Imaginary friends, fake profiles and stupid men

[Steveboy]

It makes you wonder how many stupid people there are in the world today.

If anyone has seen recently about the AshleyMadison.com hack that revealed one of the largest dating sites on the net was a total scam.

http://gizmodo.com/the-fembots-of-ashley-madison-1726670394

http://business.financialpost.com/fp-tech-desk/ashley-madisons-female-users-are-pretty-much-non-existent-evidence-shows

Yet 35 million guys are registered at this site contributing to $114 million of subscriptions per year. There are NO women on the site and never have been. Most of these guys just want to "get off" on the idea that they are having an affair with a married women
A little like many guys who sign up searching for a foreign bride. Its easy to have an "imaginary girlfriend"

[andrewfi]

For some blokes the 'imaginary girlfriend' is all that they need. I had a girl friend a long time ago who maintained an ongoing penpal relationship with a German bloke in order that she could use him as her cover story, her 'beard'.

By the way, it turns out that the story that there were no, or almost no, women on Ashley Madison was incorrect, due to a poor understanding of the database tables.

While it is true that the number of members was vastly weighted in favour of men there was activity from women in two areas:
1) genuine seekers of relationships with married or attached men
2) women who were seeking women

It seems that gay pairings were simply not considered by the management or system designers and so they were not spammed or chased by 'bots. It seems that the site was something of an undercover hookup site for gay men and women who were never pestered by other members or the site management. If I remember correctly there was an article about this on Gizmodo updating the original claims of 'no women' with the more accurate state of affairs.

[Volshe]

  writers often come up with imaginary friends/ beaus, to get people off their backs...

Instead of saying (to somebody normal) i spend the whole night rewriting an one-page long dialogue (as "normal" people don't get that), you say,

oh i was on fb (any other social network/ messenger/ application that applies) chatting with this guy/ 'gal 'till the early hours... 

why don't you meet irl?

oh, they live in a far off land... 

sounds more realistic, esp., to younger generations

if you'd tell what it really takes to write a (good) dialogue ...

[Manny]

if you'd tell what it really takes to write a (good) dialogue ...

Same with writing anything decent. If for publishing I have to go over and over it. Even with books, I haven't been happy till 7/8th test print, and even then reading later you find you could make improvements.

I spotted a howler in an RT article written by a chap I know recently. I sent him an email pointing it out, he replied back, "Crap, I must have read through it 100 times before I filed the copy - I'll get it edited". 

I see typos and howlers in the papers daily though, so nobody is immune.

[andrewfi]

I knew I'd seen it and just now Facebook shoved it into my Face.
http://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and-more-bots-1727613924

770,000 women seeking women and NONE of them were chatbots.
345,000 men seeking men and getting no 'bot contact either.

Both figures well in excess of what might be expected from a normal selection of the population - it is a gay hookup site flying under the radar!