The headliner is Magnus.
Not to anyone unfamiliar with chess - they are probably more familiar with Beth Harmon then Magnus Carlsen. It's why Chess.com runs the POG Championships - because personalities like Pokimane have 9+ million followers on Twitch, compared to Hikaru's 1+ million.
Comparing chess.com to lichess is sort of pointless. It's similar to comparing Windows to Linux. People use what they like better, and some of us run both Windows & Linux and also use both chess.com and lichess. It doesn't always have to be an either/or thing. Often times, things complement themselves in life quite well.
^^ But in some places everything and everyone must be categorised. Case in point, the juvenile posts that talk about Carlsen fanboys and Naka fans. You can't just have a general interest.
I play on both sites. I pay here, it's free on Lichess. I turn chat off here, because of the mouthy kids and poor sports. Lichess doesn't have that problem, so I leave chat on. I'm better than 90% of players on this site and better than 55% of players on Lichess, which infers the playing pool is stronger on Lichess. The level of play is also more consistent at Lichess. All that said, I financially support this site because it does much to grow our game. I'm not naive, I know the owners have a vested self-interest in growing chess. It's just that I'm willing to help them get rich if it means chess popularity grows across the globe.
Both sites are excellent for play and offer abundant resources for improvement. When ratings are understood for what they are—a statistical system that predicts expected performance on the basis of past results—instead of some absolute measure of skill, foolishness like the title of this thread occurs less often.
I have played about ten times as many games at chessdotcom as Lichess, but enjoy both (I’ve also been on this site twice as long—fifteen years to seven). I use both for playing chess with my students and for developing teaching resources. Neither site is a joke. Nothing keeps you from playing at both sites.
Back to the subject of ratings, I would say that it's harder to achieve a certain percentile on lichess Blitz, but easier to achieve a certain rating on lichess, when it comes to average, to better than average (but not ridiculous) players. 1500 Blitz players here are just better than 1500 Blitz players on lichess, although I think players here are overall not as skilled as lichess players. At those average to "above average but not ridiculous" levels, I find it much easier to perform at a higher percentile here than on lichess.
I play on both sites. I pay here, it's free on Lichess. I turn chat off here, because of the mouthy kids and poor sports. Lichess doesn't have that problem, so I leave chat on. I'm better than 90% of players on this site and better than 55% of players on Lichess, which infers the playing pool is stronger on Lichess. The level of play is also more consistent at Lichess. All that said, I financially support this site because it does much to grow our game. I'm not naive, I know the owners have a vested self-interest in growing chess. It's just that I'm willing to help them get rich if it means chess popularity grows across the globe.
Chess.com percentile is based on all users who have gained a rating in the past 90 days. While Lichess is based on players who played in the last week.
I find it difficult to complete the two because of connection issues. I'm a 1300 bullet player on chess.com because of the terrible lag. On lichess I'm at 2000. I enjoy lichess because of the much quicker servers. I like chess.com due to the layout. Maybe once they get the server problems fixed I will play again on chess.com
liches has low level than chess.com. Chess.com its better in all of levels
No need to put other sites down.
here i am 1400, ther i am 1900
They use different rating system, and chesscom uses an older version. Different systems, different sample group, different UI.. you can't compare player strength using online ratings in that fashion.
The difference between 2 sites is not steady 300 or 400 rating actually. It depends on the rating. Lower than around chess.com 1300 rating the difference is around 300-350 but at around 1700 the difference is around 200, at around 2000 on chess.com difference is around 100. So the difference is also changing. It actually decreases on higer ratings. So there is not a constant rating difference.
And also player style effects the difference a bit. Ie.
I'm around 1650 at lichess bullet, 1450 here,
1850 at lichess blitz, 1650 here,
1950 at lichess rapid, 1550 here,
(I didn't play rapid here recently.)
So for my ratings the difference is around 200 points. But I know at lower ratings difference can go up to 400. And decreases to 100 or even 50 at higher ratings.
Those 2k players on lichess are weak. Those 800s are not 800s on here. Lichess 800s blunder and use scholar mate. Lichess kids are weak. I beat a 1600s in bullet when I was in the lower rated section. Lichess forum is empty. On here, cc forums is big. Lichess is way weaker than cc.
It's naive to compare two fundamentally different rating systems.
And their forums are empty indeed, which is quite a good thing: spamming, trolling, egotripping (which is what 95% of the posts here are about) are not welcome there.
I really have no idea why chess.com lets people pick their own starting rating.
Because your starting rating matters very little once you play more than a handful of games on the site - no matter what you may choose at the start, once you've played enough games, it will change very quickly change to actually reflect where your stand relative to others in the player pool.
It's the same with the rating points refunded when a cheater's account is closed - it doesn't really matter to your rating, as after paying some more games your rating will have gone back to where it should be, the points refund just helps people feel better about it.
Or why they allow speedrunning
Because Chess.com wants more people to try chess and more people to become chess players, and one of the ways to do that is when people who don't play chess sees a streamer having fun with the game in a rapid fire and entertaining format. A speedrunner account is marked as such and people whose lose to that account get their rating points back, so there's no deception involved. Maybe someone's ego might be a little bruised by getting crushed by a Hikaru Nakamura speedrunner account, but on the other hand - hey, they got to play Hikaru! When else might they get that sort of chance?
or why they don't have a separate classical rating.
Because while it's possible to play a classical time control on Chess.com (90|30 basically, yeah?), very few people do. So any rating would have the same problem as someone who starts off completely new, in that it would be wildly inaccurate as there wouldn't be enough games for it to reach a stable and accurate measure.
Your best bet would be to see if there are any clubs here of people who want to play chess at classical time controls: I suspect https://www.chess.com/club/dan-heisman-learning-center is the largest such club, anf they run regular slow chess tournaments.
But for people rated 500 on chess.com, you never know what you are gonna get. It could be someone who plays like magnus, or someone who doesn't even know how the pieces move.
I suspect that's a measure of Chess.com popularity and how someone at your level is going to encounter more of those sort of completely-new-to-Chess.com-with-no-actual-idea-about-their-actual-playing-strength people playing their very first handful of games than at a less popular web site with fewer new members at any given time.
Lichess is working for you - awesome! It is better for you - great! Lichess is aimed at people who already play chess: it's open source and its direction is governed by the people who are already involved and invested. Chess.com's strategic vision is to get more people playing chess - to grow the game overall. Hence the style of the interface and the sorts of games it promotes. Maybe some of those new people to chess will go over to lichess - that's fine. Enough will stay at Chess.com to make it worth their while to try and keep growing the game and trying to make it more accessible to younger people and to give it more visibility.
To @Ian_Rastall's earlier analogy: the Lichess movie theatre isn't showing the biggest blockbusters - maybe they'll have them on screen for a short while, but they'd much rather show the independent, art house films, and that's what they do most of the time. The Chess.com multiplex is showing the latest Marvel movie, and they'd love to find someone as bankable as Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson to headline it (sorry, Danny, you're not him
). The people who watch independent cinema sometimes can't help but look down their nose at those plebians at the multiplexes: but those plebs are enjoying themselves and the multiplex is profitable and is even getting into making movies. Sometimes the art house folks want to 'slum it' and tell these common folk that they're so much classier, and the regular folks just look at them and think "snob" (well, I was thinking of the word that the crowd uses for Ted Lasso when he first arrives to coach soccer, which eventually becomes a term of some endearment, but I'm not sure if that would pass the auto-filter...)