90% of shown blogs are by the same 3 GMs

@KedaR_AthreyA said in #5:
> And you also put the dollar sign before the number, not after.
>
> First of all, it's a percentage sign. And also, you do put it after the number
percentage: yes.
dollar sign: no.
He typed a dollar sign, not a % sign.
@CheerUpChess-Youtube said in #1:
> It keeps only showing blogs by GM NoelStuder, FM CheckRaiseMate (offering coaching for "100$" per hour) and Avetik Chessmood (offering coaching for "300_______$" per hour ___?!)

@Toadofsky said in #9:
> I'm not a moderator so I don't understand the details well enough to explain them, but Lichess does care what blog posts are shown in the lobby.

I can't imagine a non-profit organization cares about GMs promoting expensive coaching 3 times the salary of what a doctor gets. I personally think they just use an automated algorithm and as far as I know NoJoke said himself, "just keep posting, maybe you'll get picked up by the algorithm some day" in a Q&A livestream. However so far those with titles, high rating and clickbait content get promoted non-stop, so much that the page is flooded, while someone who puts quality over quantity gets punished. Again, I understand that youtube works that way, because youtube profits as a profit organization from it - but lichess has no advantage of promoting GMs on their main page.

An example: There are articles about topics like "why you shouldn't accept a draw" or "why you shouldn't give up" or "how to play an OTB tournament" and while it may contain useful information for some players it is also very generic. Those are questions that have been answered a million times by the community. It's like the opening and trap studies in the study section, but worse. So they put out one article after the other about obvious facts. On the other hand you have really interesting studies by users that barely make it on the front page like "How some common material imbalances affect your win-rate" by marcusbuffett. He only created one blog post, but made a good one. I wish to see more of that community driven content that doesn't go for obvious facts. Now we have seen him, but how many other people creating similar stuff never see the light of day?

I am not asking to remove any content of anybody, I am asking for giving small creators a chance to be seen at all. To allow people to keep scrolling, to allow people something like the "newest" section for studies for blogs too. To reduce the amount of content per person by simply always only showing the latest article of somebody on the front page, so we have more variety and more people featured. It is just demotivating to never being able others to see and discuss your work. The blog audience is a different one from the forum audience aswell. You could connect with people outside the forum this way aswell, that may not know about the existence of this forum at all.

> I mean something like github.com/ddugovic/UserStyles/blob/master/lichess-compact-lobby.css for Lishogi - show a single thumbnail and headline in the upper-right corner.

How would that look like? Please show me an image instead of a css file. I can read css, but I cannot understand what you mean just by looking at the file.

@lucky_Nan I know that you type the dollar sign before the number, but I am used to it the other way around because of my currency which is €. Also I don't consider this to be very important for this discussion.

@lucky_Nan said in #3:

> Your welcome.

*You're

@lucky_Nan said in #3:
> No way 90%. And you also put the dollar sign before the number, not after.

@KedaR_AthreyA said in #5:
> First of all, it's a percentage sign. And also, you do put it after the number

---

When people are discussing, they have a tendency to misread each other.
It happens more than we realize. I guess we let our emotions read assumptions in between the lines.

@CheerUpChess-Youtube said in #12:
> @lucky_Nan I know that you type the dollar sign before the number, but I am used to it the other way around because of my currency which is €. Also I don't consider this to be very important for this discussion.
I never said it was important.
I was just pointing it out.
You don't need to take it so seriously.

I can understand the frustration of working hard to create something and struggling to get it noticed. I did my share of 0 viewer Twitch streams years ago. I also think the algorithm for Lichess blogs can be better about bringing low-follower blogs to the top if they're good enough. I like the idea of new discovery tools like a "new" section perhaps. That said, the overall attitude shown in this thread is something I can't support.

Insulting other blogs does nothing to bring your own blogs closer to the top of the list. It undermines any reasonable argument you might have about improving the algorithm, as does bringing up irrelevant information like how much a blog author make coaching. Why would I care if somebody charges $300/hour for coaching? Good for them! What matters here is how good the blogs are, or more precisely, to what extent Lichess users find them interesting or useful.

I think some blog feed formula such as number of likes divided by number of views could be interesting, or perhaps not counting likes from the writer's followers. I enjoy almost all the blogs I read on lichess but agree the ones presented to me are written by a remarkably few creators

@NoJoke said in #17:
> I can understand the frustration of working hard to create something and struggling to get it noticed. I did my share of 0 viewer Twitch streams years ago. I also think the algorithm for Lichess blogs can be better about bringing low-follower blogs to the top if they're good enough. I like the idea of new discovery tools like a "new" section perhaps.

Thank you for your reaction. Hope to see any discussion taking place and hopefully some changes. What about the suggestion to limit one blogpost per user on the front page? So as soon as someone creates another popular blog it replaces the one before instead of you showing 4 blogs of the same person there? This way you could keep the front page simple and not overloaded, but feature more people and give others the chance too to get seen. It would discourage creators to create countless posts just to increase traffic.

As you might know the study section has the "newest" section and it is great, but in case a lot of people create something new at the same time it may immediately disappear on page 2. Hopefully you can work something out for blogs that makes sense when prefering this solution. However whatever it is, thank you for reading, reacting and considering something, whatever it may be, it would help.

> That said, the overall attitude shown in this thread is something I can't support.

Understood. Noted. Sorry. There is some frustration leading to this. Please keep reading:

> It undermines any reasonable argument you might have about improving the algorithm, as does bringing up irrelevant information like how much a blog author make coaching. Why would I care if somebody charges $300/hour for coaching? Good for them! What matters here is how good the blogs are, or more precisely, to what extent Lichess users find them interesting or useful.

I just want to say that it DOES play a role, because people doing it for a lot of money only tend to create content in a way that it is pleasing the algorithm by creating a lot, using keywords and so on. It is not irrelevant what the purpose of the blog is. Do they have something to say too or is their only objective to increase traffic by pushing the right buttons of the algorithm? Do people click on them or do they actually find it useful? And most importantly is it helpful? There can be a big difference. Look at the like/view ratio, often it is not even half of that of small creators. 12.000 views and 250 likes. Once the blog is at the front page they get pushed and all the people can only click on their blog increasing views, which doesn't mean they would if there were other topics there aswell to choose from.

The same phenomenon of bubbles and reinforcing algorithm work is known on countless social media platforms like youtube, facebook, instagram and so on where people try to use the system. One example is people posting a short video and naming it "what is your favourite color" to increase comments and engagement despite the video having nothing to do with it and them not caring about it. Because more comments = better algorithm result. Or titles like "how to win with the caro-kann" will get clicked more often and appear more often. Now only someone who is in it solely for money would ever do something like this. As I said I have nothing against people earning money. But it does influence the way they are posting. I am glad that you have space to advertise your service, but it shouldn't be the case that people do it for that reason ALONE and that is the case when they offer such expensive coaching, clearly. @MrPushwood has said it in #4

yeah agree with this, hopefully, more developer blog posts get noticed, some of my stuff was about AI but didn't get noticed, but as soon as someone popular who does not know about AI posts, they get much attention.