New members of chess.com used to be required to have some activity before they could get a daily rating, and then that rating was usually 1200, 800, or 400. Now brand new unrated players are joining chess.com within the last few weeks with zero speed chess games or any activity of any kind, and they are getting 2000 ratings for individual matches with a single opponent AND for joining team matches!!! For many it took a life time of struggle to earn a 2000 rating, and now chess.com is handing them out like cookies at grandma’s house. What is going on?

Neither do I if it is true. 

You can now choose what level you want to be rated when you first join the site.  2000 is one of those ratings if you choose that you are at the expert level.  If they are not really that high they should lose that rating as soon as they play a game, unless they are just playing lower rated players and keep winnning...

As @BSAeagle60 mentioned, you choose your "level" when creating an account and it's been that way for a quite a while now. If someone chooses something a lot stronger than their actual strength, they will quickly drop based on the way Glicko RD works.

WHY DOESN'T CHESS.COM USE THE USCF RATING SYSTEM OR FIDE RATING SYSTEM? IT HAS GOT TO BE BETTER THAN HANDING OUT FREE EXPERT RATINGS. ALSO EVERY BODY SHOULD GET AT LEAST 1 RATING POINT FOR WINNING AGAINST A VERY LOW RATED PLAYER . OTHERWISE THERE IS NO SENSE TO PLAYING THEM.

That is absurd. It took me several years of hard work and struggle  to reach 2000. Now you click your mouse as a beginner and get  a 2000 rating. Then they play other beginners with 2000 ratings and get theirs up to 2200. I am seeing that exact scenario play out. Then they have that as their permanent highest rating achieved on their profile . We are turning beginners into masters overnight and cheapening the whole rating system. 

Another problem is they show up on board #1 , 2, or 3 in an important team match, with their bogus 2000+ rating, and promptly get clobbered, resign, or time out, and our team loses 2 key points. 

for years I had excited new unrated players wanting to join a team match for their new team, as an 800, and chess.com blocked them For insufficient activity. Expert 2000+ ratings were earned by tough competition, and were admired and respected.....now those ratings are handed out like children’s candy and the whole rating system becomes a farce. 

Texas_Retro

Jim, the way to prevent this for team matches is to ensure that your players (or all your club members) have played a minimum number of games.  I suggest 10 matches minimum would be enough to get the rating in the right range.  You can do this when you set up the team match, or you can make it a requirement for joining your club.  Or both.

But tell me how does this not cheapen and make a mockery of the whole rating system when players spend years of their time and sweat In struggle over the chess boards to earn their 2000+ rating, and now a beginner waltzes in and with a click of the mouse gets a 2000 rating, plays a few other beginners with bogus  2000 ratings, and becomes a 2200 rated master the next day. The whole rating system has become a fraud. 

If there are players with bogus ratings, that's the fraud. I still think you can mitigate this by having a club that manages its membership and arranges games that allows players only with a minimum number of games

Chess.com ratings mean nothing. There's a reason FIDE ratings are used as the official rating of a player and not from anywhere else. Don't take the Chess.com too seriously and stop obsessing over it, improving at chess or having fun should be your priorities, not an arbitrary rating assigned by a commercial entity.

I have brought lots of new players to chess.com. Most had zero understanding of ratings, online chess, and the difference between 400 and 2000. They did not understand daily, blitz and bullet. If they joined today and clicked on 2000, even if It was labeled expert, they would be making an innocent mistake with no intent to be fraudulent. The fraud is being created by the system that allows a beginner to click his mouse and become an expert, and then a master a few days later. 

Sometimes the starting rating of 2000 is way too low.

Chess.com ratings are taken seriously by hundreds of thousands, if not millions,  of people who do care. Most of us have no connection to FIDE and never will. I was a USCF tournament director for years, but I would never tell someone today that if they want a “real” rating....go spend a weekend sitting around a Hilton Hotel playing 5 USCF rated games in the conference hall. 

If it makes u feel better, I started at 400 and have entered 1 daily tournament and have completed 10 games. Currently waiting for the 2nd stage to start. Gonna be a while. 

So I didn't want any freebies, I wanted to work my way up. Also, I don't use a database and decided that half my games will be openings I've never played. 

But this site should handle unrated players the way fide and uscf do. It makes more sense.

Agreed, this is what I think is best to get around this.

If you want to understand the US Chess rating system, start by reading the link below, and note one of the authors is Mark Glickman himself, the inventor of the Glicko system.  Note that both the USCF and Chess.com use this system (an improvement on the older ELO system), although with different implementations of initial ratings, wherein lies the problem.  

Key points, that should be adopted by Chess.com to resolve this issue:  Unrated players should be given a chance to enter an existing FIDE rating, USCF rating, etc. if they have one.  Otherwise the rating is generally set to 750, but can set based on an age formula, which at any rate would never exceed 1300 for an adult over 25.  And this should be a provisional rating.  

Problem solved!!  Allowing people with new accounts to "self-rate" at 2000 is completely absurd if they don't have an established external rating at that level. 

Unrated players should have provisional ratings for their first 25 games, and their ratings should be clearly marked as provisional.  

This is the rating system as documented by the inventor, and it should be followed by Chess.com if they want to claim any sort of legitimacy for their rating system.  

http://www.glicko.net/ratings/rating.system.pdf

No worries, once u touch "Rated", the Glicko RD will tell u very soon...

Umm, there should be no reason to just curbstomp low level players.

If u play a lot of games, it becomes just a very little "noise" IMO