本来我听了这个新闻也没多想，who cares, right? 今天看见一篇报道简直瞎掉。有好奇的人分析了一下 AM 的数据库，发现里面的女性注册用户很可能几乎全是假的。
http://gizmodo.com/almost-none-of-the-w ... 1725558944
最搞笑的地方可能是之前已经有 AM 的工人把公司告了，控诉为了输入假造的女性用户资料，把手都弄伤了。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.
做这个分析的作者说，有至少两千万的男用户，注册之后有过活动，发过邮件，收过邮件，上过 chat。而有过活动的女性，大概只有一万上下。
This is fascinating. 我好奇去维基了一下 AM 是怎样赚钱的。
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison
原来 AM 网站早在 2001 年就上线了，用户要交使用费。
注册不要钱，但是注销用户资料则要交19块，而且即使不是你自己注册的（例如有人拿了你的 email address 上去注册），你要注销掉也得花钱。For a conversation between two members, one of the members—almost always the man—must pay five credits to initiate the conversation. Any follow-up messages between the two members are free after the communication has been initiated. Ashley Madison also has a real-time chat feature that is metered. Credits are utilised to pay for a certain time allotment of chat. Women can send messages to men for free, but the men must pay to read them.
网站号称注销之后会彻底消灭用户的资料数据。后来被爆出来也没有，交钱注销的用户的资料也都在他们的数据库里。真是太黑了。The full delete option claimed to remove user profiles, all messages sent and received, site usage history, personally identifiable information, and photos from the site.
说实话我简直没法理解这件事，据说 AM 网站的交通颇为密集：
但是显然活着的女性用户少得要命，真正用此网站而泡上了真人偷到了情的人，恐怕极其罕见，能有万分之一都成问题。可见这是一个非常失败的 platform，不象 Uber, Air BnB，至少人家坐上了车，住到了房子。但现实中的失败毫不影响网站的成功，AM 十几年来长盛不衰，只赚不赔。天下竟有这么好的买卖！我深深觉得自己入错了行业。According to third-party web analytics provider SimilarWeb, the site has more than 124 million visits per month, as of 2015,[6] and is ranked No. 18 among Adult sites.[7]
注意到很多很多用户用的是网站上的 chat 功能。我立刻想到这很容易造假，公司雇只要雇几个员工，每人可以应付几百上千个用户，发发暧昧短信让他们以为跟真人勾搭上了，其实哪有那么多女用户跟他们配对。唉，说到底还不如 phone sex，至少能听见一把女声，这网上意淫活动，对方是男是女你都搞不清楚。
真没想到，一条以婚姻道德争议为开头的新闻，挖出了如此悲剧的人生现实。
哦，对了，另一件让我非常意外的成分是，这么坑人的网站居然是加拿大的，不是中国也不是俄国出品！
混的人，曾经无数次莫名其妙就被带到他们网站上 
不过问题是虽然我被动访问过很多次，我也只知道这是个色情类网站，现在我才知道原来它是专门偷情的！ 