> Yes, Ashley Madison, the "dating" site.

Not sure why you seem to be implying that the article is using a euphemism, as literally the next phrase in that sentence is "which caters to married people seeking affairs".

I don't know if you are aware of the specific details of what Ashley Madison did, but basically they were using bots to convince men that there were actual women interested in meeting (if only the use paid the membership fee to enable messaging), when by-and-large there were none. It was a scam.

I mean, most dating websites use a series of tricks of messaging and "matches" to trick people into thinking there are more people available than there actual are. I did a study of eHarmony years ago and came to the conclusion that only 10% of all "matches" were people who had the capability of returning a message. But Ashley Madison took it to a whole new level of creating accounts ran by bots that actively messaged people. IIRC, it was much more on the order of 99% of activity.

There werent any women on AM. When the story broke they couldnt find anyone who actually had an affair. It was scams all the way down.

(And when the mounties responded after the hack there wasnt any evidence either. A so-called unicorn had no cohesive security program.)

wow that's ... in a way ... sad. pretty telling about the state of relationships in this day

Well, it's not really that sad that there was no one actually having affairs on Ashley Madison.

> I did a study of eHarmony years ago and came to the conclusion that only 10% of all "matches" were people who had the capability of returning a message.

Do you mind expanding as to how you were able to establish this?

At the time (mind you, this was 10 years ago) eHarmony had a "tell": paid-member profiles were rendered subtly differently than free ones. I got fed up with using the site and decided I was just going to game it and see what I could learn, so I started taking meticulous notes on what I saw. I took every match that was sent, I kept notes on how I replied, and eventually some patterns emerged. Eventually had it confirmed when a person I was matched with, and went on a date with, decided to let her membership lapse and suddenly her profile was rendered differently.

eHarmony's system only let you message people from a daily, "curated" list of matches. On any given day, you'd get 6 or 7 profiles on your email to review and decide to message or not. I'm sure you just did the math, 10% of 7 is less than one. Less than one viable connection a day.

Once I got past that "90% of these matches are dead ends" hurdle, it turned out about 50% of the people who were capable of replying actually did. I don't remember the exact breakdown, but basically there were a number of questionnaires you why through before getting through to love messages and asking people out. It was essentially a 50/50 filter at each step. IIRC, it was something like a half a percent chance that any profile eHarmony sent you would end up in an actual date.

I suppose dating sites figure, if someone finds their soul mate, they won't need to pay for a membership anymore, so don't actually match anyone, just strong them along for as long as possible.

Not the OP, but on Bumble, I matched with someone who I knew - she showed me her app and no such match had appeared on her app. I think this sort of behavior is not uncommon.

Any more info on this or maybe some screen shots? I'm not on the market but given the complaints about the current state of dating apps I think lots of people would be curious to see this.

Unfortunately I don't have screenshots. I'm happy to provide more info -

for instance, to those who might say "she just didn't want to acknowledge you had matched," I saw it with my own eyes and also we were already involved with each other at the time.

FWIW, my perception is that this is not the case on Tinder, but obviously can't be sure.

lol, I didnt know that. It was basically an extortion racket.

Do you have that study - sounds an interesting read.

I think lifeisstillgood was asking for the eHarmony study.

Yes I was looking for the study behind moron4hire's comment:

I did a study of eHarmony years ago and came to the conclusion that only 10% of all "matches" were people who had the capability of returning a message.

I can quite believe that dating sites manipulate the numbers to look better themselves, and weirdly it's something that with my old school hat on is "not worth regulating" - but as we move to a world where most (?) people will find a partner online this way, being able to trust those numbers would be paramount.

(oddly perhaps such regulation would kill off the market. One of my wife's now divorced friends showed me her Tinder matches - and boy the pickings are poor for middle aged women. Now if you showed a parade of out of shape morons and then said actually only 2 of them are available, people might just stop the whole market and take up needlepoint)

Old blog, now gone, sorry :(

Lol, the same Ashley Madison who screwed over their entire user-base by failing to secure their database. Please Ashley Madison, lecture us more about unethical behavior.

it was not only that, it was revealed they ran bots to chat with users to convince them they had a shot with beautiful women that made up the bulk of user activity iirc. no sympathy obviously but it was a total scam

Being incompetent isn’t the same as being unethical however given their target audience they were more negligent than incompetent.

I think the biggest take away from that site was just how few women were there compared to men, like we were talking in the single digits for verifiable active accounts.

Which is also where the unethical part comes in as AM was running chat bots or ignoring their existence to keep men on the site.

So, my understanding is that FB blocks all dating apps except a bunch of white-listed partners. This goes back to 2013, and was driven (AFAIK) by user feedback (people hate dating ads, who knew?). The compromise was that dating ads could only be shown to people who reported their status as single, which clearly wouldn't work for Ashley Madison.

I don't understand what editor allowed the A.M. section to remain in the article. Felt like an afterthought.

They built up the 'Voldemort' file but then barely referred back to it.

Would have preferred they wait to publish when the had the report in hand or could at least quote directly from it.

Interesting parent is so downvoted - the whole dating / facebook thing has been an issue for a while. Users didn't like cross-pollination between Facebook and dating and not all sites (AM comes to mind) even maintained facebooks LOW LOW standards.

Good to see AM lecturing though as a source for these articles.