Demographics of the newcomers

Curious if anyone knows what the overall demographic of the huge influx of new members is. I would imagine the new members consist mainly of beginners who got into it recently.

Looking at the global rapid stats though, I am a bit confused. About two months ago my friend told me the average rapid elo on chess.com was something like 850, and now I check and it is like 713. That would seem to accord with the idea that many beginners have joined. However, a screen recording from my friend not too long ago shows his then percentile of 1629 as 98.1%, while atm the percentile at my current rapid rating of 1618 is 98.2%. So the percentiles at this level have hardly changed at all, which would be odd if the site is indeed having a huge influx of beginners.

The hypothesis that comes to my mind based on this data is that we indeed have a lot more beginners coming, but somehow we also have quite some experienced players who are joining (but of the beginners who are joining, more tend to be absolutely new to chess than before). At least that is the only way I can think of to explain this data. But I am not sure why that would be the case. Would it be that there are experienced players who mainly played otb before, and then joined chess.com because of the growing popularity? I have no clue.

90% of the "newcomers" are likely free accounts and bots.    Does chess.com want to serve its paid human users?  or lose them?

Stop allowing more games to be started than what you can reliably let finish.

If a game starts, it should be allowed to finish. We need a queue. Or a limit of some kind.

Apparently the percentiles just aren't being calculated correctly right now. For example, based on the data they gave, my friend rated 1720 should be 99.6%, but the stats list him as 99%.

Re the suggestions above, I agree that would be a good idea. Guess the main thing I've been seeing them do is an alert as to when the server is going to restart soon.

Those beginners are just bots. Most of them want 7 and 14 day games, many unrated. I found 2 that were just one day and so far one of them did not respond to my opening move and was aborted, and I'm waiting on the other.

They are a complete waste of time for everyone.

Oh dear that sounds awful. Does chess.com not have a system to prevent bots joining? I don't remember what it was like to join other than I had to confirm my email....sounds like they need preventative measures of some sort.