It would have been great as a gay cheating site

Here's a very interesting footnote from the whole Ashley Madison hack debacle.

If you're going to run a website to hook up cheating men with cheating women, ideally you'd have a bunch of both. According to Ashley Madison management, there are approximately 37 million registered users, of which 5.5 million are women. That's a terrible ratio, but still 5.5 million women is a lot. It turns out, not so much.

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.

Check out the article by Annalee Newitz for the detective work involved in figuring this out.

The idea behind the Ashley Madison site is sad on many levels. The fact that, at its lying best, it had six males for every one female is a brutal comment on men. The fact that there may have only really been 12,000 women to 31 million men is pathetic on a whole new level.