Why are cheaters on chess.com seemingly getting worse?

Unfortunately for all of the honest players on chess.com cheating continues to be a massive issue which only seems to get worse with each 'boom'.

From a practical perspective I can understand why there are only so many dollars available to a product development team to address cheating.

This is a growing cultural issue on many levels. One factor is simply population based. There is probably a fixed percentage of people who will simply cheat at everything they do. Another factor is that the rise of the streamers occurred. This group may actually have a financial motivation (and for some a psychological addiction to appearing to win more often than not) and this new mentality has spread to those who wish to emulate their very public success.

Another factor is that some people believe you should win at all costs, or they attach honor or their identity to winning, others still subscribe to the belief that 'if you've got the money to buy cheating software, as opposed to the time to properly learn chess to GM levels, then why deny yourself the enjoyment of playing 2000+ level chess against titled players?'

Regardless of motivation, this lack of empathy for other people creates what I believe to be a barrier somewhere in the intermediate level chess range: at some point in your learning you are going to meet the ELO farmers, and they are more likely to rob you of your rating points, than chess.com is likely to catch them and refund you. IMO you should be refunded with 'interest' but that's a different topic...

The reporting function was recently updated to simplify the reporting process and chess.com have stated that they automate large parts of their cheat detection workflow. This, in theory, is a sound decision, however in practice I think it plays into a socio-psychological problem: the responsibility diffusion effect.

Basically, people are less likely to do something about a bad situation if they believe that:
a) they will need to stick their neck out to do something about it and,
b) somebody else is likely to be responsible for fixing it.

The reason why I think this effect applies is that we all know that cheating is bad and that cheaters need to be reported. However...

Most honest people recoil at the suggestion of being called a cheater. This is an insult to our intelligence perhaps. For many of us, the thought of hitting that report button is met with internalized questions like "what real proof do I have?" "How would I feel if I knew someone did this to me?" "What if I'm wrong and they get banned accidentally?"

Chess.com assures us that false positives are quite rare, and there is indeed an appeals process that legitmate players can use if falsely accused to have their situation looked at.

This represents the 'Stick your neck out' of the effect I mentioned earlier. Coupled with the fact we all know that this person is likely to cheat again against somebody else, means the conditions are satisfied to reach the inner conclusion 'move on, it doesn't matter, someone else will catch them'.

Another contributing factor is that apparently, the chess.com process relies on unique report counts to elevate cheating incidents to a humans attention, or even the algorithm's automated account closure features.

If this is indeed the case then this means is that each player essentially gets a 'grace period' for cheating - an arbitrary number of reports must be made before someone, no matter how blatant their cheating is, before they are detected and banned.

The tough part is that this very sensible mental barrier for making an 'hackusation' works in all cheaters' favour.

What many people may not realise is that the report function is largely anonymous, and the process is completely dependant on reports. You aren't sticking your neck out in the slightest.

To have even the most minor of suspicions? You should reach for that report button as quickly as possible.

You can't lose by reporting somebody: they will not know if you did, so if you are wrong, its 'play on. If the cheat detection process agrees with your suspicion, then the whole honest chess community wins. No matter what happens, any AI or 'big data' that chess.com owns to address cheating gets 'smarter'.

To make things worse, chess.com has no effective way to prevent people from having any number of accounts - despite expressly forbidding it unless you are a streamer. Why they trust the very cohort of people most likely to cheat at chess, I will never understand. Anyway....

While they do track account IP addresses this likely is not a consideration until a fair play incident is raised to a sufficient level.

When you consider on the flipside, there are any number of tools out there that facilitate cheating, and there are even discord (i.e. social media) communities out there that will embrace and teach the 'art' of cheating to others. To these individuals, the dopamine hit of winning chess isn't the goal, they have desensitized their brain to that. No, it is to cheat at chess and get away with it - that is the hit they are chasing like a crack addict.

With multiple accounts, easy access to tools and knowledge, and a few fast bans early on in their cheating 'careers' - they learn far too quickly how to cheat just enough to satisfy their inner desires of not getting caught.

Don't let the cheaters win, and dont assume someone else will report them. You will not be wrongly accusing anyone. Chess.com and its honest players needs you to press that button.