- Hello to the World Wide Web,
I'm Jess Joho, staff writer at Mashable,
logging on to tell you the wild story
of a 20-year-old piece of misunderstood early web history
that changed the internet forever.
Long before MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram,
or Tinder existed, there was Hot or Not,
launched in October of 2000 by two UC Berkeley grads,
James Hong and Jim Young.
It let you upload pictures of yourself, for total strangers
on the Internet to rate your attractiveness.
Today, Hot or Not sounds, at best shallow
and at worst, obviously problematic.
But, two decades ago, it became one of the first ever
overnight viral sensations.
The website equivalent of modern day memes,
spreading online only by word of mouth
and inspiring countless copycats like Goth or Not,
Rate My Poo and Monkey Hot or Not.
As ridiculous as it sounds Hot or Not
was the genesis for so many revolutionary ideas
that still define how we interact
with each other online today,
We might've gotten rid of the one to 10 rating scale,
but likes on Instagram selfies is still basically
imply a score of how Hot or Not the internet thinks you are.
It popularized this gamified online social interaction,
where the internet basically gives everything you upload
a collective score, whether through likes or retweets.
Hot or Not was the first time millions of people
turn to the internet as a collective judge
of their self-worth.
It was seen as a tool for honest assessment,
almost like a digital mirror that couldn't lie.
Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter,
described how at the time uploading pictures
of yourself to the internet was seen as
a scandalous novel concept.
But Not or Not pioneered it,
planting the seeds for what later became public profiles.
Would any of us have been comfortable with MySpace
and later Facebook without Hot or Not?
Hot or Not later invented online speed dating,
with the Meet Me feature, which is now considered
the precursor to modern dating apps.
It invented the double opt-in matching system
that Tinder then patented almost two decades later.
Potential matches could only message each other,
after both parties had expressed mutual interest.
It introduced the concept of digital consent
to online dating, where other sites at the time
like match.com, left female users to basically just be
bombarded by endless unwanted harassing messages from men.
Williams,even noted how this double
opt-in communication influenced Twitter's direct
messaging system, requiring users to already
be following each other.
We take a lot of these innovations for granted today,
but the internet was a totally different place back in 2000.
YouTube co-founders Steve Chen described how
Hot or Not launched in the wake of the dot com bubble burst
and late 1990s.
Only more traditional sites like Yahoo and Google
had figured out how to make money from the internet
alongside, well, porn because some things never changed.
But Hot or Not was the first key role model
for financial success through virality.
It was inspiring seeing these broke college kids
prove the untapped potential of profiting from the web
off of a simple, cheap, but attention grabbing idea.
Kun Gao, one of Hot or Not, earliest employees
who later went on to co-found Crunchyroll,
said that it showed that anything was possible
on the internet.
And that the web was one big experiment
that could serve as a social playground,
instead of just a place for utility services.
By 2003, Hot or Not was earning 4 million a year,
profitable enough that the founders offered to host
their friends, a startup for free.
One of those startups was Twitter.
Hot or Not is even deeply embedded in Facebook's history,
as famously fictionalized in the 2010 movie,
"The Social Network."
A college aged Mark Zuckerberg is depicted
as creating a Harvard copycat of Hot or Not,
named FaceMash, of the precursor to the Facebook.
Some critics point to Hot or Not, and FaceMash as,
the genesis for misogynistic social media culture.
Some research does suggest that these platforms,
created mostly by men can negatively impact
women and girls in particular,
by valuing their physical appearance above all else.
But Hot or Not co-founder Jim Young argues that
labeling Hot or Not a one-sided beauty pageant,
where women were judged by men isn't accurate.
Their data showed that on average men submitted
twice as many photos as women
and were even rated more harshly.
In fact, the founders described Hot or Not as giving men
a taste of their own medicine
by subjecting them to the same kind of scrutiny
that women had always faced.
The Hot or Not team also included two women,
Dawn Ngo and Desiree Therianos, saying that
their input was highly valued.
Everyone put thought into how to design the site
in a way that would lessen its potential harms.
They purposely avoided comment sections and forums.
So people with low scores wouldn't get dogpiled.
They used innovations like moderation systems
that could quickly take down pictures
flagged for being uploaded without the person's consent.
There is no doubt that the beauty standards ranked highest,
on hot or not word, gender racist, heteronormative,
ageist, fatphobic, and ableist,
much like those who get the biggest followings
and likes on social media now,
online culture reflects the biases of the real world.
But founder James Hong sees these aspects
of the social web that trace back to Hot or Not
as inevitable.
Hot or Not and social media didn't invent vanity,
insecurity or sexism.
But Hong said he does recognize that it is Silicon Valley's
job to stop creating platforms that exacerbate them.
Eventually the founders sold Hot or Not in 2008,
for $20 million.
Later, British dating site Badoo
bought it and in a painfully ironic full circle,
turned Hot or Not into yet another Tinder clone.
Hot or Not the site that inspired so many influential
copycats now exists as a bad copycat of itself.
Reckoning with the site's legacy
and impact on the social web is complicated today.
But for better and for worse,
whether we like it or not, we're all still living
on an internet that Hot or Not helped birth.