Chess.com ratings have massively deflated since 2020

Am I right, wrong? Does anyone have any evidence to support their claim? 

To start a conjuncture, I would assume that the population of chess.com increasing by multiples leads to massive deflation. Players join at low ranks like 400 and then usually most eventually make their way up to around 800-1400. When you literally double the population and then half of the population ranks up, the other half must go down. 

What's curious is that this doesn't seem to be true for the 3k plus crowd. Anyone have any ideas why that might be? 

Anyone think I'm totally full of it and have a long counterargument that the exact opposite is true? 

I'm talking mostly about the 900-2300 range here to clarify

@1

"When you literally double the population and then half of the population ranks up,
the other half must go down."
++ That is not true. A new player has a higher K and a higher RD, i.e. the new player gains more rating than the established player loses rating.
This is no deflating effect, but an inflating effect. The player pool gains rating by it.

But this requires that new players gain most of their points while their k is still active, something like 30 games. That isn't the case.

When you say "deflation", you mean "inflation", right? You're saying that ratings are higher now than they were.

Ratings from 900-2200 are lower than they used to be. I.e. the average player who was 900-2200 lost rating from 2020-2024. Outside of that range I can't claim to know much.

Even after the K value wears off most low rated players will continue to gain elo at the same rate their opponents lose them. How is it possible mathematically speaking that this doesn't take points from the rest of the ladder?

If the player base grows, ratings will go up, not down. This is what's happening in real chess, and there's no reason to believe that chess.com produces an exact opposite effect.

In theory, yes. However, there has been a ratings deflation (as well as other side effects) in the FIDE rating system, because of the usage of three different K factors.

There is a scheduled reparation of that pending, which will be effective in a couple of weeks.

https://www.fide.com/news/2831

This depends on many factors, not just the number of players. Let us assume that 10,000 new players who have already played chess at school or in a club join in. Then they are all initially underrated. This would lead to temporary deflation.

The same applies if players play many unrated games. Then the rating does not directly follow the skill level.

Does anyone know if the average rating of a chess.com player has gone up or down in the last year. This would be an indicator.

This is not a satisfying answer. I said the opposite and provided reasons. You did not.

Also in OTB chess there has been deflation as noted by Eigen, despite the playerbase growth.

@10

"there has been a ratings deflation (as well as other side effects) in the FIDE rating system"
++ Yes, but FIDE uses the 1970 elo system with 3 different K, while chess.com uses Glicko-2 with its RD. Glicko-2 requires more calculations, but keeps the RD high as long as the rating has not stabilised.

A lot of players say that there has been a deflation. I can't tell because I joined a few monts ago. But I noticed that there are people on my level playing 90% accuracy on a regular basis. It might also be a cheating problem. If a big percentage cheats, then the non-cheaters will lose rating by force.

Where do you see these types of stats?

Alright imagine that all the 400 rated players joining are actually 600 in strength on average. That's data I don't know. Something I was interested in. But in such a case that would cause deflation, right? Since lower rated players are beating higher rated players more than they should. That propagates. Where is the breakdown in my logic? It should only depend on where the true skill of the joining players is relative to their assigned rating. K factor will mess with the magnitude of the change, but not the direction. Unless you have some weird multi-layer system like fide, based on what you're saying.

I'm not very interested in your anecdotes or your friends anecdotes. I'm much more interested in statistics and theories in math. Logic will also work.

I agree with TheJobavaSicilian. The ratings are deflated. This means that rating points don't reflect the level of play. I just topped my highest rating, and if you compared that game with the first loss I had, you will see the competition is NOT as strong the second time. What I think is happening is that you start an account, and on lichess you get a huge rating hike (the inflation part). However, on here, you get tougher competition at the lower ratings if you win. If you lose a bunch as I did, then work your way back up, you are not faced with as high a level of competition. Maybe they have it this way to better evaluate pools of players. If you are 2000 you can jump to 2000 quicker initially. But what if you are 1500? Well, they still need to pass the 2000s up the ladder, so you are basically removed from that pool of players and are placed in the 1000-1500 bracket. This is the deflation, the lowering of pools.