Where has friendliness gone on this site?

That’s true!

Please don't confuse friendliness and the friends feature of the site. I am happy to be friendly with anyone I play, in the same way that I will be friendly with a shopkeeper, someone I meet at the bus stop, wherever; they are people I may never meet again, with whom I have no expectation of a close relationship, but I respect them as people, I may have enjoyed meeting them, I'm glad they are in the world. I value the people who are kind enough to play chess with me. I value those who give polite, human chat comments.

But on a vast site, what's the chance of me ever playing chess against the same person again? Even if I have some friends in my friend list here, what's the chance that one of them will be logged-on, and wanting a game, at precisely the moment I log on, and want a game? I've nothing against the friends feature, but it's not actually very useful, the way I use this site!

So please don't feel that people like me are being unfriendly. Honestly, we're not!

I see zero sense of having thousands of “friends”. I only accept friendship from people who are my friends in real life.

Id do IrL friends and like minimal people i know from online, not everybody i play against ofc

Ok I read many different points of view about this subject, people have different opinions about making friends, that's great, thank you all!

me personally, unless i know who you are and have talked to you in chat, i basically never accept freind requests. it's not hate or ego just indifference. I don't need more friends, and i primarily play chess to play chess not talk to people

the ship never sailed there anyway.

Look, this is how humans are. I agree with you, but there's really nothing we can do about it

The only people I became friends with them, I've met on the Internet, are people I've met later in rea life. Otherwise, there is nothing such as "friendship" online.

most people are from a different country and dont speak your language. or they have chat off, or they are too focused on the game. Or they are on mobile (the chat doesnt pop up you have to click it yourself)

All the people who actually were able to chat, we became friends.

Enjoying a game and how someone plays enough to want to friend is great! Nice to see people interacting well. But trying to friend them if they don’t know you, especially if you hadn’t conversed much in chat, in my experience just comes off as random or creepy. I wouldn’t friend some player for just playing me, and if they sent me a request, I’d just feel confused or mildly amused why on Earth they decided we knew each other enough to do that. Sometimes if you’ve rematched enough times, but not conversed, it’s okay though. Obviously they enjoyed playing enough to participate in more then a couple rather than searching for a different user. Otherwise, as I said, it doesn’t really makes sense.