Last Tuesday D saw me playing on Lichess and she promptly challenged me for a game. I accepted her invitation but refused to entertain a game on Chess.com (which I would henceforth refer to as ChessCom). She was a little annoyed since she is comfortable with ChessCom. So she asked me for a reason for my dislike. Shocked by her (obvious) question I muttered something about corporations and said nothing more. Now that I am able to think more coherently I would like to answer it in a more ordered fashion.
Who own these websites? In the case of ChessCom, it is owned by a multi-million dollar corporation in USA with hundreds of employees while Lichess is owned by a not-for-profit in France with just 2 employees. This may seem like a minor difference but it has a major impact on how the two sites are managed.
ChessCom earns most of its income through two channels: subscriptions and advertisements. To earn this income ChessCom uses many techniques, some of which are borderline immoral: it prohibits streamers from playing on Lichess and invests most of its earnings on eye candy features (that is, features that don’t contribute toward the improvement of the site but which are rather a means to retain user attention.) It stops free users from enjoying the most basic of features: analysis and puzzles. The analysis by Stockfish (which is a free project) and puzzles generated from games of the users are put behind a massive paywall. To show advertisements, ChessCom also tracks user activity.
Lichess, on the other hand, depends on the generous donations of its players. To recieve this money, they do their best to serve the user interests while also ensuring that no action is exploitative in nature (which has been expressly prohibited by its charter of creation.) You can do anything you want to do in Lichess. Its player base is kind and there are fewer cheaters.
In other words, ChessCom puts profits before people while Lichess puts people on the forefront. (In fact, Lichess doesn’t even have a possibility of earning “profits” due to its not-for-profit structure.) This is enough of a difference for me. Why would I want to use a website that want to exploit me rather than a website that only wants me to have a good time? ChessCom doesn’t even have more features to justify its usage. I could even say that it has less features and stability than Lichess since ChessCom paywalls most of the good stuff and doesn’t direct enough resources to the maintenance of its servers. The only thing in ChessCom’s favor is its sleek design which is, in fact, a way to keep the users hooked on its platform and ignore its multitude of problems.