This Week in God (Maddow blog)

[onager]

11. Many A-M women, like God, did not exist.

I'm still waiting for an update on the 400 who got caught.

Who were mostly trying to communicate with non-existent women, it turns out.

Annalee Newitz at Gizmodo downloaded the entire hacked database and analyzed it

Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris?

Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.

http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-women-in-the-ashley-madison-database-1725558944