Sort of agree here. But I've heard some professional streamers as well who causally say that the ignorance of the audience isn't on us to clarify, so we're playing the game and it's good for us.
Reposting an older comment I'd made under one of Chessmood's blog as well. Both Noel and Chessmood don't try to address it, at least on the face of it, who seem to be popular on Lichess. Other GMs too don't seem to bother about it.
But many chess players and coaches even don't want to investigate why they are offering to coach in the first place. And don't entertain questions about it. GM Noel Studer does the same thing and hardly elaborates or tries to question the system in place and as to why one should enter into chess competitively at this stage.
If it's simply fulfilling a demand and supply scenario, then that it is not a lofty goal.
Even teenagers are able to grasp that traditional chess is inching towards redundancy and while it may not be solved completely, it's getting quite boring that's quite apparent. And a pragmatic chess grandmaster will try to highlight this factor that whether we like it or not, the temporary surge of interest from Queen's gambit was just a lifeline to an almost sinking game that has lost its flavour after the introduction of AI. While the process of playing the game, enjoying with friends, exploring strategy is all good, there's no need to pursue it professionally irrespective of the 'why' because classical chess has almost become untenable and all this promotion for coaches is simply turning to a cash cow situation - let me milk it while I can. That's just dishonesty.
@vishytheplayer "And a pragmatic chess grandmaster will try to highlight this factor that whether we like it or not, the temporary surge of interest from Queen's gambit was just a lifeline to an almost sinking game that has lost its flavour after the introduction of AI."
"for a game sinking because of the AI" let's talk about this scrap incapable of producing any correct images. could you tell to the image generators that a chessboard does not have 164 squares? and there are no 7 knights on the board? Alright. When the AI will be a little more correct, we can talk about it again. chess still has a lot to live for! Long live to the king of games!
#12 The point was to highlight that chess in the traditional sense ie., classical chess is not what it is after Stockfish and the idea of taking it up professionally is being encouraged by GMs with no reflection on the consequences, just because it is lucrative to them.
The criticism was on that.
@vishytheplayer said in #13:
> #12 The point was to highlight that chess in the traditional sense ie., classical chess is not what it is after Stockfish and the idea of taking it up professionally is being encouraged by GMs with no reflection on the consequences, just because it is lucrative to them.
>
> The criticism was on that.
About this i 100% agree with you
I can't take Lichess blog posts seriously anymore.
Example title: "This ONE Secret will get you to the top!"
Blog post: "So I was out with my friends [...] having a bad day [...] surely I couldn't come back from this? [...] as I pursued my life in other directions [...] the moral of the story is [...] friendship is magic [...] read more at chessmagicstoriesforever.com"
I don't know if anyone's seen the memes about cooking recipe blogs but that's what Lichess blogs feel like lately.
That, and VERY shallow statistical analysis of games using the Lichess database.
@peppie23 said in #10:
>
@Toadofsky> "I just wish he and other professionals had the time to write quality free content with integrity, as they make time to do quality coaching and care for their students and their remarkable achievements."
>
> These blogs are for free and the quality coaching is not so I am not surprised.
>
> Anyway I recommend : schaken-brabo.blogspot.com/. I run this blog about 100% chess for more than a decade. It will sound cocky but I do think it offers quality free content with integrity.
Thanks! I am enjoying this blog and trying to think about how Lichess could be improved (perhaps it could serve as a blog aggregation service in addition to being a site to write blog posts).
Free is rarely worth what you did not pay.
Thanks for this post, it is good to hear that other people also find these low-quality posts on the main page annoying. I wouldn't mind all the Chessmood guys doing their marketing here, but at least they should put a little effort in their writing and give something valuable to people. They are so bad they give me second hand embarrassment, i.e. I feel ashamed for reading their stuff.
I asked Lichess about the selection of the blog posts for the main page. I got the following response:
"Which community blogs are shown on our front page is influenced by different factors as a consistent record of high quality instructive posts, following our blog etiquette and complying to any attribution/copyright requirements for images (determined by our team), their views and likes, the post age and others."
So, as it turns out, we see high quality instructive posts from Studer, Avetik and the rest of the gang, according to Lichess. After seeing this, I stopped being a Lichess patron. I certainly cannot support that.
I think the problem is that 3 heads (the lobby 3 headed thing) to represent the communicating lichess user base, is just that 3 independent heads (monster?), where there are many more not seen. And the surface area taken by big tiles...
I think my making such amplified windows into few writings it is bound to bring in advertisement.
It is in the direction of captive audience.
Perhaps blogs represent what the majority of chess players expect today:miracle methods for "thinking like a grandmaster".Since 2020 we can see in particular since a greater popularization of chess (and I'm very happy to see chess more practiced) that it is difficult to find quality chess content;I'm thinking in particular here of Youtube and Instagram,where players only think about following AI fights or having a brilliant move (!!) while the
chess.com algorithm awards them according to ranking during analysis. Although this low-quality content can be criticized, the evolution of the sites may represent what the majority want, and we can't decide for others what chess and chess-related content should or shouldn't be. But it's quite deplorable to see players buying training courses costing up to several hundred dollars (once again, we can't stop people from misusing their money).
The real question is why Lichess tolerates this advertising: new players might think that the training offered to which the blog redirects or the Chessable courses are of quality since the blog which talks about them is on the first page.
