Nine years after hackers targeted Ashley Madison, the dating site for wannabe adulterers, many people still don't grasp what was truly chilling about the scandal, says Annalee Newitz

Found via the author’s Mastodon Post

Generally, the media has focused on the (mainly) men whose names and desires were taken from the company’s subscriber database and shared with the world. […] Ashley Madison was never really about that. Avid Life Media, its parent company, wasn’t in the business of sex, it was in the business of bots. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads.

    • limelight79@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      Back when I was in online dating (I got married in 2010, so it has been a very long time), this is how it seemed to work in the hetero arena:

      • Women (by which I mean, legitimate accounts from women who were actually looking for dates): Get 1,000,000 messages, approximately 999,900 of which are dick pics.
      • Men: See 1,000,000 ads, of which about 3 are legitimate people looking for dates.

      So, both could be true in relation to the image.

      I remember a guy once telling me that basically you have to respond to EVERY AD and hope something sticks. I never did that, and I felt bad for what the women must have had to deal with when I heard that. I had very limited success - dates with, at most, two or three women, and none of those really went anywhere. I ended up marrying someone from work instead.

        • limelight79@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          Some kind of miracle, I know. Actually I got more messages, but many of them were either spam or never even made it to a date.

      • wagesj45@kbin.run
        0·
        4 months ago

        Both definitely are true. I don’t mean to indicate that one view is right. One feeds into the other. This is just he natural outcome when one sex is a sexual selector and one is not. I don’t envy either group online dating, but for different reasons.