Interesting data

Ashley Madison was a bunch of dudes talking to each other, data analysis suggests:

Gizmodo editor-in-chief Annalee Newitz analyzed the data from the site’s user database and found a lot of suspicious stuff suggesting that nearly all the female accounts were fake, maintained by the company’s employees.

she found three really damning pieces of data:

  • Only 1,492 of the women in the database had ever checked their messages on the site. That’s compared with more than 20 million men.
  • Only 2,409 of the women had ever used the site’s chat function, versus more than 11 million men.
  • Only 9,700 of the women had ever responded to a message from another person on the site, versus almost 6 million men. (This number was greater than the number of women who checked messages because it’s possible to answer messages in bulk when you first visit the site, without ever opening your inbox.)

It’s possible that most of the women signed up but never did anything.

Either way, Newitz writes, Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there.”

So, basically, the business model was fraud.

Ry and I have frequently suggested to each other we could be wealthy if only we weren’t constrained by our morals. This is another data point suggesting this hypothesis may be true.

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9 thoughts on “Interesting data

  1. “we could be wealthy if only we weren’t constrained by our morals”. Sure. For some professions, that’s true for a significant fraction — lawyers and especially politicians are a clear example.
    For some groups it’s true all the time, such as dictators.

  2. I can’t attribute this, but I remember reading a while back, “The Internet; where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents.”

  3. Kind of makes you wonder if it wasn’t a “Honey Trap” all along. Let’s lure in a bunch of folks for potential blackmail and espionage exploitation.

    • I’m not sure what you will do in this case, but most people probably wouldn’t add it to their resume as they are getting paid cash and wouldn’t want the tax collectors to have evidence for claiming their piece of the action. Or do you usually report cash income?

      I find it interesting you were looking at that type of work. Is your usual job field experiencing a downturn?

      😉

      • Around here, a lot of these porn jobs are legit jobs. My old neighbor used to be a bookkeeper for one of these companies.

        Anyway, I thought that was a weird job. Only in LA….

          • The old “loophole” to get around prostitution laws is that it’s not illegal to pay someone to have sex with you as long as you film it. With “fluff girls” it’s getting a little grayer.

  4. There’s certainly no surprise there. I’ve automatically assumed all such sites to be of a similar nature.

    The very best case scenario (if it were genuine and all – if such a thing were even possible) is still a trap anyway, if you think about it. You lose either way.

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