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.
A lot of comments are saying things like "oh, we all knew this already." But a lot of the cultural discourse around AM completely misses or forgets this. A lot of prominent people were brought down by it, and it's treated in the context that they were talking to real partners, presumably because that's a bit more salacious than the sad truth.
I think treating people for what they intended and actually tried to do to do (cheat on their partner), even if they didn't manage to carry out their intent because of external circumstances is fair. I think that's a common opinion? Although I might be wrong.
Many countries punish "attempted murder" (trying to carry out the act but failing, the same way people caught in this scandal attempted but failed at adultery) so it makes sense to me to not strongly distinguish between "tried cheating on their partner but failed" and "tried cheating on their partner and succeeded".
How would you think the conversation about AM would/should be modified, in light of the fact that people were (unknowingly) talking to chatbots instead of real partners? I think I already made my views clear, but I would actually like to hear other opinions since I don't think I understand any view but my own on this. Maybe other people would prefer the conversation is about spambots on social media websites instead of what the people on those sites tried to do?
Edit: nvm. I saw (after I was already done typing) the sibling comments to my current one, and that makes more sense.
To be fair, wanting to cheat on your partner to such an extent you'd set up an account on a website dedicated for that is already a step too far for many people barely any less bad of an act than the actual act of cheating.
For sure. But as an external observer, my reaction is quite different. In the first case, it's very much "this sad dummy was sexting a chatbot." In the second case, it's "wow, it turns out this guy was a philanderer." Not sure why.
I have to disagree with anyone that thinks it is "barely less bad".
I mean we make countless bad decisions as humans, many of them rash last minute decisions in a time of desperation.
Given the ease of just making an account and talking to someone vs actually going through with something I feel like just being on a platform like this is villainizing what could have been a moment of weakness. But that doesn't mean that you would have gone through with it.
I would also put out there that there may be a decent subset of people that just the idea that someone might be into them without needing to actually do anything beyond that, is enough.
I fully acknowledge that there is a lot of nuance to this, but I would hope that as a society we could acknowledge a huge difference between a bit of fantasy/role playing and actually going through with something.
While the long term intentions (infidelity) might be the same, social barriers prevent many people from taking it forward. Signing up on a website is something a lot of people do for a lot of things and making that the entry point to something exciting and forbidden is good marketing at best and psychological manipulation at worst.
For some (perhaps most) people, just creating an account and taking a peek is usually not enough to push them over but for many others, it's enough to start a chain reaction that will end up somewhere which will have real consequences for them and multiple people related to them. Not a good idea and a company that's making money off of this without even considering that is not very ethical in my estimation.
Right which is why I acknowledge there is nuance, but I just strongly disagree with it being "barely less bad" when I would consider it "significantly less bad" or borderline not bad at all depending on how far things got.
Especially if maybe they were just watching porn and briefly in a horny state wanted to check something out. Post nut clarity is a thing.
There is just such a large number of events and thought processes between a last minute rash decision to make an account somewhere and actually meeting up with someone, not the least of which is the time and effort to make it happen. To say just making an account is barely less bad than actually going through with cheating is... wild.
Agreed from the perspective of the person who signs up. I wouldn't judge him too harshly unless he finally went ahead and actually had an affair.
OTOH, the makers of the website have designed it to push people to do something that's likely very damaging just to sell a product. And then topped it off by lying about what they're selling.
Yeah, it's bad that they'd do something like this behind their partners' back, but a lot of them probably signed up in a moment of weakness and never planned to take it further.
It's like flirting when your partner isn't around. It's bad (assuming it isn't something you've agreed upon), but if you stop it before it goes to far it's not as bad as going to bed with somebody.
If by police entrapment, you mean cases where, say, someone tries to put out a hit and doesn't realize that the person they're hiring is a cop, I think that's totally fair. That's still indicative of serious intent to commit murder, and it really is just luck that they happened to hire a cop to do it rather than running into someone actually willing to kill.
Same with the AM stuff, it doesn't really matter that my hypothetical SO was too dumb to notice they were talking to bots. Their intention was to cheat, and so the trust would be gone. At that point, how am I supposed to believe that they aren't cheating in other ways?
It brings to mind another thing that sometimes happens lately, where "prank" channels on YouTube or TikTok film themselves committing crimes, thinking that since they don't actually mean any harm, or say, are using fake weapons, it isn't a crime anymore. But, of course, it is a crime, the people who are being "pranked" in this manner believe they're actually in danger. There has even been a case where a prankster got shot for pulling a knife on someone as a "prank", and the shooter was found innocent because it was reasonable self defense.
The problem with police entrapment isn't that the bag contains oregano instead of real marijuana. Rather it's the creation of new "crime" that wouldn't have happened otherwise. So with Ashley Madison it's not so much the bot dynamic itself creating the distinction, but rather all the push advertising getting people to sign up out of curiosity when they perhaps wouldn't have sought such a thing out otherwise.
I'm sorry it comes off that way. I genuinely think these are interesting distinctions. If I had to make an analogy, I would react differently if I found a bag of weed in a kid's backpack vs a bag of oregano that the kid was fooled into thinking was weed.
I guess the question there is "what are you punishing"? If it's your kid and you don't want them smoking weed, they clearly went out for weed. Are you punishing the act or the intent? Which is the disappointing bit?
It's what they said: as written, it generates a high volume of replies saying the same thing, namely, that the posts are extremely reductive. But do feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, curious for your thoughts.
It's not actually what they said as written though. Your quotes do not come from their post, they reflect your own interpretation. I'm suggesting that this interpretation differs from my own and what I assume is the original posters intent. (FWIW, they say the same thing.)
I also don't interpret the other replies here to be saying the same thing as you. They're discussing the idea that getting caught trying to have an affair (that happens to be fake) has interesting parallels with getting caught trying to buy drugs (that happen to be fake). You're accusing the poster of trolling.
Looking at the other comments for a 3rd time, it's clear I'm not the only one expressing skepticism.
I can't find any more to discuss here, it would feel awkward sitting in a side thread, where no one else is engaging, scrapping over how to sort other people's comments. ex. people saying the follow up analogy is flawed doesn't say "I agree with jpohhhh", so someone looking to police here should feel they can validly.
And I don't like arguing with the cops, never goes well afaik :)
Was it even the FBI that faked the murdering? I read a pretty long story about the guy and to me it sounded more like one or more people were scamming him for money, and then the same group of people posed as someone else and scammed him twice this time by among other things making it seem like they had murdered the people that scammed him for him.
men attracted to the idea of women who are cheating are not themselves precisely cheating. there are some who would wish to stigmatize this, but other (men) who would not.
As a man, if I found out my partner was flirting with guys at the bar every weekend without my knowledge or consent, even if she didn't go home with any of them, I'd still stigmatize the hell out of that.
Flirting is healthy and isn't even remotely cheating. There's also a difference between flirting and trying to pick somebody up. I'm afraid your thinking is why so many marriages are failing today.
I strongly agree with you, but I want to add that each relationship is different and people have the freedom to set their boundaries as they wish (they as in plural; the people who are in the same relationship decide together where the boundaries are).
What I'm trying to say is, it's okay if the person you are responding to wants more strict boundaries than the rest of us. If flirting is cheating to them, then it is and that's that.
For many people, if not most, the line is fuzzy enough to still be hurt by flirting. Just because it doesn't bother you doesn't mean it won't bother others/your partner.
There IS an important distinction to be had between flirting and being friendly, though. Being friendly and even laughing at a joke is not flirting without the intent.
The slogan of Ashley Madison was “Life is short. Have an affair.”
So the assumption should be that most of the real people on the site whether they are the man or the woman, are in a relationship with someone IRL but went to AM because they wanted to cheat.
They ask you about your relationship status so probably the leaked data can tell us how many reported being in a relationship vs not. (But also keep in mind people might lie about it, in either direction.)
Don't know how "prominent" they were, except maybe in their own lives. There are a few lists online. E.g. [1] lists people like Josh Duggar and Hunter Biden as people who were on the site. (I don't think either of them were "brought down by it" though.
I think there were certainly lots of other people who were less world famous but prominent in their own businesses or communities. Wikipedia goes into it a little, and notes that there were at least two suicides following it. [2]
> 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.
When LLMs and gen AI started to become somewhat competent, I began wondering if a TikTok style app with 100% "AI" generated content could be successful.
Most people here laughed at the idea, but reading things like this makes me think that it will become a thing.
Bumble was famous for only women starting a match but, like the rest of the online dating industry, Bumble has had a dramatic drop in participation in the last few years. There was this incident which got a lot of press
In the last 10 years, I've noted when couples mention that they met on Tinder. It's getting to 50% ! This isn't necessarily married couples, but established relationships (1yr+), nonetheless.
Are you saying that when couples note how they met without being prompted, it is approaching 50% total over the last 10 years? That would imply that there is a significant increase currently over 10 years ago when you first started noting this matter in order to get close to 50% now.
I also have to assume that a factor that would need to be investigated is whether it isn’t simply that people who met on tinder like telling people that for some reason, possibly because they are the transgressive, rotating door, “hookup culture” types that would have a proclivity for using something like Tinder.
Also, it didn't require verification, so if you wanted, you could sign up any email address for it. And they would charge to delete the account. Which they didn't do regardless.
So if you wanted to mess with someone, you could sign up their business email to Ashley Madison and have them receive regular notifications of "hot, married women in their area who are down to clown".
Tinder had only been around for three years when AM was hacked. Presumably a lot of the data predates Tinder. Ashley Madison had been operating for ten years by that point
It really doesnt have anything to do with a loneliness epidemic.
There wasn’t enough value in the basic chat bots, the idiots using the site considered that basic chat as a prelude to IRL sex with a real woman, a goal tempting enough to presumably blinker them to how basic the chat was. All of which is to say: no value, 100% scam.
But a low effort scam, back then chat gpt was not a thing. They could at least connect the user among each other, censor/cutting conversations as soon as they reveal ones gender .. basically grindr, but with a scam on top.
This would be more obviously fake than a chatbot: the way women respond on dating apps is very different from the way men do, and would be noticeable instantly, whereas a few scripted chat bot lines may not be.
A low effort chatbot is an accurate representation of the type of responses most men are used to from women on dating sites. This is not a misogynistic comment or snark, but a result of the fact that women tend to have a large number of people messaging them.
You may well be correct but I don’t think it’s that relevant here. Dating sites were much less prevalent when AM was at its peak and presumably the average user married (and left the dating pool) years before that peak, even.
I just don’t buy that there were that many AM users thinking “this checks out with my prior experience in dating sites so it’s plausible”. They just weren’t thinking critically at all.
I disagree- it will also check out with their real world experience. Most men are used to women being cagey, aloof, and showing low interest in real life. They will assume they either need to try harder to interest her, or that she is playing “hard to get.”
Your precious comment might not have been misogynistic but you’re rapidly approaching it here. As a man I can’t say I am “used to women being cagey and aloof”. There are plenty of cagey and aloof people out there in the world, I don’t see anything gender specific about it.
Just like above, this is not a negative statement about women but about understanding how their experience is different. Women are used to being approached and pursued by men that they usually aren’t interested in, and might even be dangerous. A positive response would invite more unwanted attention. An attractive women in a crowded public space is often experiencing men trying to initiate some type of interaction (often aggressively so) every few minutes.
Men’s experience with women also varies a lot depending on how they look, and their social skills among other things.
I think at least everyone can agree to a less controversial statement: The user experience of a (heterosexual) dating site is vastly different for men than it is for women, just as the experience of IRL courting is vastly different for man than it is for women.
In other words, the same value as porn or romance novels, just without knowing it. But those things do have value given that people pay for them knowingly.
No. Did you read the GP? When you buy a romance novel, you don't think a real life person is going to come out of it and romance you. It's a transparent fiction.
It isn't loneliness, just sex. That market has been around a very long time. Virtually every product advertised to men suggests the product might lead to sex, be them the pretty girls selling trucks/beer, or the bikini-clad models on the beach in every travel commercial. Ashley-Madison just cut out the pretense. Rather than buy the fancy car in hope of sex, men just paid a smaller amount for the hope alone. Dreams have value.
I agree, but would say it’s even far deeper than that. It’s the toxic culture that dangles images of baked women and values of transgression rather than how to communicate and build a healthy emotional relationship with someone that may not be perfect, among other things.
If I recall the A.M. ads and site image correctly, it was also full of some hot woman with lush lips and skin showing, which is just an echo of the image men have in their minds, i.e., “I too can get that hot woman that the guy in fantasy world in the TV has”, when it was really even more than the journalist realized. It wasn’t just a bot farm, it was actually a male farm that harvested and monetized male dissociation from their environment and biological imperative.
Doesn't being scammed and not getting any dates actually prevent cheating? Dirty men didn't get what they wanted, wasted their time and maybe some even gave up on their dreams.
I'd be really interested in reliable info about the gender ratio on Math Group apps. Also how their matching/scoring algo works. There must have been at least one ex engineer who leaked something.
I'll say it, the obvious no one wants to say: we've got a massive adult immaturity problem in our entire civilization. Not just men, but they're more able to act out their immaturity.
Absolutely. With social animals, we have a name for what is missing: “socialization.”
For so many men, they seem to have gotten the basic training but never finished the course. It’s the process of discovering that other people are different than you, that your unfiltered thoughts are bothersome to others, and that treating others as objects or targets will make you a pariah.
And the internet doesn’t prevent socialization, it substitutes it with an online version which fails to do the full job.
Go watch some movies from the 1930s or 1940s to see how expectations of men have changed. Yes, they are movies and idealized. But acting like an ass and then talking about why nobody will date you was not on the menu.
Sure, and racism, and lots of other bad stuff. Doesn’t mean the bar for being a functioning male in society has fallen through the floor since then. My point was that the contrast is striking, not that 1940 was a time we should go back to.
I agree- cheating in my view is generally an immature way to deal with being unhappy and unfulfilled in a relationship- instead of taking responsibility, communicating, setting boundaries, and ending the relationship if necessary people try to pretend everything is fine and cheat in secret. I don’t agree men are “more able to act out.” It’s easier for women to cheat so they don’t even need to go online, but just stop turning down interest they were getting anyways.
The problem is much wider than simply people cheating on their spouses. It's the failure of people in aggregate to rein in their predator in virtually any interaction they can get away with being a predator.
I see what you’re getting at, but think predator is the wrong word. Narcissism might be more appropriate- it is just thinking about yourself and not caring about the well being of others or of the group. Usually rationalized by the idea that everyone else is as well, and if you don’t you’re just getting taken advantage of… which becomes increasingly true the more people act this way, a self fulfilling prophecy.
I think this got so much worse during the covid pandemic. Really disheartening to see that when things get a little tough people become nasty and selfish, and create a new crisis within a crisis. I was naive enough to expect the opposite, that people would get some perspective and show some kindness, strength, and humanity.
That's what I mean when I say adult immaturity is rampant: an adult facing stress does not become nasty, selfish, nor act out creating a new crisis within the active crisis. That is small minded, "I'm the protagonist" thinking. While often a calm discussion with those in charge, communicating with peer-wise empathy, resolves everything.
I find the unfaithfulness being considered objectively abhorrent as a pretty narrow minded take but I'm curious why you don't think it's immaturity?
As far as I know, just by nature of there being more short than long relationships, In most cases cheating occurs rather early; so its a massive waste of time for every party. Seems short sighted and immature to me.
Not telling you you're wrong, just asking for a different take.
Outside the context or marriages I have no idea, but it appears in marriage, which is the context for Ashley Madison, cheating occurs when the marriage is well established, at about seven to years.
Something to do with impulse control, keeping your word, and honest and open communication in the context of a relationship. Maybe there's a better word for it than immaturity.
No need to read the "article" behind the clickbait content. New Scientist is a rag. This comment has all the article content, and is wholly unsurprising to anyone who used any dating sites and saw scame site ads over the past 20 years.
It's the optics of infidelity... A mutual affair in a terminal marriage may be frowned upon. But chasing people outside the marriage who aren't into you or who don't even exist is a combination of laughable, sad and disappointing. The victims aren't sympathetic enough to garner outage.
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
You’d be surprised, there’s a few big chatbot sites dedicated to simulating relationships and they are quite explicit about what is is. There are entire subreddits full of people obsessively talking about their relationships with AI chatbot gf/bf (yes both genders post). It’s quite the insight into the human psyche.
> 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.
Isn't it still cheating if they're trying to fuck a bot thinking it's a human?
Emotional affairs are cheating and don't need to involve any physical contact.
If I was in a monogamous relationship and my partner was sliding into the DMs of married, high-profile, celebrities asking if they were DTF I'd consider it cheating regardless of how unlikely the possibility of amounting to anything physical was.
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-...
> 95% of the site's users were men - the company running the site made fake female profiles to interact with men:
The interesting part of Ashley Madison was that it was 100% a scam, and that scam was perpetuated by software and that it really wasn't anything special in its industry. Five years prior the time I owned a digital advertising agency and had a client company that owned a couple of dating sites. They both had identical business models - and it was really kind of preying on a weakness we all have: a desire for companionship and intimacy. They companies would milk people for a shocking amount of money to reply to their bots, and the bots even had product managers.
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".
Some of Reddit's early users were sock puppet accounts run by the founders, which are different than bots. The sock puppet accounts were, in fact, interesting to engage with since they were run by interesting & literate people. Since presumably a conversation is what you came for, you got what you wanted. Quite different from talking to a bot on a dating site where you came to initiate an IRL interaction which could never happen.
My DSL tunnels through an ATM network, I think, and comes out in Norwich, NY which is about an hour's drive away. I am always getting ads about "Drivers with a perfect record in Norwich can...", "Grannies want to jump your bone in Norwich", "They hate it when seniors in Norwich do this but they can't stop you", etc. The only services which geolocate correctly for my house are Apple's.
When I got to NYC on the other hand and attach to public WiFi often those localized ads are spot on to within a block.
> 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.