This new Ashley Madison-related story shouldn’t be terribly surprising, although it acts as a companion piece to a recent article from The Independent. That piece, which arrived as news of the hack dropped, aimed to reassure women that not all was lost if they found their mate’s email address in the site’s records. Why? Because most guys on Ashley Madison only wanted an extramarital affair and did not succeed in landing a hookup. Whether or not this argument convinces depends on the couple, but a Gizmodo analysis makes a strong case for few hookups coming down the Ashley Madison pike.
This phenomenon is not new, for many “discretion”-based sites contain fake profiles. These profiles could be dummy accounts set up by the hookup service themselves, or they could belong to porn bots. To complicate matters, Ashley Madison doesn’t require women to pay to belong. So porn companies (or, uh, entrepreneurs) are free to set up profiles with links to their profiles elsewhere. Here’s the rather depressing lowdown; that is, if you’re a married guy looking to hook up:
Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.
When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy.
The piece then outlines the method of plucking out the fake profiles as opposed to the few real women on the website. The data-based analysis looks as solid as possible, considering the vast database at hand. As a built-in excuse for this sort of thing, Ashley Madison contains a term of service that says “some” users only use the site “for “entertainment,” so they’re “not seeking in person meetings with anyone they meet on the Service, but consider their communications with users and Members to be for their amusement.” Yep, that’s a big old excuse for “fake users.”
Essentially, the Ashley Madison hookup pool consists of a bunch of married guys who are cruising for nonexistent women. Some of these guys, perhaps a lot of them, realize what’s (not) happening. Fake profiles of hot young things are fairly easy to spot, according to guys I know. The question remains — why do men hand over money (and risk their marriages) for this service if they know the drill? Well played, internet.
(via Gizmodo)