History Always Repeats

As always, opinions are my own, not those of Lichess.org.

For many years I have continued to read philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's popular book After Virtue. It compares dilemmas in contemporary moral discourse to those in other eras, and proposes that true discourse is only possible when participants are willing to contemplate the world from each others' perspectives. It is a college-level work, with complex sentences and a proliferation of long words, each concisely and precisely written... and paragraphs of complex sentences building upon each other, and pages of such paragraphs, each carefully making points with deep historical references about which the average reader may be unfamiliar, but the points themselves nonetheless can be understood.

The work goes into detail about why in each historical era philosophers have failed to answer the questions we have today (or related questions from their eras); in some cases, the axioms or framework they adopted made it impossible to answer such questions; in other cases, personal and/or popular biases precluded them from carefully exploring lines of thought which more recent philosophers have successfully considered and made progress understanding (only to encounter other questions). At any rate, the reason I write here is, by way of analogy, to talk about less consequential & perhaps more practical miscommunications.

Here I won't dwell on America's well-known federal budget problems; yes, today's vote will cause needless suffering and death, but writing here won't fix that. No, I'll focus on things we chess players around the world care about:

1. There is no players' union protecting the rights and interests of all players. I recently listened to Ono Another Chess Podcast which discusses a potential interest in funding independent chess journalism, which a close friend of mine has been doing for many years. Even r/chess periodically gets mad at its moderators and creates other subreddits, only to immediately capitulate when discovering that journalism requires actual work. I haven't carefully read about the history of the PCA, but if we are to believe chess professionals such as Finegold, Naroditsky, etc. then surely there are real problems the likes of which only a union can help with.
2. Concerns about online chess cheating were rampant even before Kramnik intensified everyone's concerns. From that same podcast, @NoJoke explains that Lichess is using machine learning in combination with manual moderation work -- and while I don't at all believe that Chess.com is doing the best job it can, Lichess could improve accuracy of its rating system, adopting 14-year-old advice which no chess site or organization has acted upon (factor "first move" into rating calculations, which seems to account for +/- 5 Elo or Glicko in standard chess, and +/- 10 in crazyhouse). I submitted a patch to Lichess and did everything in my power to test it, however Lichess has many priorities and maybe doesn't care about improving its cheat detection tools this year.
3. Are there good community blog posts? Of course there's a concern that with any system, players will find ways to "game" any classification system, but on the flip side: community blog authors lack writing skills and I'm sure many would love to have feedback about their reading level and hints about how many promotional links are appropriate in posts you want other people to read. On the other hand, looking at community blog posts... well, 99% of them are unlisted (when I filter by subject like "off-topic"), so I guess there simply isn't good free content and there never will be.
4. Are there good community videos? https://lichess.org/video exists and I managed to successfully submit a friend's video. It's no wonder that PogChamps, etc. dominate social media as Chess.com encourages (limited) collaboration, whereas Lichess promotes its excellent live event broadcast system but doesn't push content creators to do anything (other than occasional "streamer battles" where viewers watch already popular streamers and no collaboration occurs).
5. Can we encourage streamers to care about accessibility? OBS has a switch to enable automatic closed captions which I've always used and never seen anyone else use. Sure, it would help if Twitch and YouTube APIs could tell us which channels provide CC (so we could highlight these), but public awareness itself might go a long way here too. Maybe there are contexts where we ought to care about color-blindness too? I thought we identified and addressed these already, but I've lost track.
6. What can we do for players which have a bullet chess addiction? The YouTube app has options to remind users to take a break at certain times of day or between certain hours, but this is a slippery slope (in that users might ignore or circumvent warnings when they are most vulnerable, yet at other times they may choose to keep the app installed). A close friend of mine chose to block Lichess altogether since bullet was too addicting, and maybe we should expect other responsible addicts to do the same thing.
7. Is there anything we can do to improve correspondence chess? Even offering an increment days/move (with a maximum clock cap) would go a long way toward approaching "vacation" functionality on other sites, although another friend of mine blogs that DMD has already brought about the death of correspondence chess, so maybe it's not worth caring about (even if my greatest chess improvement came through playing correspondence on Chess.com).
8. When players want to agree to a draw in a time scramble, surely a simple protocol could be created to help them achieve this without having to slow down to repeat moves? Maybe some other chess site can solve this one first and help set players' expectations.

I don't mean to be down on Lichess... it's the world's best chess website and app, and it is so feature-rich already that there isn't much appetite for developing new features. I used to semi-frequently contribute code to Lichess, but these days I only seem to heckle from the sidelines. Ditto Lishogi and Woogles...
Maybe I should re-learn Latin and try my hand at translating Lichess strings for the website and app again, to have some semi-constructive hobby project. Or maybe I should continue making my way through After Virtue... there is nothing new under the sun.

Image credit: Roberto Reposo