Lichess embedded in a Social Network - Best of All Worlds?

I have taken an oxwall script and embedded lichess. The site is live now on social.chessclublive.com

I see Lichess users always asking about Lichess having this social network feature or that. Maybe the answer is to find a social network which uses Lichess as widget and you get the rest of the social with it.

The site is free, and you earn a social currency, chesscoins for logging and using the site. Why should we pay for marketing for our free site when we can pay our users to use the website right?

Instead of ads we have service providers who have accounts just like any other user and post products and services.

Let me know what you think. Thanks Lichess for letting me use the embedded page feature of Lichess.

Chess Club Live - 100% Free and Ad Free forever.

Regards

Michael

Why would embedding in a social network benefit lichess? In particular, lichess is completely free/open, ad-free, and non-commercial, in large contrast to e.g. Facebook.

Also, what's the point of the currency? Does it represent any value? Who pays for this then? Remember, lichess is not commercial, and all features are freely accessible to all members, which makes me wonder what you could do with the currency.

"Instead of ads we have service providers who have accounts just like any other user and post products and services." - So you do have ads, but similar to Facebook they are masked as legit posts. That's even worse.

Nah, lichess is fine the way it is, and this is certainly not an improvement.

Hi FM thijscom.

I've answered each comment you made below.

Q: Why would embedding in a social network benefit lichess? In particular, lichess is completely free/open, ad-free, and non-commercial, in large contrast to e.g. Facebook?

A: Lichess offer an embedded page as a feature. This is available to any website of Lichess community members and websites in keeping with the Lichess ethos. My website is ad-free and subscription free, non-commercial and not for profit. Even Lichess has a shop where they sell swag and take donations from patrons. My site is exactly the same where we also have a shop and sell swag it is posted by other community members. In addition chess teachers can connect with students and students to pay teachers for lessons. Someone could sell a secondhand chess book to other community members.

Thibault Duplessis looked at it and said it was an interesting idea. I am not trying to improve Lichess, I am just creating a website for myself and a community for those who want to join. Lichess is Lichess, and great as it is.

Q: Also, what's the point of the currency? Does it represent any value? Who pays for this then? Remember, lichess is not commercial, and all features are freely accessible to all members, which makes me wonder what you could do with the currency.

The point of the currency is that it is social currency. If you look closely at the site. You will see each member gets social currency for logging in and using the site, this can be used in exchange for goods and service. So a member can join with 0 chesscoins and in 5 years time accumulate 200 chesscoins for logging in and using the site. Those chesscoins could get them free lessons from chess teachers registered on the site. The point of the currency is that it is an incentive.

Registered community members can load credits on their social profile too and these are credited to them on a 1:1 exchange, they can then pay for or buy services offered by other users. We offer an exchange rate to convert back to standard currency, small commission covers the cost of our payment gateway which we offer as a feature for members to buy and sell their own products and services.

It is a blockchain, de-centralized and peer-to-peer. We make no profit from it. All transactions are open and published on the blockchain ledger. Nobody has to buy anything or sell anything but if you wanted to you can.

Q: "Instead of ads we have service providers who have accounts just like any other user and post products and services." - So you do have ads, but similar to Facebook they are masked as legit posts. That's even worse.

A: No they are not ads or ads masked as legit posts. All users can post photos,videos,blogs etc. If you have a shop with chess products you can post them too. If people want to see your posts on your own timeline they can follow you. You can set privacy so that you don't see any users posts on the shared timeline. Again if you look at the site you will see there are no ads masked as posts, no marketing links or buy now product link spamming , just people posting things they like or want others to like, and everyone has a choice to see those things and to like them or not. Just like I can choose to view the Lichess shop and buy a non-commercially priced product, doesn't mean Lichess is publishing ads or is no longer non-commercial. Lichess is a not-for-profit like my site and can sell items just like my community members do. As a site I make no profit from this.

Q: Nah, lichess is fine the way it is, and this is certainly not an improvement.

A: Not trying to improve Lichess. I am just using the Lichess feature that inspired me to join the Lichess community and become a life long patron. I am sure Lichess founder, Thibault Duplessis, can see that Lichess improves my website and so I return the favour with my support for this wonderful chess server. The best chess server in the world.

It's a great non-commercial advert for Lichess :)

Hello!
I consider that it is necessary to enter in the bottom of the reference to Twitter, In Contact, Facebook and other social networks. I have won a tournament - I have boasted to friends. And to a resource big advantage of advertizing.
In general I am surprised that there is no such popular option on pages of tournaments.
Thanks for the website. Yours faithfully!

@michuk As I said, lichess is completely free and open. Just scrolling through your site for instance I see a logo about "Oxwall Software" which appears to be a commercial company. That is already directly in "violation" with lichess' principles.

As for the currency, my question still remains: who pays for the currency? If the currency can be used to pay for lessons, and assuming the teacher actually does get paid for the lessons, then who paid for these lessons? Or are you saying that by logging in and being online, you are actually "mining" currency which is worth money? (Not everything becomes better with blockchains really - I hope the hype will fade soon.)

@thijscom Oxwall Software is free and open source.

As for the currency it is two fold, an incentive social currency which is earned by using the site. Each action earn you a fraction of a chesscoin which in turn is a fraction of a dollar exchange. This is the official cryptocurrency Chesscoin which I have. So effectively I reward users for using the site with tokens which represent a share of the chesscoins I own and distributing to my users for using my site and represent a minute dollar value in real terms.

Then there is the credit backed currency where a member of the community would want to exchange goods and service with another. They pay for credit and get exchange value in the currency and can exchange it back when they want. The exchange fee pays for the gateway I use to handle the transaction between sender and receiver. The exchange rate is published daily.

I make no profit out of the currency but it gives members of the community the option to exchange value with each other.

I explained all this in my first response to you.

If Lichess is embedded on a website which is commercial and in addition non-contributing to Lichess as a sponsor then I have a personal issue with that. My website is non-commercial and free and open and I am a lifetime patron of Lichess.

Thank you @thijscom for your concern and care, I really appreciate your feedback.

@thibault I hope you are still happy for my website to embed Lichess. I do not run ads and do not charge my website users. I don't even promote the site people join organically and I encourage them to sign up directly to Lichess website and app.

I also want to make the promise that I will continue to support @Lichess, as a patron for as long as I am on this earth.

I've registered now to see what it's like "inside" and I'm not sure what to make of it. Is your site some sort of "portal" to chess on the web? It seems you're just loading content from various other websites, and the only "selling point" of your site is the chess coins. Is that correct?

So besides the coins, what is the added benefit of going through your site first, instead of going to lichess, Chess.com, ChessBase etc. directly?

@thijscom it is a social network.

Members of the chess social network I built can create content as well as consume feeds from other places.

The aim of a social network is not to make websites like lichess better but to create a community who want to share a collective experience in chess.

I didn't invent the concept of a social network, social media website architectures has been around for a while, however I thought a chess portal for me and my friends was what I wanted to build and creating a hub where widgets can be used to provide free chess services for our members was the benefit IMHO.

My friends like it.

Everyone is free to join it or not to join it.

Again thanks for your feedback it has been nice discussing why I decided to pay people to join my website and have created a chess hub for my friends and community. Feel free to be part of it if you want.