What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal

First of all, the article nails it. Ashley Madison wasn't a dating site that lost sensitive personal data, it was a scam site full of bots.

> And the men had to pay for every single message they sent. For most of their millions of users, Ashley Madison affairs were entirely a fantasy built out of threadbare chatbot pick-up lines like “how r u?” or “whats up?”

Taking it one step further: Apparently the millions of male users were unable to tell this site apart from any of the "legitimate" dating sites like Tinder.

For the male users, this site offered quite the same experience. You pay for attention, get a few chats full of dry "how r u"s and nothing further happens.

It's mind boggling how many bad actors need to come together to execute something like this and keep it running. "fraud-to-engager"...

There are several traps startups can fall into, problems that seem like they have no good solution, problems where the startup can "Reinvent X". Travel is a prime example but another is dating websites.

One can say that Ashley Madison was a scam posing as a "dating" website (given the infidelity association) but the bigger story I think is that this describes all dating websites. It's just a question of degree.

For simplicity, I"ll speak in the heteronormative sense since this is the largest market. AM's tactics here of using fake profiles is a common tactic used by dating websites. Founders will argue this is to bootstrap the site, particularly because there tend to be more men than women on these sites. At what point does this rise to the level of being a scam? Remember that pretty much all these sites have paid features and subscriptions to send more messsages or likes or to raise your pfoile.

It's a common sentiment in the pharma world that there's money in the treatment but no money in the cure. This seems to apply here too. A "cure" here is your site's users find a long-term relationship and thus cease to be paying customers. As a business you want them to keep coming back.

AM was really just a headline-drawing hook on the model the pervades this space. "Have an affair" is just marketing. We love to extol the virtues of the "profit motive" but so often when you look at the details you see the company's interests and the user's interests not only don't align but are directly in opposition.

For a peek behind the modern equivalent of this checkout this podcast ep on the behind the scenes of using AI to create NSFW chatbots - https://www.latent.space/p/nsfw-chatbots

> In late 2015, a group calling itself Impact Team got angry at the site and hacked into its servers. The group grabbed a bunch of user data and code, then posted it on Reddit with the claim that 95 per cent of the people on the site were men. I was intrigued. How could all those men be having affairs, if there were virtually no women on the site?

So in a way, the site was _preventing_ men from cheating, since they mostly interacted with bots instead of real women.

I read about the bots back when the hack happened, but what nobody investigated was how the Affair Guarantee worked. Did they refund everybody who paid for it? Stonewall them? Direct the real women to the paying users? Send a prostitute? https://people.com/tv/josh-duggar-paid-for-affair-guarantee-...

There's no new information here (the article is probably just a promotional tie-in to promote the recent Netflix series..).

In any case, the tl;dr

- 95% of the site's users were men

- the company running the site made fake female profiles to interact with men: "how r u?", "what's up?" etc.

- men would pay to reply

Not sure what the discovery is. Haven't social sites been doing this since the beginning? Reddit was. Not too dissimilar from those IP ads from like two decades ago, "Jane Doe is ready to meet you in Centralville, Wyoming".

Fuck cheaters and fuck cheating.