Why does anyone believe Ashley Madison?

It's pretty amazing that women don't use it at all, even though I suspected that was the case. Very interesting sociological experiment, really.

 

Maybe they all didn't really want to get fucked by a total stranger but were there for a different reason?

 

You will not believe in God or a higher power or an afterlife, but you believed the majority of the women on Ashley Madison were there for some "afternoon delight" and not checking on husbands or neighbors?

I love this place.

 

I believe in God.

 

I have no clue what the fuck you're even talking about.

I started the thread specifically stating that I didn't think there are women on Ashley Madison.

 

I posted this on the thread on the Journalism Board. It wasn't just that the female profiles were fake, it's that they were faked by the site's owners:


Ashley Madison has long claimed, in triumphant news releases and slick, Web-ready graphics, that it is one of the few dating sites that really clicks with women. According to statistics CEO Noel Biderman has trumpeted in the media, Ashley Madison enjoys an overall 70/30 gender split — with a 1:1 male/female ratio among the under-30 set.

But the user records laid bare by hackers last week tell a very different story: Of the more than 35 million records released, only 5 million — a mere 15 percent — actually belonged to women.

This discrepancy may be the smoking gun that proves something angry users, industry insiders and government watchdogs have alleged for some time: that when it comes to reporting their own user numbers, paid-dating sites distort, manipulate … and sometimes straight-up lie.

“Ashley Madison has paid people to write profiles, and they’ve allowed fake profiles to proliferate on their site,” said David Evans, an industry consultant who has contracted with Ashley Madison in the past and has tracked the business of online dating since 2002. “Tons of sites are guilty of that. That’s not news.”

It may be news, however, to the legions of paying online daters who have treated tales of “date bait” as message-board apocrypha — and not as a tangible, industry-wide practice that they themselves have encountered.

Ryan Pitcher, who spent two years in the late aughts running a fake-profile team for Global Personals — parent of the massive, multinational dating platform WhiteLabelDating.com — explains the scheme like this: Paid-dating sites only make money when potential customers believe they’re sitting on a huge pot of available dates — so many dates, in fact, that it’s worth ponying up 20 or 30 dollars a month just to message them.

For lots of sites, acquiring such a pot is pretty easy. If you’re a niche site running off a platform like White Label — which thousands of niche dating sites do — that partnership will frequently come preloaded with a database of real users. Meanwhile, if you’re peddling run-of-the-mill, straight-laced dating, a la Match or eHarmony, you can just buy Facebook ads and run 10-second spots on TV.

“Adult dating” and hook-up sites have a serious problem, though, Pitcher says: While they have no problem attracting interested guys, they absolutely bomb when it comes to women. Some of that has to do with openly misogynist marketing; some of it relates to women’s well-conditioned social and sexual roles; much of it has to do with the fact that being a rare woman on a site full of desperate, oversexed, uninhibited dudes is objectively terrible.

Whatever the exact cause, on the adult sites Pitcher worked on, real women accounted for less than 2 percent of total profiles. And so he and a 28-person team, working in Global Personals’ vaguely named “admin” department, spent their work hours crafting very sexy, very fictional profiles and messaging users from them. Profile-writers made roughly $25,000 a year, with bonuses for hitting certain monthly subscription targets.

Ashley Madison faked female profiles to lure men in, hacked data suggest

There may have been a few wives who created fake profiles to check up on their husbands, but they would be in the minority.

 

Who needs Ashley Madison now that we have Tinder?

 

If you read the story the majority of the women on there were fake profiles.

What point are you trying to make?

 

If only someone on here had called AM on this while journalists for major publications were regurgitating their press releases as fact.

 

I may be an arrogant, abrasive SOB on here. But I'm a sharp arrogant, abrasive SOB. Always keep that in mind before you start popping off like this.

 

Don't make him cry Dick!

 

Don't hurt me, Hammer.