Everything about Hot Or Not totally explained
Hot or Not is a
rating site that allows users to rate the attractiveness of
photos submitted voluntarily by others.
Description
Photos are approved by a panel of volunteer moderators, who strive to keep the site "fun, clean, and real". However, in recent times there have been changes to the moderating system, see below.
History
The site was founded in
October 2000 by James Hong and Jim Young, two friends and
Silicon Valley-based engineers (both graduated from
UC Berkeley), as a technical solution to a disagreement they made one day over a passing woman's attractiveness. The site was originally called "Am I Hot or Not". Within a week of launching, it had reached almost two million page views per day. Within a few months, the site was immediately behind
CNET and
NBCi on NetNielsen Rating's Top 25 advertising domains. To keep up with rising costs Hong and Young added a
matchmaking component to their website called "Meet Me at Hot or Not", for example a system of
range voting. The matchmaking service has been especially successful and the site continues to generate most of its revenue through subscriptions. In the December 2006 issue of Time Magazine, the founders of
Youtube stated that they originally set out to make a version of Hot or Not with Video before developing their more inclusive site. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook similarly got his start by creating a Hot or Not type site called FaceMash, where he posted photos from harvard's facebook for the university's community to rate.
Hot or Not was recently sold for a rumored $20 million.
Predecessors and Spin-offs
Hot or Not was preceded by the popular
RateMyFace
, which was launched a year earlier in the summer of
1999, and AmIHot.com, which was launched in January of 2000 by MIT freshman Daniel Roy. Despite the head starts of its predecessors, Hot or Not quickly became the most popular. Trademark threats from AmIHot.com eventually forced AmIHotOrNot.com to change its name to HotOrNot.com in 2001 and buy AmIHot.com in 2004. Since AmIHotOrNot.com's launch, the concept has spawned many imitators. The concept always remained the same, but the subject matter varied greatly. The concept has also been integrated with a wide variety of dating and matchmaking systems.
In 2007 a new concept emerged and BecauseImHot.com was founded. Unlike Hot or Not and other spin-offs, Because I'm Hot restricted membership to hot people only. Users that are not deemed hot enough by voting audits are deleted.
Variations on the Hot or Not concept include voting via a
Condorcet method where a candidate is compared with other candidates in a series of pairwise comparisons in order to gauge their popularity.
Research
In 1883,
Francis Galton, cousin of
Charles Darwin, devised a technique called
composite photography, described in detail in
Inquiries in Human Faculty and its Development, which he believed could be used to identify 'types' by appearance, which he hoped would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces. In short, he wondered if certain groups of people had certain facial characteristics. To find this answer, he created photographic composite images of the faces of
vegetarians and
criminals to see if there was a typical facial appearance for each. Galton overlaid multiple images of faces onto a single photographic plate so that each individual face contributed roughly equally to a final composite face. While the resultant “averaged” faces did little to allow the a priori identification of either criminals or vegetarians, Galton observed that the composite image was more attractive than the component faces. Similar observations were made in 1886 by
Stoddard, who created composite faces of members of the
National Academy of Sciences and graduating seniors of
Smith College. This phenomenon is now known as
averageness-effect, that's the highly physically attractive tend to be indicative of the average traits of the population.
In 2005, as an example of using
image morphing methodology to study the effects of averageness, imaging researcher Pierre Tourigny created a composite of about 30 faces to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet (as shown above). On the popular
Hot or Not web site, people rate others’ attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. An average score based on hundreds or even thousands of individual ratings takes only a few days to emerge. To make this hot or not pallate of morphed images, photos from the site were sorted by rank and used SquirlzMorph to create multi-morph composites from them. Unlike projects like
Face of Tomorrow where the subjects are posed for the purpose, the portraits are blurry because the source images are low resolution with differences in posture, hair styles, glasses, etc, so that here images could use only 36 control points for the morphs. A similar study was done with
Miss Universe contestants, as shown in the
averageness article, as well as one for age, as shown in
youthfulness article.
A recent 2006 "hot" or "not" style study, involving 264 women and 18 men, at the
Washington University School of Medicine, as published online in the journal Brain Research, indicates that a person's brain determines whether an image is erotic long before the viewer is even aware they're seeing the picture. Moreover, according to these researchers, one of the basic functions of the brain is to classify images into a hot or not type categorization. The study's researchers also discovered that sexy shots induce a uniquely powerful reaction in the brain, equal in effect for both men and women, and that erotic images produced a strong reaction in the
hypothalamus.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Hot Or Not'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://hot_or_not.totallyexplained.com">Hot or Not Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
