This is a very fair point. It’s clear a myriad of factors need to work together for the Go community to grow.
Media visibility, accessibility (design + features + app?), and many things I am more than likely blind to.
But, I do hold a very strong belief that IF there is ever an upswing, for whatever reason, then the architecture to maintain that initial curiosity needs to be in place.
One could imagine the Alpha Go boom being more successful (speculation of course) had this been the case at the time. Same as The Queen’s Gambit had chess experience. It wouldn’t be comparable in scale due to lack of English content/creators, and similar, but maybe it could have shifted the climate more readily in the right direction.
What do “designers” appear like to you? Do they have to wear a suit and tie or crunch data? To begin with, UX design as we know it only started in the 1990s – you might as well call everyone an armchair in this field.
I haven’t said anything here in the past 3 days and you’re all still talking in circles about things I said or already explained over a week ago – no progress made. In this time I’ve been preparing DX tools to get back into coding web apps, like this neat list of files and folders I can click on to directly navigate to important files in projects with 1000s of files – it’ll help me de-clutter my active tabs list in VSCode.
I learn things hella fast so I don’t need half as much experience as others. I have at most 3500 hours in Go playing + studying combined (~15 min per blitz game x <= 10000 games + only started doing tsumego in September 2025: goproblems.com) and I’m better than 98% of you. You can classify me as an armchair designer all you want, I can still do a better job at it than anyone here. It’s one of my talents – however good I am at Go, I’m 10x better at some of the arts, like music and game design. I’m only bad visually, meaning I can’t draw up Lichess-level UIs by myself. I can only draw stick figures by hand. But the non-visual arts including UX design are my comfort zone.
You guys only think I’m dumb because I talk like a retard half the time. I don’t have more to say here – next time you guys hear from me I’ll have already made the best Go platform in the world – feel free look forward to it. Or not, I don’t care.
but first I want to thank @GreenAsJade and @noob42 on OGS – my experience submitting that one pull request helped a lot with coding the VSCode extension! Your patience and encouragements helped me see public communication and the open-source community in a new light.
After recent “learning experiences” here, I am starting to think that the lack of a “learning mode” is perhaps the main barrier, if there is an “surge of new player interest”.
There will be more people (if not as extreme) who find it hard to absorb the rules - some “potential territory indication” and “emoticons on stones” could be a big help…
Let’s assume you are the genius you say you are… I’m not going to question that at all here.
You would make a lot more progress here, and I suspect in other spaces, if you didn’t start every message stating the subjective fact that you are the smartest person in the room. I mean this with all due respect intended, but going around insulting everyone, while at the same time claiming to be a genius, is going to piss a lot of people off.
I feel like, if you were to humble yourself a little more and set aside the need you have to explain how grand and brilliant you are, you would probably be a lot more successful in pissing off a lot fewer people.
Again, assuming you are as smart as you say you are, it would not be a difficult task for you to simply learn to communicate more effectively.
I want to reiterate here that while I am being direct with you, I am doing so without the intent of actually trying to insult you. For the record, I do actually think you have a lot to offer OGS. However, when trying to contribute to a project that already has a lot of people working on it, with a culture built in, and indeed a process by which people are already working too, it generally pays to learn how things are done before throwing a proverbial spanner in the works and then complaining when that isn’t particularly well received.
I also want to make it clear here that I’m not a particularly smart person. You absolutely could slap me in a game of Go, and indeed, you probably are a better learner than me. I certainly can’t code. You are, without a doubt, probably a smarter person than me. However, it would also be fair to say that there are things I know that you don’t, regardless of how smart you are, and I would wager that is probably true of every single person you think to be stupider than you.
A wise person knows when it is a good idea to express how smart they are. A wiser person knows that, though they are smart, they can still learn from the stupid.
There is a job title called “Designer” (it doesn’t require suit and tie)
I suppose the razor I’m using is “has this person at any point in their lives made a living off their design skills?” And the only reason I say “made a living” is because it’s more objective than the “shamisen said so” metric.
Yes, 3 decades ago.
You’re actually better than 100% of us at overselling yourself (but please do prove me wrong!)
I feel like that’s very fresh compared to a lot of academic fields that you would trust someone to be an expert in. People have studied Go for 1000s of years and still got proven wrong in the past few years/decade with basic joseki.
AI overview (it said the principles of UX design began in 1950, which I doubt):
I would also like to add the the tutorial has piecewise strange progression curves, with problems that end up substantially harder out of nowhere. I’ve seen a few talented beginners struggle due to the sudden increase.
It’s also gotten way, way to long. I played through it with a friend recently, and he had to give up halfway through. It shouldn’t take 30-40 minutes to go though a tutorial. Some excercise end up very tedious.
Edit: or at the very least make a clear indication when some basic tutorial is done, then have a section for deeper learning (still for beginners) if that feels appropriate.
We all have different design preferences and i don’t think any of us are leaving because the homepage isn’t sexy enough..
I’m relatively new here and now addicted so I’d like to offer my experience as a case study. When I first got here I felt like I landed in some retro deep web gaming space. it was kinda cool, like I was joining a secret club. A lot of potential new player will be solitary figures with no local community, falling into this world on their own. We might want to cater to that
I first got to OGS after trying out the app GO by AI factory on my PHONE I later tried BadukPOP and GO quest . I only found OGS by asking chat GPT about the best places to play go and which one was most like Lichess. Hence I found OGS.
Problem 1 : Where are we? We miss that initial contact.. We aren’t even on the shelf. We need to think about this. A lot of future players might only be on their phone when they enter the GO universe.
Secondly GO was obviously mysterious and coming from Chess, ( where a lot of potential new players will come from) I was looking for a way to learn that made sense to me, learn an opening ( E4) develop your piece,s castle early try no to blunder.. In GO it was practice Tsumego and lose 100 games starting on 9x9. Even after 9 months I’m still fighting to understand the basics. 19x19 opening with big plays instead of over concentrating on some local fight, concepts like using sente. I taught my 4 year old how the game worked; gameplay and captures are easy to learn, but concepts like influence aren’t. The Learn to play GO section is great, but other sites like GOmagic frankly do teaching better than us. We could use more visual learning exercises that aren’t Joseki or basically Tsumegos. Things like “which of these moves is the biggest” or “ If you want to build influence in this area on which point should you play”. Bare with me, Im a newb so explaining what I’d like to learn isn’t easy. NOTE these could be in learn to play go but after months im still on level 4, Can we cycle these concepts in earlier mixed in with other basic, and increase the difficulty as the learner goes up in level.
Nobody thinks you are dumb. Rude, yes. Suffering from massive Dunning-Kruger, also yes. These things can exist in parallel.
Since we already had pm contact and many posts here and the message hasn’t really hit home yet, I’ll be blunt:
You are very smart. People probably called you a smart kid when you were small. Over time “being smart” turned into your identity, which then made it your only source of self confidence. Now you overly rely on the opinion of others to find you smart, trying to impress them (us), throwing a fit when that fails.
This failed here, because we are professionals in our own field (and recognise dunning Kruger), and we have seen many smart people like you, if we aren’t them ourselves anyway.
You have to admit yourself that you came in here saying: “I’m the only one who can fix this, anoek might want to commission me”. This weakened to “I’m good at UX but kyu-level at UI, but btw you guys are worse” all the way to: “I’m smart in every area except visually.”
None of this is your fault but you’d best get starting to take this seriously if you want to get accepted into a community. Use that intelligence to figure out how to pleasantly interact with others. There is no alternative.
20 years ago I was somewhat like you (a know-it-all, not rude though). A friend then told me two things, that didn’t mean anything at first, but over time really hit me. I leave it here in the hopes that it does the same to you:
Not sure if you gave a timeout to yourself or if you got a three day ban (which would probably have been deserved). But it’s astonishing that you seem to be incapable of communicating in a nice and constructive manner. It’s almost funny how each of your sentences has openly aggressive or passive aggressive elements.
Cool story bro.
Hey everyone look! He made a LIST OF FILES!
Looking at your OGS profile you were already a dan player when you started playing on OGS more than three years ago. You reached 4.5d in the summer of 2024 but are ranked 3.0d now. If I ever want to know how to get worse at Go over time I’ll give you a call.
If that’s your comfort zone then why was your design so underwhelming?
I simply got bored of arguing with the color-blind about color on the forums. And having fun studying a bit of Go again. I also found this thread : Shikiri - the concept of fall back scenarios - #8 by shamisen to have Go-related discussion in, a nice change of scenery. so no I didn’t get banned, does a 3-day ban even exist on these forums?
This is probably an easy assessment of me but it’s almost the opposite of true. For most of my life I considered myself too dumb to achieve my goals. I even gave up improving at Go after my 2nd or 3rd year learning it because I thought I didn’t have enough talent at it to reach high dan. I’m still smarter than most by objective metrics like IQ, but I don’t care because my goals of making the best games in the world take MUCH, much more than that. In high school I hated having bad long-term memory, spatial reasoning/visualization, ADHD symptoms, and other cognitive weaknesses, all of which drove me to look into developing productivity/DX tools, learning systems, and information systems to achieve my goals more easily. I’ve also played competitive video games for half my life and always faced competition much more talented than me on a daily basis. I know my limits very, very well.
There’s many reasons, but being smart doesn’t guarantee much success in this life and money isn’t equal to success for everyone. If someone offered me a $million to work on their website right now I would turn it down because I value working on my own dreams orders of magnitude more than working on some corporate trash I don’t care about. In fact, one reason I chose to insult OGS’ codebase and say I’m giving up on it is to send a clear message that I’m not trying to get hired by anoek, but I guess it wasn’t clear enough.
And why haven’t I released a game yet is due to ADHD/depressive symptoms stunting my executive function + crippling insomnia (recently fixed it so I’m very happy) + my own rule: I refuse to release a game unless it’s significantly more fun than any of the video games I play (i.e. the best games in the world). I design games so that they can become my own lifelong hobbies, not for money. Mixing business with art is blasphemy to me.
Nobody else made that particular list of files with that specific functionality, which is why I made it . And why are you talking like that? You’ve got quite a nasty personality yourself, check yourself in the mirror.
pfft, I was 4.5d playing exclusively 13x13 ultra blitz (5 seconds per move), not the same game as 19x19 live games at all, and I won most of my games by opponents running out of time. I also peaked there very briefly – I couldn’t reach that rank again no matter how much I tried. And everyone active on OGS these past 2 years experienced a deflation of about 2 ranks – I would be 5.0d if I played under the rating system in 2024 with my current skills. I could give my 2024 self 2 handicap stones and destroy him 9 games out of 10.
Because visual arts are my weakness, and half my time was spent learning how to use Figma. I can’t see color when I close my eyes, I probably have mild aphantasia. User experience is completely different set of skills.
I’m usually a pretty nice person. But I follow a different approach to you than most other users here. I think the best way to deal with ruthless behavior is to be even more ruthless back. And looking at your response which is much calmer than before it seems that my approach is working somehow.
I think it’s interesting that people like GreenAsJade or benjito continue to try to find some middle ground with you, and then you even have users like Lys and JohnnieDarko that completely fell for the “misunderstood genius” schtick.
But I don’t want to just sit there watching you insult fellow forum members as “cavemen”, “uninteresting” or “worthless teachers”. Not cool.
hmm I see where you’re coming from but i don’t know about straight-up lying or fabricating a false narrative to change people’s opinions about me. I started it but you also excessively brought down the mood of a few of these threads – it didn’t benefit anyone. The one who helped me change my attitude was mostly GreenAsJade with his honesty, kindness, and much more accurate assessments of me than anything you said. Everyone here is an adult, they’re experienced enough to form their own opinions and stand up for themselves.
Plus, I didn’t call anyone cavemen. I believe the worst thing I said is that they’re worthless at teaching Go, which I regret saying. Bad at teaching, sure, but the word “worthless” excessive. @GreenAsJade pushed back and called my opinions about the codebase worthless in exchange, in a much better way and I fully accepted it. You might want to learn from him more.
I never lied once in all of my posts and replies in this forum since I’ve joined. Honesty is the greatest value I believe in.
There is no age restriction on this forum afaik. But despite that if someone would insult me in a forum I’d be happy if someone else would jump in to my defense.
Yes, you did. Do I need to find the quote again?
Yes, like I said. I respect GreenAsJade and his communication skills a lot. And I think his approach works great in 99% of the cases. Just not sure at this point if it works for your case specifically.
Anyways, you seem to have one of your moments of reflectiveness and concession. I wonder how long it will last this time.
. And why are you talking like that? You’ve got quite a nasty personality yourself, check yourself in the mirror.