I'm confused that they had a business BEFORE their data breach. That the same people who thought it was a good idea to publicly search and advertise for a secret affair would continue doing so after a privacy breach is less of a shock.

I once worked at a company that did about $50 million / year at 19.95/mo/customer where about 99% of those customers had forgotten they ever signed up. So it isn’t that surprising AM is still in business.

This is not actually an unreasonable business model, and is explicitly the profitability criteria for most gyms / fitness clubs.

AOL?

No, but more or less of that era. What was really interesting about it was that while I think there had been some dubious tactics to lure people to the product (before my time), the team I was on legitimately wanted to create a useful / valuable product for customers. Ironically, in the course of doing that it drove customers away as they became aware that they had signed up for this thing they had completely forgotten about. So in the course of making right with customers, that $50+MM/year stream disappeared from the company. There's a business lesson or two in there somewhere, but I'm not sure I like what it might say.

> I'm not sure I like what it might say.

To me it says economic performance isn't everything, and I like that idea.

I’m surprised that anyone thought there were a lot of women on that site. To me it seemed one step up fronm “Hot singles in <IP address location>!” Laughably transparent with a side order of extra skeeze.

It turns out -- IIRC -- that Ashley Madison was basically hiring women to flirt with potential customers. Something like that came out in the dump.

quick google: https://splinternews.com/ashley-madison-comes-clean-about-al...

I understand that, I’m just shocked anyone fell for it.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." - H. L. Mencken

Where does this 99% figure come from? And how did they get exposed? Did someone contact everyone's friends and family that got leaked?

>Where does this 99% figure come from?

The data is public now -- AM were blackmailed and didn't pay -- I guess you can take a sample of the email addresses and compare with public profiles that match the emails. There were virtually no women -- in fact they were so paranoid the men would realize there weren't any women to have extra marital affairs with they had -- bots -- that flirted now and again just to keep the men paying.

Plenty of reporting was done on it after the breach. I recall saying to people that this would be a good example of a breach that would destroy a company by exposing that it's value proposition was nothing. I guess I was very wrong.

What if there is a value proposition in paying to have a bot flirt with you now and again?

I'm reminded of the entire "robot boyfriend/girlfriend" genre of TV/Movies/Comics from Japan/Korea, plus the "dating simulator" genre of video games. These are more fantasy-fulfillment, though.

I honestly think it would be a net good for society to have simulators/bots that teach people how to have real, healthy relationships with other humans. (There are anecdoates about kids with autism who became more verbal once they started talking to Siri or the Google Assistant, for example.) But I feel like working on or using such tools would probably be as stigmatized as sex toys in the near/medium term.

There's a difference between seeking out human interaction and then being deceived by a company's bots, and intentionally seeking out bots.

It’s more sad and funny to outside observers, that’s all.

Also, their target audience is nominally married people. So either these people have a fetish for cheating (weird, but not my problem), or they already are in relationships of some sort of another. One would hope that a bit couldn’t teach them anything new at that point.

Maybe it's the perfect place to cheat on your wife with a dude? I've never looked into their site, but maybe it is in practice a gay hookup place?

Or maybe the bots are so good they should just sell those as a service? Why bother chatting with a real woman when the bot experience is better? As I say this, why isn't it a thing already? Chatbot hookers. It has to be a thing already. The interactive experience for a fraction of the price. Or do camgirls set the price floor too low to make this viable?

It seems like our NLP AIs should be advanced enough to make a pretty compelling chatbots by now. People were fooled by Eliza 40 years ago. A lot of porn is pretty formulaic too, so getting the common case right shouldn't be that hard.