Definitely saw some of that when I initiated contact. Fortunately my profile was decent enough that I had messages coming in which was how I met everyone I actually met in person. I stopped initiating conversations pretty soon into it.
Ashley Madison doc on Netflix
- Thread starter Tinmachine
- Start date
LavaLife was quite good back in the day. I had too many ongoing conversations to keep track of, but I met my wife there (quickly). I wish I had spent more time on there and joined the “Encounters” part of the site to have some fun prior to seriously dating my (now) wife, but I guess she was the smart one for wrangling me off and exclusively dating.
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Finished the first episode. Really appreciate the frequent shots of the Toronto skyline to remind you what we gave to the world. Toronto the Good eh?
Interesting seeing the behind the scenes business decisions. Also the many comments about people doing it for what they're not getting at home and not because they don't love their spouse or whatever. That was exactly what I was thinking as were the women I saw and it was surprising how furious the public reaction was considering how common cheating is.
It did amaze me even back then how naive so many people were to surrender so much personal info like real name, birthday, even posting public pics of their face. I joined very early and even then my first thought was this is a treasure trove of info for extortionists like the mob. I figured it was only a matter of time before someone hacked it. Never gave any such info, think I originally paid by anonymous money order or something. Even the women I met, we all had an understanding about no last names, home addresses, etc.
Hasnt come up yet but when the site started they had a feature where you could rate people on various metrics (responsive, good conversation, better in person, etc) both plus and minus. Even those early internet days anticipated the future as rejected men were soon giving women negative marks like crazy. They eventually killed that feature for obvious reasons but I took advantage before then and used some of my fake female accounts to bolster my real profile with positive votes. Really helped my profile stand out more and then the real women added to the score even more. Funny thing is, they both turned off the rating feature and removed all negative numbers, but left all the positive ones already earned by existing members. Gave a permanent advantage over new members who could not have any positive metrics at all to display.
On to the next episode soon.
Interesting seeing the behind the scenes business decisions. Also the many comments about people doing it for what they're not getting at home and not because they don't love their spouse or whatever. That was exactly what I was thinking as were the women I saw and it was surprising how furious the public reaction was considering how common cheating is.
It did amaze me even back then how naive so many people were to surrender so much personal info like real name, birthday, even posting public pics of their face. I joined very early and even then my first thought was this is a treasure trove of info for extortionists like the mob. I figured it was only a matter of time before someone hacked it. Never gave any such info, think I originally paid by anonymous money order or something. Even the women I met, we all had an understanding about no last names, home addresses, etc.
Hasnt come up yet but when the site started they had a feature where you could rate people on various metrics (responsive, good conversation, better in person, etc) both plus and minus. Even those early internet days anticipated the future as rejected men were soon giving women negative marks like crazy. They eventually killed that feature for obvious reasons but I took advantage before then and used some of my fake female accounts to bolster my real profile with positive votes. Really helped my profile stand out more and then the real women added to the score even more. Funny thing is, they both turned off the rating feature and removed all negative numbers, but left all the positive ones already earned by existing members. Gave a permanent advantage over new members who could not have any positive metrics at all to display.
On to the next episode soon.
Finished the last 2. Very interesting seeing what happened inside the company in response to the hack and that the hacker got away and was never heard from again. I get why they would want to expose the lies of the company about charging people to delete traces and not doing it, about the deluge of bots sucking money in, etc and if they had limited their data leak to that I'd be applauding. But leaking real people's info knowing full well the damage it would cause from divorce to suicides was something else entirely and they deserve to pay for that. It was effective showing a few marriages and what happened to them.
Surprised that they didn't get into whether the new owners had made any changes to address these issues. The user base has doubled since so you'd think whoever hacked them would be doubly upset that the site is still going. Do they have better security, do they delete data like they used to promise? Would have been interesting to hear interviews with people who joined the site after the hack about why they're comfortable doing so given what happened.
It really is amazing how cheap they were especially when the money was rolling in. How could you expect to get away with having no serious IT security or not hire someone to just delete the info of people who paid for that? As I mentioned in my earlier post, you could figure out who was a fake profile contacting you by just clicking on the "who viewed your profile" tab? How little would it have cost to write some basic code to make the bot view your profile first before messaging you. Penny wise, pound foolish.
Surprised that they didn't get into whether the new owners had made any changes to address these issues. The user base has doubled since so you'd think whoever hacked them would be doubly upset that the site is still going. Do they have better security, do they delete data like they used to promise? Would have been interesting to hear interviews with people who joined the site after the hack about why they're comfortable doing so given what happened.
It really is amazing how cheap they were especially when the money was rolling in. How could you expect to get away with having no serious IT security or not hire someone to just delete the info of people who paid for that? As I mentioned in my earlier post, you could figure out who was a fake profile contacting you by just clicking on the "who viewed your profile" tab? How little would it have cost to write some basic code to make the bot view your profile first before messaging you. Penny wise, pound foolish.
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