7 ms·

What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal

136 points by consumer451 2y ago

infecto 2y ago
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".
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  Obligatory xkcd :) https://xkcd.com/713/ https://xkcd.com/713/
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    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.
- tlb 2y ago
  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.
  - infecto 2y ago
    That is true, I had lumped them together at a higher classification level. I still find it surprising that this is new news as it has been the direction of different industries for a couple decades now.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    There's a big difference between a bot and a tool-assisted human.
knallfrosch 2y ago
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.
- Loughla 2y ago
  This is just another example of the massive loneliness epidemic in today's world. If there is enough value in basic chat bots for the people using that site, this is a sad state of affairs (pun fully intended).
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    I mean, these are presumably married men who were using it. So the problems might be a little more nuanced than just pure loneliness.
    - thetoon 2y ago
      There is loneliness in marriage, sometimes.
  - afavour 2y ago
    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.
    - delichon 2y ago
nomilk 2y ago
There's no new information here (the article is probably just a promotional tie-in to promote the recent Netflix series..). In any case, the tl;dr - 95% of the site's users were men - the company running the site made fake female profiles to interact with men: "how r u?", "what's up?" etc. - men would pay to reply
- indymike 2y ago
  > 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.
michaelbuckbee 2y ago
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 https://www.latent.space/p/nsfw-chatbots
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  > often users know that they are not talking to a person, but choose to ignore it. Keep telling yourself that to sleep soundly at night while scamming lonely people, Jesse.
  - dmix 2y ago
    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.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    Many of these sites aren't scams. They proclaim loudly and proudly "chat with an AI sex bot" and people sign up for that.
noufalibrahim 2y ago
It's mind boggling how many bad actors need to come together to execute something like this and keep it running. "fraud-to-engager"...
- havblue 2y ago
  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.
  - afpx 2y ago
    They mean the people who built and ran it.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
jmyeet 2y ago
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.
lern_too_spel 2y ago
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-on-ashley-madison/ https://people.com/tv/josh-duggar-paid-for-affair-guarantee-...
djkivi 2y ago
Fuck cheaters and fuck cheating.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  > Fuck cheaters Pretty much sums up AM's sales pitch.
D-Coder 2y ago
> 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.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  It's funny, because at no point do they consider the possibility that them were having affairs with each other. Less likely, for sure, but far from impossible.
  - phone8675309 2y ago
    Dudes rock
- pcthrowaway 2y ago
  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.
alberto6996 2y ago
[dead]
MELEKE 2y ago
[dead]

136 points by consumer451 2y ago

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".

seabass-labrax 2y ago
Obligatory xkcd :) https://xkcd.com/713/ https://xkcd.com/713/
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  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.
tlb 2y ago
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.
- infecto 2y ago
  That is true, I had lumped them together at a higher classification level. I still find it surprising that this is new news as it has been the direction of different industries for a couple decades now.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  There's a big difference between a bot and a tool-assisted human.

knallfrosch 2y ago

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.

Loughla 2y ago
This is just another example of the massive loneliness epidemic in today's world. If there is enough value in basic chat bots for the people using that site, this is a sad state of affairs (pun fully intended).
- saagarjha 2y ago
  I mean, these are presumably married men who were using it. So the problems might be a little more nuanced than just pure loneliness.
  - thetoon 2y ago
    There is loneliness in marriage, sometimes.
- afavour 2y ago
  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.
  - delichon 2y ago

nomilk 2y ago

There's no new information here (the article is probably just a promotional tie-in to promote the recent Netflix series..). In any case, the tl;dr - 95% of the site's users were men - the company running the site made fake female profiles to interact with men: "how r u?", "what's up?" etc. - men would pay to reply

indymike 2y ago
> 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.

michaelbuckbee 2y ago

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 https://www.latent.space/p/nsfw-chatbots

knallfrosch 2y ago
> often users know that they are not talking to a person, but choose to ignore it. Keep telling yourself that to sleep soundly at night while scamming lonely people, Jesse.
- dmix 2y ago
  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.
- itishappy 2y ago
  Many of these sites aren't scams. They proclaim loudly and proudly "chat with an AI sex bot" and people sign up for that.

noufalibrahim 2y ago

It's mind boggling how many bad actors need to come together to execute something like this and keep it running. "fraud-to-engager"...

havblue 2y ago
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.
- afpx 2y ago
  They mean the people who built and ran it.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

jmyeet 2y ago

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.

lern_too_spel 2y ago

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-on-ashley-madison/ https://people.com/tv/josh-duggar-paid-for-affair-guarantee-...

djkivi 2y ago

Fuck cheaters and fuck cheating.

chuckadams 2y ago
> Fuck cheaters Pretty much sums up AM's sales pitch.

D-Coder 2y ago

> 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.

BobaFloutist 2y ago
It's funny, because at no point do they consider the possibility that them were having affairs with each other. Less likely, for sure, but far from impossible.
- phone8675309 2y ago
  Dudes rock
pcthrowaway 2y ago
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.

alberto6996 2y ago

[dead]

MELEKE 2y ago

[dead]