Why does Lichess have fewer players than chess.com?

I kind of prefer it this way. I feel like the lichess userbase is much more hardcore about chess. As long as its always easy to find a pairing then its OK that lichess is smaller.

@XEHAZAKQUQH_IMWZAOBI said ^

Obviously Lichess is better since it's completely free.

i hate when someone says that. chess.com is free too.......i didnt try it for 8 years because they said its not free. only then i figured i liked bughouse.

Using chess.com is free, but important features like unlimited game analysis is not free in chess.com. You’d have to go to Lichess (or other websites that are kind of like Lichess) to analyse your game freely.

@TitusPlaysChess123 said ^

Obviously Lichess is better since it's completely free.

i hate when someone says that. chess.com is free too.......i didnt try it for 8 years because they said its not free. only then i figured i liked bughouse.

Using chess.com is free, but important features like unlimited game analysis is not free in chess.com. You’d have t...

they always fail to mention that. thats why its 100% lie as they say: chess.com is not free. they never put it like "chess.com's some features are not free"

lol

Also chess dot com has a large marketing budget, and design their app to be as addictive as possible.

there is more than one type of free.

lichess is many types of free.

lichess's source code is available under some type of open source license, it might be a free software type license, don't know. either way, it's available.

lichess is free from ads and trackers.

chess.com is proprietary software that has ads and trackers. Your data gets collected and sold. So even if you don't pay with money to play on chess.com. it has a cost to you, you pay with your data, you pay by looking at ads. it's not free.

When you compare chess clubs you have to compare the age. Maybe a club has more members because it is filled with children, while another club is filled with elders. There are 2 parents and yet some have 10 children. Get the point. You cannot compare a website with another and say this or that site has more members. What type of members are they?

Lichess has a distribution graph, but I do not know of any other site that has this.
This is what's needed to be compared the size of the site and even then it's a weekly measurement.
https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/blitz

When you go to a club in town and see it empty is it any good? Well it depends on what time of day or night you went to look at it.

Each website serves it's purpose.

Some people are very influential and go with the flow.
The OP advertised that the other website has more members.
So I would assume, there will be more influential people going to the other site to be part of a bigger club.

The behaviour is like a night club. For some that's what the want a crowd, while others prefer it less crowned.
The why this and why that can only be answered with biases.

I mean, if you search chess on google, look what comes up...

Meanwhile, if you go to like Youtube, you'll see all those Gotham videos... played on chess.com

And also, people tend to do what others around them do. Ask all your friends, they probably all know of chess.com, but unless they actually play chess they might have never heard of Lichess.

Of my friends the ones that just play occasionally, don't really care play on .com, but those like me that actually play a lot and try to get better use Lichess, maybe because of me :)

I think toscani explained it very well.

@yangtuo said ^

Obviously Lichess is better since it's completely free.

This website is as woke as reddit with the owner supporting political causes, like transgenders in women's chess tournaments.