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Ashley Madison founder steps down
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gregmolnar 11y agoMany known, but now there is proof :)
- kstenerud 11y agoWorst thing they could have done. Now is the time to rally, not capitulate.
- qrendel 11y agoTbf, the worst thing they probably could have done is run a scam business model then get exposed in one of the highest profile hacks in years. This is just icing on the cake.
- seren 11y agoIt seems the revelation there are no women on AM is far worse business-wise than the security breach (Maybe not legally). How can you go on as a business if your business model has been exposed as totally fake ? I would also add, that by extension, there is no reason than competitors like gleeden.com have a different men/women split.
- RexRollman 11y agoMaybe dating/relationship sites should be required to disclose numbers to prevent fraud.
- TallGuyShort 11y agoThat gets tough without giving a third-party direct access to everything for auditing. You can lie about numbers just as easily as you can imply they're not an issue.
- uptown 11y ago"That gets tough without giving a third-party direct access to everything for auditing." That's kind of the entire idea behind an auditor.
- Crito 11y agoGiving auditors complete access to people's personal profiles? That doesn't phase you at all?
- reagency 11y agoThere ar e ways to audit... Timestamps of account creations, IP block where signups and messages come from....
- halviti 11y agoAnyone competent who wanted to boost their numbers could just pay someone under the table to buy a bunch of vps's or vpn connections and fake all of this. You're just creating hoops, but you're not stopping anyone.
- harryh 11y agoThe way auditors have complete access to people's financial records?
- TallGuyShort 11y agoPeople don't want authorities having access to data on their sexual promiscuity the same way the government keeps tax records.
- fweespeech 11y agoGiven those personal profiles are effectively public to "millions" of users....eh?
- uptown 11y ago
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- vanderZwan 11y agoIt shows acting upon intent. Are you saying attempted murder shouldn't be a crime? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempt
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- irl_zebra 11y agoTo be fair, using your analogy, signing up for an account on AM is probably much closer on the attempted murder scale to "sitting in the potential victim's bushes at night with a knife" than it is to "googling 'how do I kill someone.'"
- notahacker 11y agoI wonder how many people are using the "I wanted to research before I lectured my congregation on the sin of adultery" or "I just wanted to know if you were on it, darling" defence.
- irl_zebra 11y agoFactual impossibility [1] doesn't do much in the court of law, let alone to help a jilted lover feel less betrayed, one would think. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossibility_defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossibility_defense
- orbitur 11y agoExonerates? They're guilty just by making an account/spending money in the first place.
- drpgq 11y agoI'm amazed at how few women there are on AM. I knew there wouldn't be many, but the numbers seem to be ridiculously low.
- Killswitch 11y agoLet me tell you this, I worked in the adult industry and I absolutely despised working with dating sites. Ashley Madison, Adult Friend Finder, etc because of this issue. They employed hundreds of staff who's main job was to pretend to be interested women messaging non-paying members enticing them to upgrade their free memberships to be able to respond back or what-have-you-not and then once the customer was paying, they stopped and moved onto the next. That's shady business no matter what you think. I personally have zero empathy for Ashley Madison and for what's happening to them. Edit:// Adult Friend Finder actually pays an absurdly higher payout for referrals whom happen to be women, because they don't get many women signing up.
- wmeredith 11y agoHow is this not considered fraud?
- logfromblammo 11y agoProving it would require the cooperation of witnesses and aggrieved parties who would be publicly embarrassed if they were to provide testimony. So it's usually safer to cheat someone if you can do so in a manner that would also humiliate them if their role in the con was exposed. They discount what they lost by the price of their own dignity and reputation.
- reagency 11y agoThat is true, but the world is big and there are people who (1) wouldn't be ashamed, (2) could do it as an intentional investigation. And the crooks can't detect those people in advance.
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- brianbreslin 11y agoI wonder if the FTC will fine them. Or a large scale class action suit will take them down.
- adventured 11y agoLawsuits would have happened a while ago, except the amount of money users will tend to have lost, won't make for a good enough trade on the personal cost of public embarrassment.
- icebraining 11y agoA lawsuit was just filed this week: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34032760 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34032760
- bradleyjg 11y agoA class action lawsuit only needs one named plaintiff.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> It seems the revelation there are no women on AM is far worse business-wise than the security breach (Maybe not legally). Is it really true though? The estimates were, what, 1,400 available women in total? It's anecdotal but there are thousands of accounts online of people saying they were able to hook up with women and a few who even ended up marrying the woman they hooked it up. Seems a great deal of those would either have to be made up or the estimate people came up with is wildly wrong. I'm not entirely convinced yet.
- seren 11y agoIf you are ready to create millions of fake account, you are probably ok with writing false testimonies/reviews. Most likely, some affairs have actually happened, but the "success stories" you've read were probably submarines[0] by AM. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- DiabloD3 11y agoI think if pg had a Youtube channel where he talks about issues he's written over the years (say, in the format of PBS Idea Channel, just not as caffeinated; and don't get me wrong, PBS Idea Channel, in my opinion, is one of the best web shows on Youtube, but that pace might be me inappropriate for pg.tv), I would probably subscribe.
- pc86 11y agoSomething tells me he has more important things going on.
- matthewowen 11y agolike working on arc?
- jsprogrammer 11y agoExtracting value from his resources?
- ryandvm 11y agoIf your business model is fundamentally predicated on dishonesty, I think all bets are off regarding the value system that people will use to evaluate it.
- Yhippa 11y agoKnowing that and the fact that they seemed so disinterested in security it seems like this was just one big honeypot for cheaters.
- temponly 11y ago"the revelation that there are no women on AM". In my experience, this was not true. I was on AM about six years ago, over a two month period. I'm in a Poly relationship and at the time was searching for a new partner. I chatted with a couple dozen women. Don't think they were software robots. Met with six or so. Definitely not robots. Still with one, who I love and adore. The women I met were all quite good looking and quite sexual. Was introduced to the nude selfie - an eye opener. Perhaps the fakery came after my time, or perhaps the assertion that there were no women on AM is just not true.
- Shish2k 11y agoI wonder where all the women are? I'm fairly sure that the human race as a whole is 50/50 split; but dating sites are 99% men, the tech industry is 90% men, when I take public transport it's 75% men, pubs are 80% men, construction workers I pass on the walk to work are 100% men, etc etc. I can't remember the last time I was in a room which was mostly women; the last time I even got to 50/50 was high school... It's really hard to avoid bias when the bubble that I live in is so skewed :/
- niccaluim 11y agoHere's a real sample of most of the messages women get on dating sites: hi [that's the whole message] u r so beautiful [again, the whole message] hey babe do u want a real man i will treat yuou lik a lady This represents the vast majority of messages men send on dating sites. And the volume of messages women get is insane. It is a firehose of garbage. Why would anyone volunteer to be on the receiving end of that?
- robwormald 11y agoI moderated on OKCupid for years, and this is so, so true. In fact, it usually went more like: "Heyyy guurllll lemme holla at you" "Thanks, but no thanks" "Fine bitch, you ugly anyway" That, or dick pics. So many dick pics.
- surge 11y agoRight, I know personally of more success stories from Everquest and WoW (and maybe one eHarmony story) or other random online communities than actual dating sites.
- mikeash 11y agoThe first site that can reliably filter this stuff out before it even gets to the target will probably make enough money to form a small black hole. As a moderator, were you just responding to reports from users, or were you preemptively checking into messages, or something else?
- unoti 11y ago> How can you go on as a business if your business model has been exposed as totally fake ? They should take a few pages from the TSA playbook!
- jordsmi 11y agoOther than the few big main sites, this is how alot of the dating sites are. Especially all of the hook up ones you see on porn sites ads. They are all fake women accounts just trying to get money out of the guys.
- linkydinkandyou 11y agoI've been happily married for 25 years, and haven't dated for longer than that, so what do I do. But I think a site that actually verified profile photos and height/weight would go a long way to getting a better balance of both men and women. You'd go to a kiosk local to you to get a "standard" photo taken, where everyone gets the same mugshot from front and side, and full body, and a verified height and weight. And then, to log in, you need biometric proof that you're the same person in the photo, so you can hire a non-obese or fit person to have the picture taken. I think this may appeal to both men and women.
- quizzas 11y agoA combination of the following reasons: 1. Consumption Mismatch: men have an endless thirst for new sexual trists whereas women can be sexually fulfilled by a single partner every few years. Because of this consumption mismatch, a site like AM clearly seeks to address the consumption habits of men, but does not address the pairing habits of women. 2. Average looking women and above have no shortage of interested men showering attention - why join AM when there are easier ways? The path of least resistance. 3. Women do not solve their "mid life crisis" issues with an affair, but instead turn to self-help, yoga, group therapy, etc. Men predictably buy sports cars, climb mountains, sky dive and have affairs. So let's say the above generalizations are 80/20 accurate at best. It still significantly skews the gender ratio on a site that's soooo clearly focused on addressing the unique mating habits of men (which any sociologist and psychologist will confirm are different than women) rather than women. Tinder, although not perfectly aligned with women, is still better than AM for women. The best platforms for women are ones that allow for more deeply layered and nuanced interactions that may lead to relationships/sex rather than built specifically for an easy hookup (Tinder, AM). As others have observed, women would rather hookup through meetings on WoW, EverQuest, etc. than meat markets like OKCupd, Match, Tinder, etc.
- nkurz 11y agoIt seems the revelation there are no women on AM is far worse business-wise than the security breach (Maybe not legally). I was hoping the opposite. Lying to your users may well be a viable strategy for this sort of business, as the users aren't likely to band together than share information. But failing to inform potential investors that your business is based on fake accounts is both legally actionable and highly risky. How can you go on as a business if your business model has been exposed as totally fake? My disappointed guess would be that this is not as large a handicap as you might expect. Each struggling business's hope is that they can "pivot" to a different model before they fall apart. Sometimes this is a polite fiction, but sometimes they manage to do it.
- prawn 11y agoThe brilliance of AM is that who, realising it's even more of a scam than they suspected, is going to complain to friends, colleagues, partners or authorities that they were trying to have an affair and got ripped off? Someone should take it to the next level, create a similar site but give people a cut of the revenue for leading men on past the paywall. Outsource the staff, essentially.
- selimthegrim 11y agoLet's hope he's not thinking of going into screenwriting. edit: http://gawker.com/the-ceo-of-ashley-madison-was-secretly-working-on-a-scr-1726202879 http://gawker.com/the-ceo-of-ashley-madison-was-secretly-wor...
- 0x4a42 11y agoThis saga is getting better than Dallas. Someone should port it to TV.
- DiabloD3 11y agoFor those that don't get the reference, Dallas was a long running prime-time drama (a "soap", back when they didn't air these solely during the daytime), that was known for its wild twists (such as the "who shot JR" plot line, which is considered one of the best moments of TV). This isn't even close to the levels required for entertaining TV, but in my humble opinion, the comment is neither bad enough to downvote, nor good enough to upvote, I merely suspect a lot of HN's readership is just too young to get the reference or had a knee-jerk reaction to soaps in general (which, hey, I hate the overly-dramatic nature of soaps too; but apparently what Dallas did was still novel in the 80s, and worth dragging out for a pop-culture reference now and then).
- Agustus 11y agoAbsolutely great TV. Think Silicon Valley but with a name tied to it. We need to get the naming rights to get initial viewers, but you and me, DiabloD3, we have a show here. Treatment: Name: Ashley Madison or some generic name so as to avoid copyright and naming issues. Dramatis Personae: Ashley Madison President, Ashley Madison programmers, IPO Finance Team, Hacker team Story Arcs: A Story: Follow the Ashley Madison president as he goes about his 2014-2015 tour to promote the site across the globe, focus on the Japanese campaign, in preparation for the IPO. Detail the trials and tribulations of the IPO setup, pressures from the M&A team. Then lead up to the hack and the bourbon scotch being thrown against a wall as a man who built an empire realizes it is crashing. The programmers in Ashley Madison trying to figure out if the data was expropriated, how much, and lead up to the internal discussions on the blackmail offer. B Story: The hacker group recruits team members, identify weak points and sets up to acquire the data. Once the data has been lifted, they struggle on what to do with a release, expecting to have received blackmail monies, fending off the popularity it brings to them and how to exit what they have done. The season ends when the news report starts to detail you can get the database on TOR. This could be on HBO, Amazon, or Netflix.
- chatmasta 11y agoI wonder how many new signups they've gotten in the past 2 weeks. Does "any press is good press" apply in this case?
- minimaxir 11y agoThat would be the equivalent of people buying more eggs after a salmonella outbreak.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoSo business as usual then? Edit: not sure why I'm getting downvoted. There was a study that showed food recalls have an impact on purchasing but it wasn't huge, people certainly didn't stop. Though I can't find the article I had read a long time ago about this. Oh well.
- GhotiFish 11y agoI don't know either, it was a little short, sort of a non comment I guess. but It wasn't really objectionable or anything.
- chatmasta 11y agoOne could argue that's the safest time to buy eggs, since recalls will err toward false positives.
- s_dev 11y agoI've gone from viewing the people in the database as maliciously motivated cheating jerks who deserved their outing to complete lame asses I simply feel sorry for. Very few of the women on the database were actually real. They charged for deleting data and never did. Every successive revelation makes the AM users look like chumps and AM employees look like incompetent fools. I would have thought such a security breach would have taken down the entire business model but nope they're still going. I'm sure a lot more senior staff will have to step down in order to rebrand at some point so they can distance themselves from this disaster.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoAlso keep in mind that the whole affair thing was a branding change done in 2009 so many who signed up before may not have been looking for that. Then you have stories about people who were looking for a discrete relationship and wasn't commuting adultery they just needed to be discrete because of personal reasons (like living in a country that imprisons or executes people who are gay). Plus anyone can add someone to the service AND there are plenty of people who enjoy the trill of simply looking and not doing anything. So yeah I don't think it's a slam dunk that they're all "cheating jerks". Though I'm sure plenty are :)
- inversionOf 11y agoAlso keep in mind that the whole affair thing was a branding change done in 2009 2005- http://www.cbsnews.com/news/double-trouble/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/double-trouble/ "Darren Morgenstern is a happily married man who runs ashleymadison.com, a Web site for attached people with cheating on their minds. "When monogamy becomes monotony: That's our trademark slogan," 2002- https://web.archive.org/web/20040214171743/http://www.ashleymadison.com/public/media/press/2.php https://web.archive.org/web/20040214171743/http://www.ashley... The site identified itself specifically for adultery, and that angle earned them an enormous amount of free press.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoHmm I had read in several places it was in 2009. Well there goes that point then.
- logfromblammo 11y agoI simply cannot fathom why anyone would sign up for a site that specializes in extramarital relationships instead of a general-purpose dating website or culture-specific or orientation-specific dating website. I just don't see what value it adds beyond putting "married, looking to swing/cheat" in your profile. They say you can't cheat an honest man. So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters.
- dpark 11y ago> I simply cannot fathom why anyone would sign up for a site that specializes in extramarital relationships Discretion. Most of the people on Ashley Madison presumably were wanting to keep their attempted affairs a secret. Most of them were probably not in "swinging" relationships, or indeed they would go to regular dating websites and just advertise their open relationship status. > So if you want to cheat someone, you might as well advertise to cheaters. That's basically the sales pitch for Ashley Madison. "Want to cheat? Here's some women who want to cheat with you."
- logfromblammo 11y agoDiscretion? Hindsight has its benefits here, but I already automatically suspect anyone asking for my e-mail address of turning around to sell it to the highest bidder. If I'm looking for discretion, this is what I expect to see on the HTTP site: "You are being redirected to our secure site." And this is what I expect to see on the HTTPS site: "How to delete this site from your browser history and router logs" and "How to access our Tor hidden service." Finally, on the Tor hidden site, "How to maintain anonymity while using Bitcoin" and "Create a new account". But I'm probably more untrusting than most. And there will probably always be people willing to visit http://www.blackmailphishing.cc/new_mark.php http://www.blackmailphishing.cc/new_mark.php to create a new account and upload their dankest, dirtiest, and most embarrassing secrets, for free! Wait. Wait. I got that address wrong. It's actually https://www.opm.gov/investigations/e-qip-application/ https://www.opm.gov/investigations/e-qip-application/ . And they got hacked, too.
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- justwannasing 11y agoI consider this article the equivalent of announcing the stepping down of a founder of a porn site. Why is this considered news?
- throwamay 11y agoSure he's gone, but he'll have to pay $19 to have his corp email account deleted.
- dixx 11y agoThis is so strange! How can a business with 30+ million male users looking for sex outside marriage exist for 14 years while the site has no female users except for bots!!! Are you saying all those people were stupid enough to not realize they were not going to get laid(and kept paying too)? It seems when you have advertising money and a cost structure that let's you make money and stay alive, you don't even have to have a real product! It makes sense to invest on people not ideas! I wonder how many other BIG companies are pulling the same tricks to get unrealistic valuations (Twitter and Uber, they are not worth that much, especially Uber)
- JeremyMorgan 11y agoI figured Tinder would be putting these folks out of business anyway. It's like Netflix vs Blockbuster. The hack and exposures, combined with the revelation most of the accounts are men.. yeah they won't make it another year.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- octygen 11y agoHere's a different angle. I'd recruit ex-AM employees. Their business model is brilliant even if is basically illegal! Imagine what they could achieve in an organization with even moderate ethics! The users? That's another story. I'm checking each applicant against "the list". On the list? We could probably do better in that position.
- mikeash 11y agoI don't think the unethical part of their business model can really be separated from the brilliance of it. The site is basically a scam. If you remove the scam, there's nothing of substance left.
- am-user 11y agoThrowaway because obvious (BTW, it would be really cool if HN had a way of allowing anonymous posts not linked to your primary account without creating a 1-time account that just clogs up the user table). I am an Ashley Madison user, although probably not typical in any respect. And yes, my details are in the leak. Me and my wife grew up and married within the mormon church, complete with its absolutely distorted view of human sexuality. After leaving mormonism, we came to realize our sexual maturity had been stunted and wanted to experience new things...we now have a somewhat open marriage. We set a few ground rules because we do love each other and didn't want to break up, but then we set out on our quests to find other partners. I tried the tinder thing, and that was okay. I tried just going to bars, and that was okay. I came away feeling a little skeezy, despite being completely honest with my wife, because I had to be dishonest with the girls I was meeting...nobody in those situations responds well to "Oh, by the way, I'm married", no matter how clear you are about it being okay with your wife. I also grew tired of hookups and one night stands very quickly. I wanted to meet women that occasionally wanted to meet up, but were okay with the fact that I had a family life and couldn't just run away any time either of us wanted some. Tinder and bars were definitely the wrong target market. While I was doing this, my wife skipped straight to Ashley Madison. Put up a few pictures, and within seconds she was getting more messages than she could read. Like literally 500+ messages a day. She tried to filter them by stating explicitly on her profile what she was not interested in (specifically, out of shape or over 45yo). It didn't stop them. Most of the messages could be described as follows: Shrivelled or obese old men (my wife is 29 btw) well over 45 (including several senior citizens), accompanied by unsolicited dick pics, and messages about how they could last all night long or whatever. Some men were a lot closer to what she was looking for, but after filtering out all the garbage she didn't feel up to the task of trying to message back. She decided to ignore the messages and try messaging men herself. They either didn't respond, or they messaged back asking if she was a fake profile. She eventually was successful in finding what she wanted, but it was pretty significant effort. I grew frustrated with the expectations of tinder and bars, and reluctantly decided to try AM. After seeing my wife's experience, I knew I was in for a sausage fest competition, but I also learned quickly what was a turnoff to women and I am pretty attractive myself, so I thought I had a chance. My perspective from the guy's side? For the most part, it is an extremely expensive scam. A single message will cost you $1-2 depending on the points package you bought (women don't pay for anything). If you want a priority message, it costs double that. All you get with a priority message is a guarantee that your message will not be buried in the 500+ message/day inbox of the woman you are trying to message. It can still get buried, but it only gets buried under other priority messages. I had 20+ messages a day from other women (or, more accurately, profiles of women). It was very obvious that most of them were fake, so I didn't bother with the obvious ones. Some of them were less obvious fakes. Some of them were scams to get you to sign up for other sites, or paid "background checks" from women who "just want to be safe". And occasionally, I got messages from actual women, but I never was interested in them. I did have some success with talking to and meeting actual women. Based on my experience, I would estimate that 1000 is a pretty low estimate for the total number of active women on the site. I would probably ballpark 100-200 in my metro area, at least between 20-40yo. And here's another surprise...about half of them were single. In fact, all of the women I ended up meeting in person were single. But yes, it was quite obvious that the vast majority were completely fake. I actually feel like I enjoyed my AM experience, but can totally understand why you wouldn't if you aren't comparatively young and attractive. For them, I guess you could blame it on AM being a scam site as much as you could blame it on having inflated expectations of what you could get out of it. I mean, if you are 50+, overweight, and have no clue how to talk to women, of course you aren't going to land a date with a 20yo hotbody. And yet it happened...thousands of men threw away their money in an attempt to hook up with my wife. I'd estimate AM made at least $5000 from my wife alone, in the two months she was active on it. And then there is the leak problem. I wasn't worried about my wife finding out, and I'm not worried about divorce...but I am worried about my extended family finding my email address, because they are all super judgmental mormons (albeit with naive kind hearts). I have had to come up with a cover story with my wife if they approached her about it. My life won't end if they find out...it just will just become a lot more tense with my extended family. I also now have to worry about moral crusaders in background checks and other situations...I get the opportunity to tell people my situation is different while they smile, nod, and judge me as a sleazy cheater. That sucks. Add to that the fact that we couldn't delete our profiles without paying a ransom, and it totally sucks. And while the majority of the active users were likely men trying to cheat on their wives, there were tons of people just like me, as well as other situations (including single people, homosexuals, polyamorous, etc.) where they weren't cheating but they did want something direct and discrete. TL;DR: Not a complete scam, just mostly. The site really was mostly a bunch of desperate men talking to bots and getting ignored by women, and paying out the nose for the privilege. And Avid Life Media is a pile of shit company that deserves their inevitable bankruptcy. Their executive team is both nefarious and negligent and should be burned at the metaphorical stake. I hope they shut down the company before the picture data gets released. And maybe have some empathy for the users that got caught up in the leak, because all you have is proof that they signed up for a website, but you don't have any clue as to their situation nor intentions.
- hadeharian 11y agoMeanwhile, we wait for AM founder to bend over for the soap.