Tbf, the worst thing they probably could have done is run a scam business model then get exposed in one of the highest profile hacks in years. This is just icing on the cake.
It seems the revelation there are no women on AM is far worse business-wise than the security breach (Maybe not legally). How can you go on as a business if your business model has been exposed as totally fake ?
I would also add, that by extension, there is no reason than competitors like gleeden.com have a different men/women split.
Let me tell you this, I worked in the adult industry and I absolutely despised working with dating sites. Ashley Madison, Adult Friend Finder, etc because of this issue. They employed hundreds of staff who's main job was to pretend to be interested women messaging non-paying members enticing them to upgrade their free memberships to be able to respond back or what-have-you-not and then once the customer was paying, they stopped and moved onto the next.
That's shady business no matter what you think. I personally have zero empathy for Ashley Madison and for what's happening to them.
Edit://
Adult Friend Finder actually pays an absurdly higher payout for referrals whom happen to be women, because they don't get many women signing up.
Proving it would require the cooperation of witnesses and aggrieved parties who would be publicly embarrassed if they were to provide testimony.
So it's usually safer to cheat someone if you can do so in a manner that would also humiliate them if their role in the con was exposed. They discount what they lost by the price of their own dignity and reputation.
That is true, but the world is big and there are people who (1) wouldn't be ashamed, (2) could do it as an intentional investigation. And the crooks can't detect those people in advance.
It's in the fine print usually that some accounts are there for "entertainment purposes".
I think it would be naive to not suspect these sites of having a very skewed male subscribership in addition to using chat bots or paid people to engage customers.
The T&C did not say or imply that ~100% of the womens' accounts were fake. Plus you can't rely on fine print in the T&C to absolve you of engaging in a fraudulent business relationship, that's not how contracts are enforced.
5. Other Aspects of the Ashley Madison Service – For Your Entertainment
Our Site and our Service gives users the opportunity to explore their fantasies
and to interact with others in the Site. However, there is no guarantee you will
find a date or partner on our Site or using our Service. Our Site and our Service
also is geared to provide you with amusement and entertainment. You agree that some
of the features of our Site and our Service are intended to provide entertainment.
Others Using the Site for Entertainment
You also understand and agree that there are users and members on the Site that
use and subscribe to our Service for purely entertainment purposes. Those users and
subscribers are not seeking physical meetings with anyone they meet on the Service,
but consider their communications with users and members to be for their amusement.
You acknowledge and agree that any profiles of users and members, as well as,
communications from such persons may not be true, accurate or authentic and may be
exaggerated or fantasy. You acknowledge and understand that you may be communicating
with such persons and that we are not responsible for such communications.
Seems pretty clear to me - absolutely no claim you will actually find someone to "hook-up" with. Absolutely states there are accounts being used that have no interest in you other than for entertainment purposes (ie. keeping you engaged).
What? The "Guaranteed" ad was purchased by someone else?
Marketing says guaranteed. Tiny print says "oh, heh, no guarantees". It has all of the elements of fraud.
Additionally, no where in what you posted does it say that their employees or bots will be interacting with you as if they were a user, member, or subscriber.
You acknowledge and understand that you
may be communicating with such persons
and that we are not responsible for such
communications.
But AM is directly responsible for many (a majority of?) such communications. It's their employees doing the communicating. AM saying that they're "not responsible" is a blatant lie.
Still fraud, methinks. Having some accounts for "entertainment purposes" accounts is one thing, taking money from men -- with an "affair guarantee" at the top tier -- to let them message "women" nearly 100% of whose accounts are fake is another.
As the writer of the Gizmodo exposes said, it was like cheating Farmville.
Again, it said all this was happening in clear text, in the terms and conditions likely few read. Other comments have even mentioned there was a setting in the account which would toggle off (opt-out) of receiving the bogus account messages... but few people probably made that setting either.
Ashley Madison didn't invent dating sites, and certainly didn't invent this MO. I'd wager it's pretty standard for all dating sites. AM just happened to be the first (or most prominent?) dating site that advertised having an affair/cheating.
I see no fraud here -- only bruised egos, a few ruined marriages, and the embarrassing truth that some men will go to extreme lengths to speak with women, even when it flies in the face of absurdity.
One interesting tidbit that I came across in all of this is that the "affair guarantee" itself is its own little scam.
The way it works is that if you don't hook up within the specified time (I believe it's 120 days) then they refund your money. And technically speaking, this is not a lie.
What they don't tell you is that they process the refund in the form of a check, with their name on it, mailed to your home address.
Given that the entire concept of the site is to attract users who want to keep their activity secret from the people they live with, how many people will actually go through with asking for their guarantee to be honored?
(I know that there are legitimate uses of the site that don't require going behind your spouse's back. But it's pretty clear that most of their user base was using it that way.)
Note the Ashley Madison wiki page says that these BS accounts are actually presented in the terms and conditions. I'm kind of impressed with the hutzpah of even giving these fake accounts the name "Ashley's Angels":
Several aspects of Ashley Madison are described in the Terms and Conditions as "For Your Entertainment."[19] This included Ashley's Angels, a feature that generated fictitious profiles to simulate communication with real members and perform market research. According to the site, Ashley's Angels accounts "are NOT conspicuously identified as such."[20] Ashley's Angels profiles were limited to messaging only guest accounts and users could opt out of the feature via their profile management page. Users were charged the standard rate to read messages from and chat with these fictitious profiles.
Actually, I can sort of accept that. I'm sure people would be upset to find they were chatting with a fictitious account, but I'm also sure AM made the chats entertaining and flattering. The question is whether they actively lead the men to believe there was a real chance of a hookup, and how much leading is bad and how much is normal and how a flirtatious women would act? I guess AM would actually have stats on that based on real female profiles.
The highest paid tier, for $249, includes an "Affair Guarantee." You could still claim that even so, men are just paying for a fantasy, but at those prices, and with the supposed "guarantee," they seem to venturing into fraud territory.
This is the study of human nature in all this that I find most amusing. For $249, there are much more straight forward and guaranteed ways to have an affair. Even if affair is not insinuating sex, which I'm pretty sure most guys would assume, how is this not paying for sex in their mind? One would also assume the few real women are most likely prostitutes/escorts anyways.
I imagine paying for sex and paying for a service to help you find someone interested in you (either physically, mentally or both) actually fulfill two related, but still very separate, desires.
I think the social and cultural dynamic in most western countries means that women who want extramarital affairs have an easier time finding men than vice-versa.
Well in general an imbalance in dating websites exists. It's not because women aren't as interested in dating but because I'd think women have an easier time hooking up than men. If a woman wants to meet men all she has to do is visit a pub and you've got the attention of 5 outgoing, more chatty than usual men for every 1 woman. The opposite probably isn't quite as true. The 5:1 ratio surely exists the other way around but a yoga class isn't exactly a place to hook up and most would be really bothered by an advance at a yoga class. So unless you happen to have a certain social circle, as a man you'd be more desperate to try to meet women online than a woman, who has various opportunities to meet men in the real world.
But then AM adds a whole extra layer ontop, which is marketed for affairs. And there I feel the disposition towards cheating also differs between sexes. At least, intentional, planned cheating. i.e. woman probably cheat just as often, but it's probably very much a male thing to register on a website specific for dating guys who cheat (and being comfortable then, with the notion that whoever you're meeting is also a cheater), pay a whole load of money for this, and then hook up with guys you know are cheating on their wives. Whereas a man who's looking to cheat probably doesn't care much that the woman he's hooking up with is cheating on her husband. There's this whole layer of 'family wrecking' and notions about sex that men and women probably, on average, think differently about. Most women who are comfortable with such relationships are probably part of a swinger couple anyway which isn't cheating and not part of AM's market.
The combination of the two is such that you get ridiculous ratios. But yeah even I was surprised to hear it was apparently something like 1:2000 right? That's just hilariously pathetic if you think about it.
Lawsuits would have happened a while ago, except the amount of money users will tend to have lost, won't make for a good enough trade on the personal cost of public embarrassment.
To be fair, using your analogy, signing up for an account on AM is probably much closer on the attempted murder scale to "sitting in the potential victim's bushes at night with a knife" than it is to "googling 'how do I kill someone.'"
I wonder how many people are using the "I wanted to research before I lectured my congregation on the sin of adultery" or "I just wanted to know if you were on it, darling" defence.
That gets tough without giving a third-party direct access to everything for auditing. You can lie about numbers just as easily as you can imply they're not an issue.
Anyone competent who wanted to boost their numbers could just pay someone under the table to buy a bunch of vps's or vpn connections and fake all of this.
You're just creating hoops, but you're not stopping anyone.
Do you seriously think there were controls in-place to prevent Ashley Madison developers from doing just-that?
Auditors work with privileged information in order to provide assurances to third-parties that the audited entity is operating in a legitimate way. Sometimes they receive a sampling of data to spot-check things, while other times their review necessitates more-broad access. Both of these approaches necessitate some level of access to what would otherwise be considered confidential information, but audits are performed with the understanding that the firm conducting the audit has as-much to lose by compromising the data privacy of a client as the client. It makes no sense for a reputable auditor to expose the information they're analyzing because it would destroy their firm's reputation, and put them out of business.
> Do you seriously think there were controls in-place to prevent Ashley Madison developers from doing just-that?
No, but there should have been. Access to personal customer data should be strictly controlled, with access being granted only to those who need it for their work, and only for as long as they need it.
I would never expect them to do that, but they should do that.
> It seems the revelation there are no women on AM is far worse business-wise than the security breach (Maybe not legally).
Is it really true though? The estimates were, what, 1,400 available women in total? It's anecdotal but there are thousands of accounts online of people saying they were able to hook up with women and a few who even ended up marrying the woman they hooked it up. Seems a great deal of those would either have to be made up or the estimate people came up with is wildly wrong.
If you are ready to create millions of fake account, you are probably ok with writing false testimonies/reviews. Most likely, some affairs have actually happened, but the "success stories" you've read were probably submarines[0] by AM.
I think if pg had a Youtube channel where he talks about issues he's written over the years (say, in the format of PBS Idea Channel, just not as caffeinated; and don't get me wrong, PBS Idea Channel, in my opinion, is one of the best web shows on Youtube, but that pace might be me inappropriate for pg.tv), I would probably subscribe.
Probably? Or do you mean possibly? If you mean probably then what data are you going by that shows they probably wrote false testimonials / reviews / etc? It's certainly possible but I haven't seen any data to warrant a "probably" for that assumption but if you have it I'd certainly take a look.
Given statistical (and anecdotal) evidence for Ashley Madison astroturfing their own site, it's not exactly beyond the realms of possibility they're also willing to astroturf the rest of the internet. Plus the editors of the "sex and relationships" section of most media properties probably see fact-checking as lower on the list of their priorities than the newsroom, especially when publishing an account "by Anonymous"
Of course, there are also plenty of real men that would consider "women on there invariably ignore me" to be a far worse admission than "I joined a site to cheat on my wife".
I'm not saying the hypothesis that the hack team manipulated the data to make it look even worse is beyond the realms of possibility, but it's even easier to believe one of the sleaziest sites on the internet knew how to do black-hat PR.
If your business model is fundamentally predicated on dishonesty, I think all bets are off regarding the value system that people will use to evaluate it.
I wonder where all the women are? I'm fairly sure that the human race as a whole is 50/50 split; but dating sites are 99% men, the tech industry is 90% men, when I take public transport it's 75% men, pubs are 80% men, construction workers I pass on the walk to work are 100% men, etc etc. I can't remember the last time I was in a room which was mostly women; the last time I even got to 50/50 was high school... It's really hard to avoid bias when the bubble that I live in is so skewed :/
Women don't need any of the online stuff. Men throw themselves at women on a daily basis. Even average looking women get an overabundance of sex options.
And most of those options are ones they don't want; I'd wager that most women don't particularly want to sign up for a site and deal with 50 garbage messages a day.
It's a numbers game for them. You get hit on by 5-10 guys a day, one per week is guaranteed to be handsome/funny/rich/whatever they are looking for.
That's why we end up in a situation when 20% of guys have sex with like 80-90% of women, and the rest 80% of the guys are struggling online, in bars, in gyms, etc.
You know that's interesting. I was going to comment that I'd be okay with that amount of rock pelting for a gold ingot per week but I'm not actually sure anymore. After doing the math (assuming .5 inches per side rock pellets)(http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=.5%5E3+cubic+inches+of+...) it only comes out to roughly $18 per rock...
Where do you live? In New York, the split seems to be much closer to 50/50. In fact, during the day there seem to be more women (though I'm guessing that's because more men than women have day-jobs, and so women probably tend to run errands during the day rather than after work.
This is very noticeable in London. Commuter-trains are skewed towards men. Take the trains later in the morning/earlier in the afternoon, and very different. It's a very stark illustration of how far we are from gender equality.
Here's a real sample of most of the messages women get on dating sites:
hi [that's the whole message]
u r so beautiful [again, the whole message]
hey babe do u want a real man i will treat yuou lik a lady
This represents the vast majority of messages men send on dating sites. And the volume of messages women get is insane. It is a firehose of garbage. Why would anyone volunteer to be on the receiving end of that?
Right, I know personally of more success stories from Everquest and WoW (and maybe one eHarmony story) or other random online communities than actual dating sites.
The first site that can reliably filter this stuff out before it even gets to the target will probably make enough money to form a small black hole. As a moderator, were you just responding to reports from users, or were you preemptively checking into messages, or something else?
No, it will cost them money because it's the men spending all the money on subscriptions. If they knew their messages were filtered they'd leave it droves.
You're assuming that everything would continue to work as it does now. I'm proposing that if you can filter out the dickheads, you could end up with a site where it's no longer just men signing up. If you're the only site where women actually want to sign up, then you'll get all the men too, and you'll rake in the cash.
Also, you're assuming that the idiot men would even be able to tell. Women mostly ignore their nonsense now, right? So it wouldn't look much different.
>As a moderator, were you just responding to reports from users, or were you preemptively checking into messages, or something else?
I also worked as a moderator for a (local) dating site. We only checked on the messages that were reported either by the users or by the anti-spam filters. Also this was clearly specified in the privacy policy and EULA pages.
I did see one girls 'research'. Any time a guy on a dating site told her how 'fine' she was, she said "Thank you" or "Yes".
9 times out of 10, the response was "Well, you ain't all that".
The implicit assumption was that girls should feel flattered to have some random man tell them they're attractive, and have no ego or self-confidence of their own.
Not that I want to stereotype, but you can find places that are skewed as heavily towards women: nursing, sociology classes, yoga and pilates, book clubs, feminism forums, dance lessons, etc. That's off the top of my head, there are likely better examples - and (disclaimer!) yes I'm aware that some men frequent these too, but point is the women are in fact congregating somewhere while the men are at the sausage fest.
I've seen studies that most women in affairs or who ended up in one said they don't go seeking them, at least not outright. They start innocently enough as a relationship with a coworker or platonic friend that they start to feel a connection with, start developing feelings, and it snowballs from there. Based on that pattern, I doubt many women go "I want to have an affair" and just go do it so the dedicated website model is probably not where online affairs start for women. Probably more likely FB reconnecting with an old flame or talking with someone at a point where they at least convinced themselves it was innocent at first.
UK Birmingham: my experience is the total inverse of that. I work a three day week in a College that is a reasonable commute from where I live. Bus and train.
One early morning per week (out at 6am): cleaners and nurses.
One night I'm coming home after 9pm. Its (mostly female) care staff coming off shift until we hit the outskirts of Birmingham when we pick up some of the the postal workers coming off shift.
Other commutes: admin and retail workers - mostly women.
One of the other days of the traditional working week I'm doing sessional work locally and its women and children all the way on a mid-morning and late afternoon bus ride.
Chaps: construction workers going into the New St site of an early morning come in by coach and have breakfast in a cafe. Guess what gender the cooks and servers are. And guess how they got to work.
Rooms mostly full of women: management meetings. I work in UK public sector (and its fine).
In the US, the vast, vast majority of restaurant cooks are men, as are all of the other back of the house jobs. Servers are predominantly female. The back of the house jobs pay less except in restaurants where tip-sharing is enacted, unless the restaurant has poor business and gets few customers/tips.
Yep restaurant cooks/chefs are predominantly male. I was talking more about the greasy spoon cafes, which tend to have predominantly female staff. I gather tip sharing is the norm in UK for the kind of restaurant where people do tipping e.g. pizza houses upward.
You need to move to NYC. I'd say the city is far more skewed towards women. And by far I mean, at least in the single un-married space the ratio of women to men is something like 1.05:1... I dont have a citation - just from memory.
"the revelation that there are no women on AM". In my experience, this was not true.
I was on AM about six years ago, over a two month period. I'm in a Poly relationship and at the time was searching for a new partner. I chatted with a couple dozen women. Don't think they were software robots. Met with six or so. Definitely not robots. Still with one, who I love and adore. The women I met were all quite good looking and quite sexual. Was introduced to the nude selfie - an eye opener.
Perhaps the fakery came after my time, or perhaps the assertion that there were no women on AM is just not true.
Other than the few big main sites, this is how alot of the dating sites are. Especially all of the hook up ones you see on porn sites ads. They are all fake women accounts just trying to get money out of the guys.
I've been happily married for 25 years, and haven't dated for longer than that, so what do I do.
But I think a site that actually verified profile photos and height/weight would go a long way to getting a better balance of both men and women.
You'd go to a kiosk local to you to get a "standard" photo taken, where everyone gets the same mugshot from front and side, and full body, and a verified height and weight.
And then, to log in, you need biometric proof that you're the same person in the photo, so you can hire a non-obese or fit person to have the picture taken.
A combination of the following reasons:
1. Consumption Mismatch: men have an endless thirst for new sexual trists whereas women can be sexually fulfilled by a single partner every few years. Because of this consumption mismatch, a site like AM clearly seeks to address the consumption habits of men, but does not address the pairing habits of women.
2. Average looking women and above have no shortage of interested men showering attention - why join AM when there are easier ways? The path of least resistance.
3. Women do not solve their "mid life crisis" issues with an affair, but instead turn to self-help, yoga, group therapy, etc. Men predictably buy sports cars, climb mountains, sky dive and have affairs.
So let's say the above generalizations are 80/20 accurate at best. It still significantly skews the gender ratio on a site that's soooo clearly focused on addressing the unique mating habits of men (which any sociologist and psychologist will confirm are different than women) rather than women. Tinder, although not perfectly aligned with women, is still better than AM for women. The best platforms for women are ones that allow for more deeply layered and nuanced interactions that may lead to relationships/sex rather than built specifically for an easy hookup (Tinder, AM). As others have observed, women would rather hookup through meetings on WoW, EverQuest, etc. than meat markets like OKCupd, Match, Tinder, etc.
It seems the revelation there are no women on AM is far worse business-wise than the security breach (Maybe not legally).
I was hoping the opposite. Lying to your users may well be a viable strategy for this sort of business, as the users aren't likely to band together than share information. But failing to inform potential investors that your business is based on fake accounts is both legally actionable and highly risky.
How can you go on as a business if your business model has been exposed as totally fake?
My disappointed guess would be that this is not as large a handicap as you might expect. Each struggling business's hope is that they can "pivot" to a different model before they fall apart. Sometimes this is a polite fiction, but sometimes they manage to do it.
The brilliance of AM is that who, realising it's even more of a scam than they suspected, is going to complain to friends, colleagues, partners or authorities that they were trying to have an affair and got ripped off?
Someone should take it to the next level, create a similar site but give people a cut of the revenue for leading men on past the paywall. Outsource the staff, essentially.
For those that don't get the reference, Dallas was a long running prime-time drama (a "soap", back when they didn't air these solely during the daytime), that was known for its wild twists (such as the "who shot JR" plot line, which is considered one of the best moments of TV).
This isn't even close to the levels required for entertaining TV, but in my humble opinion, the comment is neither bad enough to downvote, nor good enough to upvote, I merely suspect a lot of HN's readership is just too young to get the reference or had a knee-jerk reaction to soaps in general (which, hey, I hate the overly-dramatic nature of soaps too; but apparently what Dallas did was still novel in the 80s, and worth dragging out for a pop-culture reference now and then).
Absolutely great TV. Think Silicon Valley but with a name tied to it. We need to get the naming rights to get initial viewers, but you and me, DiabloD3, we have a show here.
Treatment:
Name: Ashley Madison or some generic name so as to avoid copyright and naming issues.
Dramatis Personae: Ashley Madison President, Ashley Madison programmers, IPO Finance Team, Hacker team
Story Arcs:
A Story: Follow the Ashley Madison president as he goes about his 2014-2015 tour to promote the site across the globe, focus on the Japanese campaign, in preparation for the IPO. Detail the trials and tribulations of the IPO setup, pressures from the M&A team. Then lead up to the hack and the bourbon scotch being thrown against a wall as a man who built an empire realizes it is crashing. The programmers in Ashley Madison trying to figure out if the data was expropriated, how much, and lead up to the internal discussions on the blackmail offer.
B Story: The hacker group recruits team members, identify weak points and sets up to acquire the data. Once the data has been lifted, they struggle on what to do with a release, expecting to have received blackmail monies, fending off the popularity it brings to them and how to exit what they have done.
The season ends when the news report starts to detail you can get the database on TOR.
Thanks for mentioning the TV show. I foolishly thought everyboby, even the youngest, would have at least heard about "Dallas". I'm suprised it didn't become an Internet meme.
Edit: not sure why I'm getting downvoted. There was a study that showed food recalls have an impact on purchasing but it wasn't huge, people certainly didn't stop. Though I can't find the article I had read a long time ago about this.
Closest thing would have to be new user accounts, but then the analogy definitely falls apart since you can't just double the size of your QA team and check each account before it goes to market. The security issues aren't remotely so well contained.
Probably the best time to do it. The DB has already been released without your email address in it, so you can "prove" you're not on it. I also suspect the competition of users is lower now...
Unless there's a reason to believe that (your gender) is more likely to have been scared off by the data release than (opposite gender), I'm not sure there's a reason to think lowered competition will help you.
Well, at least now I know that there are services like Ashley Madison. I was never aware that such services existed before the breach. Now, when I hear about a certain service similar to this one, I'll always connect it with what Ashley Madison offered.
After some time, there is a possibility that I will forget about the breach, but I don't think that there's a possibility that I will forget about Ashley Madison as a company.
I actually first heard about airbnb in 2011, the time they were all over the startup news because someone's house was trashed. At the time I thought "this is terrible, but this service sounds great!" and I've used it many times since. In fact, I'm sitting in an airbnb right now.
I could see people using it after the hack itself, figuring that they're well-protected enough to not need to worry. But I don't know how they survive the revelation that there are basically zero women on the site.
I've gone from viewing the people in the database as maliciously motivated cheating jerks who deserved their outing to complete lame asses I simply feel sorry for. Very few of the women on the database were actually real. They charged for deleting data and never did. Every successive revelation makes the AM users look like chumps and AM employees look like incompetent fools.
I would have thought such a security breach would have taken down the entire business model but nope they're still going. I'm sure a lot more senior staff will have to step down in order to rebrand at some point so they can distance themselves from this disaster.
Also keep in mind that the whole affair thing was a branding change done in 2009 so many who signed up before may not have been looking for that. Then you have stories about people who were looking for a discrete relationship and wasn't commuting adultery they just needed to be discrete because of personal reasons (like living in a country that imprisons or executes people who are gay).
Plus anyone can add someone to the service AND there are plenty of people who enjoy the trill of simply looking and not doing anything.
So yeah I don't think it's a slam dunk that they're all "cheating jerks". Though I'm sure plenty are :)
"Darren Morgenstern is a happily married man who runs ashleymadison.com, a Web site for attached people with cheating on their minds. "When monogamy becomes monotony: That's our trademark slogan,"
Yes, though it's harder to add someone as a paying member using a card in their name and tied to their address. Based on the stories that have come out, it sounds like there are dates on those payments.
That doesn't necessarily mean everyone was a "cheating jerk", and even if they were, that doesn't necessarily mean a judgmental response is the healthiest response the rest of us can give.
I simply cannot fathom why anyone would sign up for a site that specializes in extramarital relationships instead of a general-purpose dating website or culture-specific or orientation-specific dating website. I just don't see what value it adds beyond putting "married, looking to swing/cheat" in your profile.
They say you can't cheat an honest man. So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters.
> I simply cannot fathom why anyone would sign up for a site that specializes in extramarital relationships
Discretion. Most of the people on Ashley Madison presumably were wanting to keep their attempted affairs a secret. Most of them were probably not in "swinging" relationships, or indeed they would go to regular dating websites and just advertise their open relationship status.
> So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters.
That's basically the sales pitch for Ashley Madison. "Want to cheat? Here's some women who want to cheat with you."
Hindsight has its benefits here, but I already automatically suspect anyone asking for my e-mail address of turning around to sell it to the highest bidder.
If I'm looking for discretion, this is what I expect to see on the HTTP site: "You are being redirected to our secure site." And this is what I expect to see on the HTTPS site: "How to delete this site from your browser history and router logs" and "How to access our Tor hidden service."
Finally, on the Tor hidden site, "How to maintain anonymity while using Bitcoin" and "Create a new account".
But I'm probably more untrusting than most.
And there will probably always be people willing to visit http://www.blackmailphishing.cc/new_mark.php to create a new account and upload their dankest, dirtiest, and most embarrassing secrets, for free!
I doubt most members care if some corporation, or spam mailing list, or the NSA, or a "hacker" gets their information. It's more about discretion from people they know, their wife, their friends, etc. I see friends and coworkers on Tinder all the time, but if I came across one of my married friends on there, I would probably tell their spouse.
>Finally, on the Tor hidden site, "How to maintain anonymity while using Bitcoin" and "Create a new account".
If you need to use Tor and bitcoins to avoid detection by your spouse.... Well I'd say stop cheating on them because (s)he's a keeper.
I'm not all that interested in avoiding detection by my spouse. I don't really want to do anything that I'd feel the need to conceal. Maybe the setup for a practical joke?
I was thinking more along the lines of skirting the bounds of some malum prohibitum crime--like buying unlicensed Mickey Mouse apparel, or eating a protected species, or building an outhouse in the wrong spot--where a certain someone other than my spouse might come down on me like a ton of turds if it ever found out.
The gummint is a lot more concerned about policing my behavior than my spouse. And it's more uptight about what I'm doing when it's not around. Like a stalker, really. Tor and Bitcoin is demonstrably not enough to keep it off my back, and it is definitely not a keeper.
> I'm not all that interested in avoiding detection by my spouse.
Yeah, that makes you not the target audience. Ashley Madison was sold as a place meet someone to have a secret affair with. The people looking for this generally wanted to hide it from their spouses most of all.
Undoubtedly, they had some customers that were on the site with their spouses' knowledge and approval, but this was most certainly a minority. That minority is probably bothered by this leak in the same way they are bothered by the OPM leak, but they aren't terrified of their spouses' reactions.
Clearly users were only interested in sexual encounters which would not involve feelings. Just adding "married, looking to swing/cheat" to your profile could be an equivalent if it is searchable on the dating website.
How can a business with 30+ million male users looking for sex outside marriage exist for 14 years while the site has no female users except for bots!!! Are you saying all those people were stupid enough to not realize they were not going to get laid(and kept paying too)?
It seems when you have advertising money and a cost structure that let's you make money and stay alive, you don't even have to have a real product! It makes sense to invest on people not ideas!
I wonder how many other BIG companies are pulling the same tricks to get unrealistic valuations (Twitter and Uber, they are not worth that much, especially Uber)
I'd recruit ex-AM employees. Their business model is brilliant even if is basically illegal! Imagine what they could achieve in an organization with even moderate ethics!
The users? That's another story. I'm checking each applicant against "the list". On the list? We could probably do better in that position.
I don't think the unethical part of their business model can really be separated from the brilliance of it. The site is basically a scam. If you remove the scam, there's nothing of substance left.
Throwaway because obvious (BTW, it would be really cool if HN had a way of allowing anonymous posts not linked to your primary account without creating a 1-time account that just clogs up the user table).
I am an Ashley Madison user, although probably not typical in any respect. And yes, my details are in the leak. Me and my wife grew up and married within the mormon church, complete with its absolutely distorted view of human sexuality. After leaving mormonism, we came to realize our sexual maturity had been stunted and wanted to experience new things...we now have a somewhat open marriage. We set a few ground rules because we do love each other and didn't want to break up, but then we set out on our quests to find other partners.
I tried the tinder thing, and that was okay. I tried just going to bars, and that was okay. I came away feeling a little skeezy, despite being completely honest with my wife, because I had to be dishonest with the girls I was meeting...nobody in those situations responds well to "Oh, by the way, I'm married", no matter how clear you are about it being okay with your wife. I also grew tired of hookups and one night stands very quickly. I wanted to meet women that occasionally wanted to meet up, but were okay with the fact that I had a family life and couldn't just run away any time either of us wanted some. Tinder and bars were definitely the wrong target market.
While I was doing this, my wife skipped straight to Ashley Madison. Put up a few pictures, and within seconds she was getting more messages than she could read. Like literally 500+ messages a day. She tried to filter them by stating explicitly on her profile what she was not interested in (specifically, out of shape or over 45yo). It didn't stop them. Most of the messages could be described as follows: Shrivelled or obese old men (my wife is 29 btw) well over 45 (including several senior citizens), accompanied by unsolicited dick pics, and messages about how they could last all night long or whatever. Some men were a lot closer to what she was looking for, but after filtering out all the garbage she didn't feel up to the task of trying to message back. She decided to ignore the messages and try messaging men herself. They either didn't respond, or they messaged back asking if she was a fake profile. She eventually was successful in finding what she wanted, but it was pretty significant effort.
I grew frustrated with the expectations of tinder and bars, and reluctantly decided to try AM. After seeing my wife's experience, I knew I was in for a sausage fest competition, but I also learned quickly what was a turnoff to women and I am pretty attractive myself, so I thought I had a chance. My perspective from the guy's side? For the most part, it is an extremely expensive scam. A single message will cost you $1-2 depending on the points package you bought (women don't pay for anything). If you want a priority message, it costs double that. All you get with a priority message is a guarantee that your message will not be buried in the 500+ message/day inbox of the woman you are trying to message. It can still get buried, but it only gets buried under other priority messages. I had 20+ messages a day from other women (or, more accurately, profiles of women). It was very obvious that most of them were fake, so I didn't bother with the obvious ones. Some of them were less obvious fakes. Some of them were scams to get you to sign up for other sites, or paid "background checks" from women who "just want to be safe". And occasionally, I got messages from actual women, but I never was interested in them.
I did have some success with talking to and meeting actual women. Based on my experience, I would estimate that 1000 is a pretty low estimate for the total number of active women on the site. I would probably ballpark 100-200 in my metro area, at least between 20-40yo. And here's another surprise...about half of them were single. In fact, al...
Thanks for your perspective. I agree both that an anonymous option would be nice, and that many people around the internet are way too quick to judge people on these sites without knowing their situation. I personally think that those who tell others how they should live their lives based on a bunch of wishes and assumptions are the real bad people in this, not the "cheaters".
Beautiful post, thanks for the insights. The info that you only met single women is interesting. Do you suppose this may have been self-selected? Otherwise it implies the number of real married women on the site was indeed vanishingly small.
Adding a "post anonymously" checkbox instead of creating a throw away account may be worth pursuing, but it's hard to know if making anonymous posting easier would be a net positive for the site.
AM is a great place for women to find anything from a sugar daddy to just someone who will pay for dinner. I'm sure there were a number of actual prostitutes on the site as well, but I personally know of one woman on it who was looking for guys to just take her out on the town, and if they happened to buy her stuff, that was cool too (which a lot of them were more than happy to do). If you're female, single, have a low-paying job, and don't want to be in a relationship, it seems like an obvious choice for some -- the guys are in a relationship, so it's easy to keep it uncomplicated.
Please don't take this as an "all women are gold diggers" sort of thing. <sigh> But that may explain why there were a lot of single women.
For me, there was a convenience-oriented self-selection process. Having an affair is hard. You have to have time, alibis, and "laundered" money (typically an unknown credit card, maybe wads of cash, etc). When it is two married people trying to meet up, the difficulty is much harder just from scheduling alone. Even in my case, it was a lot easier than most to find times to meet up, but I still can't spend more than a night or two per week out late without feeling like a crappy husband or father. I found it much easier to deal with single women on the site because I was constrained on when I could meet up, but they weren't.
I think a good idea would be to have "verified-but-anonymized" posts tied to the amount of karma you have (just like downvotes). After building up some reputation, you could occasionally post an anonymized comment, and have it distinguished by the fact that it is done by an HN regular.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadI would also add, that by extension, there is no reason than competitors like gleeden.com have a different men/women split.
That's shady business no matter what you think. I personally have zero empathy for Ashley Madison and for what's happening to them.
Edit://
Adult Friend Finder actually pays an absurdly higher payout for referrals whom happen to be women, because they don't get many women signing up.
So it's usually safer to cheat someone if you can do so in a manner that would also humiliate them if their role in the con was exposed. They discount what they lost by the price of their own dignity and reputation.
It's in the fine print usually that some accounts are there for "entertainment purposes".
I think it would be naive to not suspect these sites of having a very skewed male subscribership in addition to using chat bots or paid people to engage customers.
You agree to the terms and conditions upon account creation, even if you don't read them.
A person's ignorance and naivety is not evidence of fraud.
Nor did the T&C say or imply that any percent of the account will be genuine, or that there would be plenty of male and female accounts.
The customers paid for the ability to read messages sent to them by anyone (employee, bot or real person), nothing more.
Assuming something when you've been explicitly told otherwise but chose to ignore it does not equate to fraud.
A person's naivety and ignorance don't equate to being defrauded.
Their landing page says:
>Ashley Madison is the most famous name in infidelity and married dating.
Their Google ads say:
>Have an affair -- Guaranteed
Only conclusion to draw here is that you are a bot.
Seems pretty clear to me - absolutely no claim you will actually find someone to "hook-up" with. Absolutely states there are accounts being used that have no interest in you other than for entertainment purposes (ie. keeping you engaged).
No fraud here, only bruised egos.
Marketing says guaranteed. Tiny print says "oh, heh, no guarantees". It has all of the elements of fraud.
Additionally, no where in what you posted does it say that their employees or bots will be interacting with you as if they were a user, member, or subscriber.
As the writer of the Gizmodo exposes said, it was like cheating Farmville.
Ashley Madison didn't invent dating sites, and certainly didn't invent this MO. I'd wager it's pretty standard for all dating sites. AM just happened to be the first (or most prominent?) dating site that advertised having an affair/cheating.
I see no fraud here -- only bruised egos, a few ruined marriages, and the embarrassing truth that some men will go to extreme lengths to speak with women, even when it flies in the face of absurdity.
The way it works is that if you don't hook up within the specified time (I believe it's 120 days) then they refund your money. And technically speaking, this is not a lie.
What they don't tell you is that they process the refund in the form of a check, with their name on it, mailed to your home address.
Given that the entire concept of the site is to attract users who want to keep their activity secret from the people they live with, how many people will actually go through with asking for their guarantee to be honored?
(I know that there are legitimate uses of the site that don't require going behind your spouse's back. But it's pretty clear that most of their user base was using it that way.)
Several aspects of Ashley Madison are described in the Terms and Conditions as "For Your Entertainment."[19] This included Ashley's Angels, a feature that generated fictitious profiles to simulate communication with real members and perform market research. According to the site, Ashley's Angels accounts "are NOT conspicuously identified as such."[20] Ashley's Angels profiles were limited to messaging only guest accounts and users could opt out of the feature via their profile management page. Users were charged the standard rate to read messages from and chat with these fictitious profiles.
But then AM adds a whole extra layer ontop, which is marketed for affairs. And there I feel the disposition towards cheating also differs between sexes. At least, intentional, planned cheating. i.e. woman probably cheat just as often, but it's probably very much a male thing to register on a website specific for dating guys who cheat (and being comfortable then, with the notion that whoever you're meeting is also a cheater), pay a whole load of money for this, and then hook up with guys you know are cheating on their wives. Whereas a man who's looking to cheat probably doesn't care much that the woman he's hooking up with is cheating on her husband. There's this whole layer of 'family wrecking' and notions about sex that men and women probably, on average, think differently about. Most women who are comfortable with such relationships are probably part of a swinger couple anyway which isn't cheating and not part of AM's market.
The combination of the two is such that you get ridiculous ratios. But yeah even I was surprised to hear it was apparently something like 1:2000 right? That's just hilariously pathetic if you think about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempt
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossibility_defense
That's kind of the entire idea behind an auditor.
You're just creating hoops, but you're not stopping anyone.
Auditors work with privileged information in order to provide assurances to third-parties that the audited entity is operating in a legitimate way. Sometimes they receive a sampling of data to spot-check things, while other times their review necessitates more-broad access. Both of these approaches necessitate some level of access to what would otherwise be considered confidential information, but audits are performed with the understanding that the firm conducting the audit has as-much to lose by compromising the data privacy of a client as the client. It makes no sense for a reputable auditor to expose the information they're analyzing because it would destroy their firm's reputation, and put them out of business.
No, but there should have been. Access to personal customer data should be strictly controlled, with access being granted only to those who need it for their work, and only for as long as they need it.
I would never expect them to do that, but they should do that.
Is it really true though? The estimates were, what, 1,400 available women in total? It's anecdotal but there are thousands of accounts online of people saying they were able to hook up with women and a few who even ended up marrying the woman they hooked it up. Seems a great deal of those would either have to be made up or the estimate people came up with is wildly wrong.
I'm not entirely convinced yet.
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Of course, there are also plenty of real men that would consider "women on there invariably ignore me" to be a far worse admission than "I joined a site to cheat on my wife".
I'm not saying the hypothesis that the hack team manipulated the data to make it look even worse is beyond the realms of possibility, but it's even easier to believe one of the sleaziest sites on the internet knew how to do black-hat PR.
That whole story seemed bogus and now the data would suggest that it probably is.
I think news outlets publish stuff like that because it's pure clickbait and will get traffic. It reads like a press release for AM.
Likely more than that on a site like AM.
11,000,000 active accounts, of which about 2,000 were women. That's a 5,500 : 1 ratio.
That's why we end up in a situation when 20% of guys have sex with like 80-90% of women, and the rest 80% of the guys are struggling online, in bars, in gyms, etc.
I'd wager it's way more than 5-10 per day, and I'd wager that it takes a fairly long time to ascertain which one is actually a rich guy.
It's like saying you're fine with getting pelted by a dozen rocks a day, because probably one a week is going to be a golden nugget.
Where do you live? In New York, the split seems to be much closer to 50/50. In fact, during the day there seem to be more women (though I'm guessing that's because more men than women have day-jobs, and so women probably tend to run errands during the day rather than after work.
hi [that's the whole message]
u r so beautiful [again, the whole message]
hey babe do u want a real man i will treat yuou lik a lady
This represents the vast majority of messages men send on dating sites. And the volume of messages women get is insane. It is a firehose of garbage. Why would anyone volunteer to be on the receiving end of that?
In fact, it usually went more like:
"Heyyy guurllll lemme holla at you"
"Thanks, but no thanks"
"Fine bitch, you ugly anyway"
That, or dick pics. So many dick pics.
Also, you're assuming that the idiot men would even be able to tell. Women mostly ignore their nonsense now, right? So it wouldn't look much different.
I also worked as a moderator for a (local) dating site. We only checked on the messages that were reported either by the users or by the anti-spam filters. Also this was clearly specified in the privacy policy and EULA pages.
9 times out of 10, the response was "Well, you ain't all that".
The implicit assumption was that girls should feel flattered to have some random man tell them they're attractive, and have no ego or self-confidence of their own.
Yoga, Tennis, Beach Volleyball all have a high percentage of women. And whole foods...
http://pics.city-data.com/agegraph/2455.png
(This is for residents of SF only, so it won't account for any differences that might arise due to commuters who live outside SF)
Edit, source page: http://www.city-data.com/housing/houses-San-Francisco-Califo...
UK Birmingham: my experience is the total inverse of that. I work a three day week in a College that is a reasonable commute from where I live. Bus and train.
One early morning per week (out at 6am): cleaners and nurses.
One night I'm coming home after 9pm. Its (mostly female) care staff coming off shift until we hit the outskirts of Birmingham when we pick up some of the the postal workers coming off shift.
Other commutes: admin and retail workers - mostly women.
One of the other days of the traditional working week I'm doing sessional work locally and its women and children all the way on a mid-morning and late afternoon bus ride.
Chaps: construction workers going into the New St site of an early morning come in by coach and have breakfast in a cafe. Guess what gender the cooks and servers are. And guess how they got to work.
Rooms mostly full of women: management meetings. I work in UK public sector (and its fine).
They should take a few pages from the TSA playbook!
I was on AM about six years ago, over a two month period. I'm in a Poly relationship and at the time was searching for a new partner. I chatted with a couple dozen women. Don't think they were software robots. Met with six or so. Definitely not robots. Still with one, who I love and adore. The women I met were all quite good looking and quite sexual. Was introduced to the nude selfie - an eye opener.
Perhaps the fakery came after my time, or perhaps the assertion that there were no women on AM is just not true.
But I think a site that actually verified profile photos and height/weight would go a long way to getting a better balance of both men and women.
You'd go to a kiosk local to you to get a "standard" photo taken, where everyone gets the same mugshot from front and side, and full body, and a verified height and weight.
And then, to log in, you need biometric proof that you're the same person in the photo, so you can hire a non-obese or fit person to have the picture taken.
I think this may appeal to both men and women.
So let's say the above generalizations are 80/20 accurate at best. It still significantly skews the gender ratio on a site that's soooo clearly focused on addressing the unique mating habits of men (which any sociologist and psychologist will confirm are different than women) rather than women. Tinder, although not perfectly aligned with women, is still better than AM for women. The best platforms for women are ones that allow for more deeply layered and nuanced interactions that may lead to relationships/sex rather than built specifically for an easy hookup (Tinder, AM). As others have observed, women would rather hookup through meetings on WoW, EverQuest, etc. than meat markets like OKCupd, Match, Tinder, etc.
I was hoping the opposite. Lying to your users may well be a viable strategy for this sort of business, as the users aren't likely to band together than share information. But failing to inform potential investors that your business is based on fake accounts is both legally actionable and highly risky.
How can you go on as a business if your business model has been exposed as totally fake?
My disappointed guess would be that this is not as large a handicap as you might expect. Each struggling business's hope is that they can "pivot" to a different model before they fall apart. Sometimes this is a polite fiction, but sometimes they manage to do it.
Someone should take it to the next level, create a similar site but give people a cut of the revenue for leading men on past the paywall. Outsource the staff, essentially.
edit: http://gawker.com/the-ceo-of-ashley-madison-was-secretly-wor...
This isn't even close to the levels required for entertaining TV, but in my humble opinion, the comment is neither bad enough to downvote, nor good enough to upvote, I merely suspect a lot of HN's readership is just too young to get the reference or had a knee-jerk reaction to soaps in general (which, hey, I hate the overly-dramatic nature of soaps too; but apparently what Dallas did was still novel in the 80s, and worth dragging out for a pop-culture reference now and then).
Treatment:
Name: Ashley Madison or some generic name so as to avoid copyright and naming issues.
Dramatis Personae: Ashley Madison President, Ashley Madison programmers, IPO Finance Team, Hacker team
Story Arcs:
A Story: Follow the Ashley Madison president as he goes about his 2014-2015 tour to promote the site across the globe, focus on the Japanese campaign, in preparation for the IPO. Detail the trials and tribulations of the IPO setup, pressures from the M&A team. Then lead up to the hack and the bourbon scotch being thrown against a wall as a man who built an empire realizes it is crashing. The programmers in Ashley Madison trying to figure out if the data was expropriated, how much, and lead up to the internal discussions on the blackmail offer.
B Story: The hacker group recruits team members, identify weak points and sets up to acquire the data. Once the data has been lifted, they struggle on what to do with a release, expecting to have received blackmail monies, fending off the popularity it brings to them and how to exit what they have done.
The season ends when the news report starts to detail you can get the database on TOR.
This could be on HBO, Amazon, or Netflix.
the what?
Thanks for mentioning the TV show. I foolishly thought everyboby, even the youngest, would have at least heard about "Dallas". I'm suprised it didn't become an Internet meme.
Ah... well... :)
Edit: not sure why I'm getting downvoted. There was a study that showed food recalls have an impact on purchasing but it wasn't huge, people certainly didn't stop. Though I can't find the article I had read a long time ago about this.
Oh well.
but It wasn't really objectionable or anything.
After some time, there is a possibility that I will forget about the breach, but I don't think that there's a possibility that I will forget about Ashley Madison as a company.
I would have thought such a security breach would have taken down the entire business model but nope they're still going. I'm sure a lot more senior staff will have to step down in order to rebrand at some point so they can distance themselves from this disaster.
Plus anyone can add someone to the service AND there are plenty of people who enjoy the trill of simply looking and not doing anything.
So yeah I don't think it's a slam dunk that they're all "cheating jerks". Though I'm sure plenty are :)
2005-
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/double-trouble/
"Darren Morgenstern is a happily married man who runs ashleymadison.com, a Web site for attached people with cheating on their minds. "When monogamy becomes monotony: That's our trademark slogan,"
2002-
https://web.archive.org/web/20040214171743/http://www.ashley...
The site identified itself specifically for adultery, and that angle earned them an enormous amount of free press.
Yes, though it's harder to add someone as a paying member using a card in their name and tied to their address. Based on the stories that have come out, it sounds like there are dates on those payments.
That doesn't necessarily mean everyone was a "cheating jerk", and even if they were, that doesn't necessarily mean a judgmental response is the healthiest response the rest of us can give.
Of the "cheating jerks" that were "cheating jerks", who did they have to cheat with?
They say you can't cheat an honest man. So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters.
Discretion. Most of the people on Ashley Madison presumably were wanting to keep their attempted affairs a secret. Most of them were probably not in "swinging" relationships, or indeed they would go to regular dating websites and just advertise their open relationship status.
> So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters.
That's basically the sales pitch for Ashley Madison. "Want to cheat? Here's some women who want to cheat with you."
Hindsight has its benefits here, but I already automatically suspect anyone asking for my e-mail address of turning around to sell it to the highest bidder.
If I'm looking for discretion, this is what I expect to see on the HTTP site: "You are being redirected to our secure site." And this is what I expect to see on the HTTPS site: "How to delete this site from your browser history and router logs" and "How to access our Tor hidden service."
Finally, on the Tor hidden site, "How to maintain anonymity while using Bitcoin" and "Create a new account".
But I'm probably more untrusting than most.
And there will probably always be people willing to visit http://www.blackmailphishing.cc/new_mark.php to create a new account and upload their dankest, dirtiest, and most embarrassing secrets, for free!
Wait. Wait. I got that address wrong. It's actually https://www.opm.gov/investigations/e-qip-application/ . And they got hacked, too.
>Finally, on the Tor hidden site, "How to maintain anonymity while using Bitcoin" and "Create a new account".
If you need to use Tor and bitcoins to avoid detection by your spouse.... Well I'd say stop cheating on them because (s)he's a keeper.
I was thinking more along the lines of skirting the bounds of some malum prohibitum crime--like buying unlicensed Mickey Mouse apparel, or eating a protected species, or building an outhouse in the wrong spot--where a certain someone other than my spouse might come down on me like a ton of turds if it ever found out.
The gummint is a lot more concerned about policing my behavior than my spouse. And it's more uptight about what I'm doing when it's not around. Like a stalker, really. Tor and Bitcoin is demonstrably not enough to keep it off my back, and it is definitely not a keeper.
Yeah, that makes you not the target audience. Ashley Madison was sold as a place meet someone to have a secret affair with. The people looking for this generally wanted to hide it from their spouses most of all.
Undoubtedly, they had some customers that were on the site with their spouses' knowledge and approval, but this was most certainly a minority. That minority is probably bothered by this leak in the same way they are bothered by the OPM leak, but they aren't terrified of their spouses' reactions.
How can a business with 30+ million male users looking for sex outside marriage exist for 14 years while the site has no female users except for bots!!! Are you saying all those people were stupid enough to not realize they were not going to get laid(and kept paying too)?
It seems when you have advertising money and a cost structure that let's you make money and stay alive, you don't even have to have a real product! It makes sense to invest on people not ideas!
I wonder how many other BIG companies are pulling the same tricks to get unrealistic valuations (Twitter and Uber, they are not worth that much, especially Uber)
The hack and exposures, combined with the revelation most of the accounts are men.. yeah they won't make it another year.
I'd recruit ex-AM employees. Their business model is brilliant even if is basically illegal! Imagine what they could achieve in an organization with even moderate ethics!
The users? That's another story. I'm checking each applicant against "the list". On the list? We could probably do better in that position.
I am an Ashley Madison user, although probably not typical in any respect. And yes, my details are in the leak. Me and my wife grew up and married within the mormon church, complete with its absolutely distorted view of human sexuality. After leaving mormonism, we came to realize our sexual maturity had been stunted and wanted to experience new things...we now have a somewhat open marriage. We set a few ground rules because we do love each other and didn't want to break up, but then we set out on our quests to find other partners.
I tried the tinder thing, and that was okay. I tried just going to bars, and that was okay. I came away feeling a little skeezy, despite being completely honest with my wife, because I had to be dishonest with the girls I was meeting...nobody in those situations responds well to "Oh, by the way, I'm married", no matter how clear you are about it being okay with your wife. I also grew tired of hookups and one night stands very quickly. I wanted to meet women that occasionally wanted to meet up, but were okay with the fact that I had a family life and couldn't just run away any time either of us wanted some. Tinder and bars were definitely the wrong target market.
While I was doing this, my wife skipped straight to Ashley Madison. Put up a few pictures, and within seconds she was getting more messages than she could read. Like literally 500+ messages a day. She tried to filter them by stating explicitly on her profile what she was not interested in (specifically, out of shape or over 45yo). It didn't stop them. Most of the messages could be described as follows: Shrivelled or obese old men (my wife is 29 btw) well over 45 (including several senior citizens), accompanied by unsolicited dick pics, and messages about how they could last all night long or whatever. Some men were a lot closer to what she was looking for, but after filtering out all the garbage she didn't feel up to the task of trying to message back. She decided to ignore the messages and try messaging men herself. They either didn't respond, or they messaged back asking if she was a fake profile. She eventually was successful in finding what she wanted, but it was pretty significant effort.
I grew frustrated with the expectations of tinder and bars, and reluctantly decided to try AM. After seeing my wife's experience, I knew I was in for a sausage fest competition, but I also learned quickly what was a turnoff to women and I am pretty attractive myself, so I thought I had a chance. My perspective from the guy's side? For the most part, it is an extremely expensive scam. A single message will cost you $1-2 depending on the points package you bought (women don't pay for anything). If you want a priority message, it costs double that. All you get with a priority message is a guarantee that your message will not be buried in the 500+ message/day inbox of the woman you are trying to message. It can still get buried, but it only gets buried under other priority messages. I had 20+ messages a day from other women (or, more accurately, profiles of women). It was very obvious that most of them were fake, so I didn't bother with the obvious ones. Some of them were less obvious fakes. Some of them were scams to get you to sign up for other sites, or paid "background checks" from women who "just want to be safe". And occasionally, I got messages from actual women, but I never was interested in them.
I did have some success with talking to and meeting actual women. Based on my experience, I would estimate that 1000 is a pretty low estimate for the total number of active women on the site. I would probably ballpark 100-200 in my metro area, at least between 20-40yo. And here's another surprise...about half of them were single. In fact, al...
Adding a "post anonymously" checkbox instead of creating a throw away account may be worth pursuing, but it's hard to know if making anonymous posting easier would be a net positive for the site.
Please don't take this as an "all women are gold diggers" sort of thing. <sigh> But that may explain why there were a lot of single women.
I think a good idea would be to have "verified-but-anonymized" posts tied to the amount of karma you have (just like downvotes). After building up some reputation, you could occasionally post an anonymized comment, and have it distinguished by the fact that it is done by an HN regular.