It's a joke... You know, like... haha... funny. That kind of a thing.

Right.

But why's half the thread treating it like an actual analysis?

There are two claims here: "POF is not really that big", and "Emergent AI clickfraud bots are causing POF's traffic". People who are treating this seriously are assuming that the first claim was the real message, and that the author merely indulged in some whimsy after. I think it more likely that the second claim, the joke, was the point of the article, but there's a lot less to be said about that, and so people who want to say something serious about POF are ignoring it.

Because people have no sense of humor? Beats the hell out of me, and I wrote it. They're debating it on the comments of the post itself, too. I thought it was pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek, but maybe I should have suggested that Markus was secretly an alien or something.

I was equally perplexed. I thought it was hilarious and then I went to the comments and thought Isiah Thomas was running the Knicks again.

Hey, sorry, I missed that it was a joke too. I only read half way through, sounded like crack-potery so I stopped.