danah boyd | apophenia

I’ve always known that many of the women who post personals ads aren’t real, but i never realized how many of them were adverts for porn sites. Basically, it seems as though porn sites create personals ads for average women and then when men respond, they respond with something like “check out pictures of me on my personal site” which is a link to a porn site.

When talking with a friend who used to work at a personals site, i learned that when they removed all of these “fake” people, their numbers dropped dramatically. It seems as though the loss of fake characters meant the loss of large numbers of decent looking attractive women, which made the site less appealing because there were seemed to be fewer options, even though the same number of real options existed.

Another point for deception being useful psychologically.