Itâs a good example that Puritanical beliefs about sex have wide-ranging effects.
If people could talk more openly and accurately about their sexual and romantic needs, they wouldnât have to be so desperate and sneaky about it all.
With this revelation, can we agree that the story linked to on here yesterday from the guy who claimed to have âhad sex with about 60 women I met on the siteâ is totally bogus? I am betting it was a PR plant. It even hit directly on their âAshley Madison saves marriagesâ nonsense talking point.
Either that or he paid for the âpremiumâ account which guaranteed sexytimes and was spending a whole lot of dough for hookers who were marketed by the pimps at AM as lonely housewives looking for a roll in the hay.
Ashley Madison = Sausage fest
Bit surprised it is that low. I would have thought there would be more escort type girls looking to make a discrete buck on there.
I guess that guy who had the spread sheet of 60 women is probably a liar, haha.
My email inbox (or, more accurately, my spam folder) periodically fills up with ads for âdating sitesâ where hundreds of Russian ladies are waiting to talk to me (or so they say). If you go very far down this particular rabbit hole, you quickly learn that you need to pay money to exchange messages with all these âladiesâ, at which point anyone smarter than a paramecium will start to suspect that the âladiesâ arenât real after all. Or, if they are, that behind all those attractive profile pictures are some bored Russian college students â gender unspecified â being paid piecework rates to respond to the messages.
I confess, I hadnât guessed that Ashley Madison would turn out to be essentially the same kind of scam.
The really interesting question is why Ashley Madison had to resort to this kind of tactic, creating sockpuppet accounts to fill in for the missing âladiesâ. Human nature being what it is, and men and women being less different in some ways than is generally believed, Iâm sure there are married women out there who are interested in having sex with people other than their husband. And while they might be fewer in number than men, I bet that the disparity is less extreme than the 38,000,000 vs. 12,000 suggested by the Ashley Madison analysis. So why werenât women using Ashley Madison in larger numbers?
I wonder if it didnât have something to do with Ashley Madisonâs marketing pitch, which was basically âHey, weâll help you cheat.â Is it possible that that resonates less with women than men? Do women prefer not to think of themselves as cheating? Or did they look at Ashley Madison and think âEw, itâs full of cheating men, I donât want to have an affair with some other womanâs creepy horndog of a husband,â and then headed off to Tinder or other âregularâ dating sites?
Iâd wager most dating sites are set up this way. Someone I saw in a niche market was selling a âdating site for your fandomâ template/package. The way it worked was, you paid the fee, you got the custom dating site software templated for your fandom, with fake accounts generated and bots that message back and forth to real accounts.
After you get enough paying, real accounts, you start to slide back the bot activity. The initial use of the bots is to get the paying accounts in. At some point, the theory is, you have enough real traffic that you turn off the bots and then your membership makes you self sustaining and you rake in the dough.
I wouldnât be surprised to find out most / if not all dating websites do something extremely like this, even the âgood ones.â
Wait, wait.
Youâre telling me that I could set up a dating site where I could have bots send each other sexy messages all day?
Huh, when I first heard about the site, this is exactly how I assumed it worked, but after I kept hearing about it, I thought I was being unnecessarily cynical. I thought something that was getting so much attention couldnât possibly be actually working that way. I guess my first instincts were correctâŚ
Hot bot-on-bot action! Weirdly, I know someone who set up an art project some years back that was basically thisâŚ
I frakking called it!
head asplodes
Absolutely hilarious, right? 
Thatâs pretty much exactly what happened to Yahoo chat. The more bots that joined, the less real people used it until it literally was a bot-fest.
One of the strangest things Iâd seen in a long while.
They just want to cuddle.
Interesting affirmation for my startupâs business model, I predict Cuddly Madison is going to hit unicorn levels next year.
I heard an interview with CEO Noel Biderman who said women donât pay at all. That could that explain the low paying accounts, but surely the researcher should know that, right?
