levels 800 1200 2000 and don’t remember the fourth.
On the other side, lichess starts directly with 1500 provisional elo.
Taking in consideration an elite player has near 3000, is in the middle of the table. I think at the end is almost the same. Matchmaking will position you in the right place after 3 or 4 games (or it should be).
But neither you nor I really know what difference it would make, so how can we recommend doing it? What if it means that in a year all the ranks need to be corrected. What if people keep choosing to be a beginner when they’re really not 15kyu, driving the real (current) 25kyus down to 30+kyu.
It doesn’t seem like there’s anything to say it will be better other than “feeling”.
Back in the days when i first joined ogs, people were able to choose their own starting rank. That had 2 big negative effects:
dan ranks were absolute chaos because so many users chose high rank to either appear stronger for some ego-boost, or in order to play against high-dans for few “free” teaching games and who then made a new account once the the old one dropped from 6d. Or they were absolute beginners who had no idea how go ranks worked, so they guessed that 6d is weaker than 30k (6 is smaller numer than 30, so it kinda made sense)
a lot of people who were new to ogs but still had some experience with go chose the lowest 30k rank “to see how quickly they can raise in ranks”. Or they chose 30k because they had only played irl with friends and family, and legimately had no idea what their rank should be.
That free rank selection caused 6d being basically a random rank where you could expect to find anything from pros to people who didnt yet see ataris, and there were (and still is) lot more beginners than legit high-dans on the server.
And huge portion of the ogs playerpool was at “30k dungeon” fighting eachothers for rating points. For a beginner, it was almost impossible to raise from that 30k dungeon since they were constantly paired with players who were actually 10+ stones stronger than they, but still ranked as 30k as well.
It caused a lot of work for both anoek and the moderator team at that time to manually adjust ranks one user at a time, or to push some server-wide rating adjustments to get people away from the 30k dungeon.
The main reason why ogs now uses glicko2 based rating system was to get rid of those constant adjustments caused by free rank selection.
I dont know whether the current rating rating system would work if there was some simple “i’m a beginner / experienced player” thing people could choose when registering to set their starting rank to either 25k or 6k, maybe someone who’s more familiar with the maths involved in glicko2 can answer that question better.