Why does everything in chess.com cost money

https://support.chess.com/article/2017-how-can-i-pay-with-cryptocurrency

That's serious?

You seem like a drama queen. I literally just mentioned 2 of the most basic features, that would barely cost the site anything. You sound like the people who try to justify tolls on already-built highways for "maintenance" lol. No one needs a 2nd job to pay $50 a year for platinum membership, I'm getting 20x that in interest on my savings account per year. I was unemployed at the short period of time I did have a subscription membership. And yes some things in life are free, but people and corrupt politicians choose to capitalize on it, such a water, a totally renewable resource yet some places charge $6 for a water bottle. Another example is healthcare, hospitals that have the available number of doctors but only hire a few of them to save costs on paying their salaries. With a hundred million users and a good percentage of them having paid memberships the sites got plenty of money.

Jeez! You do know that it is not only North Korea where things are provided for free to everyone (is it even true in North Korea?)? Lichess is just one example of a service offered to everyone in the world completely for free. I know that some Americans have a blurry vision of anything beyond their country's borders, where dragons and communists roam unchallenged, but I can assure you that North Korea and the French charity called lichess.org have very little in common.

Many other countries also have Universal Healthcare. There is literally no reason for certain things to cost money. People shouldn't have to work for and earn basic human rights either.

A communist system would involve distribution of the resources evenly. Yet to happen.

Communism is a very vague term. People mean different things by it, often contradictory. It's just not very useful at best and plain harmful when used as a swear word.

i agree.

North Korea is fascism, not socialism. Communist is somewhere in between the two depending on the context, but I think most people use it in the context of leaning toward the fascism side. Capitalism is almost as bad. Socialism is the best.

Game review uses server resources to run and staff are constantly working on improvements. There are absolutely real world expenses in providing that feature.

Regarding your last point, you have no way of knowing that.

In your analogies, just because the infrastructure is already in place doesn't mean that it will remain there without continuing maintenance and repair. For doctors, recruiting for hospitals is a very major issue. There's almost always openings trying to be filled in needed areas, especially specialties,

the rich need to get richer

I was thinking the same about the word free earlier when I saw that. Nothing is free really. Money is only a medium of exchange, it's energy really. Here's a good summary by Michael Saylor.

Even "free" stuff, or what u think is free stuff, is just a transfer of energy.

I will speak of North Korea when and how much I want, do not need your permission.

> If you think Lichess because it is "non-profit"

No, I think of lichess because its services are offered to everyone free of charge (whether it is a charity, non-profit, owned by a secret world government or sponsored by Elon Musk is beyond the point). You do not have to pay for them. Neither explicitly (there are no paywalls) nor implicitly in terms of your data and attention being sold to advertisers.

And if you read the post I was reacting to, you'll see that I was simply pointing out that such arrangements can be found in places other than North Korea.

If you say that nothing is free and there's no free lunch, yada yada, then Okay, fine. Somebody, somewhere always has to pay (in one way or another) for anything of value. True in North Korea, true everywhere else. There's no point arguing about empty tautologies and platitudes.

North Korea doesn't give its citizens access to the internet. So anything with free websites is moot.

Wow... seemed like pretty innocent thread made by a innocent little kid... but this is...

My theory is that Chess.com hooks you into games, and tries to make you pay to get better.

Shocking news: analysis is free on chess.com too.

Also: if a thread opens with an insane lie (like this one), why is it still running after 2 years?