95,000 New People Per Day?

What's wrong with faking the numbers? People lie about their business all the time. Its called self promotion. 

You may not care about lying since your president is the biggest lier of all time but in my country honesty and integrity is still a valor that we praise and the liars are not worth our trust! 

I'm not sure what you are talking about. We are talking about how chess.com is fudging the numbers (unless you really believe one person is joining every second). When a president lies, and they all do, it really has nothing to do with a business fudging the number for self promotion purposes. It's basically advertising. If they say 95,000 people are joining every day it's supposed to make you believe they are really popular. McDonalds had a phrase on their signs "billions and billions served". 

I think the issue is they have made it unbelievable. One person every second is a fourth of how many people are born every second. So if the current trend were to hold, a fourth of the worlds population would eventually be chess.com members. Not very believable. 

Just based on what I've read of things @erik has posted in the past, I really don't believe he would make up numbers. A lot of accounts probably are people making new accounts when they already have one or more (those could be abandoned, forgotten, closed, force closed) and some are things like abusers/spammers trying to create accounts to create problems, there are also people coming to chess for the first time. A lot of those are going to lose interest quickly and stop coming.

Any sufficiently popular site, in any fields is going to get a lot of account created and reporting those numbers isn't faking things.

Everyone know it's fake!

I'm sure some of it is people making new accounts when they already have one. But I thought that wasn't allowed. Is it possible this erik person does things that you might not know about? It just comes down to what makes the most sense. People were skeptical of 17,000  a day. Imagine what they think of 95,000 a day. 

What's not allowed and what happens are two different things

Of course @erik can do things I don't know about. I have to make a judgment call based on my dealings with him and reading things he has posted. Based on that judgement call, I feel that he is a very genuine guy and wouldn't artificially report numbers to boost the site's reputation.

The problem with "what makes the most sense" is that humans are generally bad at making accurate estimations, especially when it comes to things where they don't have first-hand experience with the things they are trying to understand (such as large, community based internet platforms, how popular they are and how many people actively interact with them).

I don't think there has been any claims of uniqueness on the numbers, just the numbers and the generated traffic from those numbers. Of course, you can disbelieve them if you want to, it doesn't necessarily make them false.

At what point would you question it? It seems you don't question it at one new member every second. What about one new member ever half second? Or one new member every tenth of a second. Lets say there were several million members joining in the last 24 hours, would that make sense to you? Because humans, generally, aren't very good at making accurate estimations. 

I've watched spammers in real time creating new accounts, so I know that account creation can happen quickly and there can be a lot of them. Add legitimate users to that, even if they have previously had an account (whether closed, forgotten, etc) and that adds up 

There are over 4.5 billion internet users. Even if only 1% of those are interested in chess, that leaves a ton of room for growth and during the pandemic, almost every online entertainment site has received an influx of users. Add to that the articles about chess and the Queen's Gambit and that can even accelerate things.

Maybe the 17,000 members "joining" is not new people creating accounts on chess.com, but rather like the number of people on chess.com in total for that day. This could include (old + new people)

I'm not sure what a spam account is but it sounds like something that's not very genuine. If that's the case then I think that is exactly what people are talking about. The 17,000 a day wasn't genuine, and the 95,000 a day is also not genuine. It's unbelievable. 

No. There is a place where you can see how many people are online.

They are doubling down. It's now 102,000 joined in the last 24 hours. 

Those numbers are BS....it say that 312 000 000 in the usa have internet....

and 904 000 000 in China!

and 744 000 000 in India.

You have more than 50 000 000 in the usa alone that can barely eat 3 times a day and they can barely pay there rent.

China has more peoples living with 1$ per day that the number of peoples in the whole usa..same with India...

It's an automated count by the system. It literally just counts new account signups.

That's probably true. One way or another. 

It says? Who is it? I didn't provide a link to where I got that value. Where did you see your numbers?  Are the numbers off by an order of magnitude? By 10 or 20%? More? I'm not making absolute claims that numbers are 100% accurate; I imagine the numbers are not off by enough to  make a difference in the discussion.

Anyway, even people without computers at home still get online in places like libraries, schools and work. A lot of people maintain a mobile device that they use to get online with, even those that might be less affluent. Yes, there are still a lot of people and places where access may not be ubiquitous, but often is still available, being used and growing.

Have you been in China? if you get out of any big cities they live in dump! no electricity no plumbing and their toilets are super filthy!

India is very poor! 

330 millions of peoples in the usa and at least 10% don't even have a job! more than 50 millions poor! do you know what is a poor?

minimum federal wage in the USA 7.25$ in Canada were the cost of living is way cheaper $11.

No one can live with 7.25$ an hour and by an internet connection!

Minimum wage in China? in the best city $2 an hour-outside the big city a few penny.

in India? .40 for one hour of work in the big city is the minimum wage.

Try to live in any country with $2 per day! well billions do....