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Pool 5+5

OneOfTheQ, great post but I have a bone to pick with one of your points.

I generally don't believe in comparisons to ICC but that's another story. Here though, the comparison you made is certainly not proportional:
"To make another comparison to ICC, there the pools are far more popular than tournaments, with both being less popular than regular seeks (although like here, a much higher proportion of strong players play in the pools)."

Tournaments on ICC are not one bit like lichess's Arena tournaments! The fact is that most players get the same rush from playing in tournaments as they do from auto-matching in pools.

Personally, I don't think people see the benefit of pools over standard matchmaking. They don't see it as much of a challenge, and, unlike on ICC, Lichess players have probably not watched 20 GMs emphasise the fine points of pools and why they are purportedly a better metric than using the lobby.

Unlike with tournaments, pools offer rating progression and no big prize at the end (in the form of having your name on the home page or being at the top of the list). They don't feel recognised for their effort unless they get in the top 10, much like with playing games on the site normally.

Which brings me to my last point, that was discussed to death before the pools implementation was put into place. What people are really looking for is a simple auto-matching system, not something segregated from the rest of the site. They want to match-make seamlessly, Xbox Live-style with the click of a button based on their set preferences. I came up with a basic idea of how to retain the lobby and have optional matchmaking on top, though I've lost my rather basic mockups of that, now.

TL;DR: We need to think out of the box and realise what draws people into pools. Pools are not popular because they're not different (apart from being segregated, a negative) or better enough than what's normal (lobby/tournaments) on Lichess.
#19 Clarkey, you are quite right in your observations - but perhaps missing something vital.

Before trying another approach, surely it would be best to find out what it is people want, and why the pools are empty when the arenas are not?

The differences between the arena and the pool, logically, are the key to the success of the one and the failure of the other.
You're not wrong in your observations about why Arena works, and why Pools do not. The problem is that the goals of Arena are completely different to Pools, they're trying to achieve different things. If they were trying to achieve the same thing, we'd just have one over the other.

So, the question is, with the goal of Pools in mind, how do we make it a popular independent platform?

I personally use the main lobby over pools due to convenience. To go to Pools (a separate page of the site) and wait for a pairing out of a visibly limited amount of players is not appetising. This is a major oversight in design of which I'm personally to blame.

Hopefully by making the whole system more convenient - easier than using the lobby - we'll be able to increase their popularity.
"So, the question is, with the goal of Pools in mind, how do we make it a popular independent platform?"

if i remember correctly, especially the 1+0 pool used to be quiet popular with sometimes ~35 players in the pool...now this is not happening anymore, i wonder why (this is an honest question).

in terms of making the pools more interesting, maybe a combination of less transparency and artificial bots (low version of stockfish) would be working. the biggest problem at the moment is the long pairing time and the knowledge that it will take long, because one sees from the outside that there are just 2 players in the pool...
maybe a global announcements that titled player x is playing in pool y would also do the trick (although this of course is the exact opposide of the 'less transparency' approach)...
I think the ego thing is a major issue here. Maybe a new rating system, one that would not allow for gigantic drops in rating will help... maybe a special rating system just for the pools: when you win you get, say, 10 points, when you area beaten you lose the same amount of points.
The rating system won't be changed. Being egotistical about ratings is your own problem.
@clarkey: It was just an idea, sorry if exposing it offended you. And I think that even if being "egotistical about ratings" is evil and even if, as you gratuitously assume, it is also my "own problem", when it affects the popularity of the pools it clearly becames everybody's problem.
Whether one agrees, or not, with Tantalus's ideas, there surely is no need to for a moderator to be so rude in response.

The success of lichess is in everyone's best interests here.

The pools failed because the input of pretty much everyone except for a handful of 2000+ rated players was ignored and indeed often ridiculed.

Perhaps, before embarking on the complete re-organisation of the pools, it might be worth first asking what people want this time...

If people's feedback is supposedly welcomed here, then why not... welcome it?!
"your own problem" doesn't mean you and solely you. I'm not singling you out, Tantalus. "your own problem" means that if anyone has a problem with a widely used, accepted and reputable rating system it is their own problem. It's not like we're going to invent a brand new rating system that only works with positive integers because people don't like losing points. Rating systems like that only favour whoever plays more games - not who's good.

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