Hot or Not

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Hot or Not
OwnerHot Or Not Limited
URLhttps://www.hotornot.com
LaunchedOctober 2000; 23 years ago (2000-10)

Hot or Not is a

rating site that allowed users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted voluntarily by others. The site offered a matchmaking engine called 'Meet Me' and an extended profile feature called "Hotlists". The domain hotornot.com is currently owned by Hot Or Not Limited,[1] and was previously owned by Avid Life Media. 'Hot or Not' was a significant influence on the people who went on to create the social media sites Facebook and YouTube.[2]

Description

Users would submit photographs of themselves to the site for the purpose of other users to rate said person's attractiveness on a scale of 1 - 10, with the cumulative average acting as the overall score for a given photograph.

History

The site was founded in October 2000 by James Hong and Jim Young, two friends and

Ph.D.
at the time. It was inspired by some other developers' ideas.

The site was a technical solution to a disagreement the founders had 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

FaceMash, where he posted photos from Harvard's Facebook for the university's community to rate.[3]

Hot or Not was sold for a rumored $20 million on February 8, 2008, to Avid Life Media, owners of

radio DJ turned celebrity blogger Zack Taylor
.

In 2012, Hot or Not was purchased by

Bumble Inc.[6]
The app is currently rebranded as Chat & Date which uses a similar user interface to Badoo and shares user accounts between both sites.

Predecessors and spin-offs

Hot or Not was preceded by other

MIT freshman Daniel Roy. Regardless, despite any head starts
of its predecessors, Hot or Not quickly became the most popular. 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 BecauseImHot.com launched and deleted anyone with a rating below 7 after a voting audit or the first 50 votes (whichever is first).

As a sophomore at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg created Facemash, a website where users compared the attractiveness of fellow students.[7]

The binary concept has been used in a variety of dating apps where users can select to swipe right or swipe left on a user, to decide where to match or discard them. This represents a similar concept of deciding whether a user is "hot" or "not".

Research

In 2005, as an example of using

youthfulness
article.

A 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 erotically appealing long before the viewer is even aware they are 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.[10][11]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Hot or Not Privacy Policy". Hot Or Not. Retrieved 6 April 2015.
  2. ^ "Rich, Thriving, Busy: Where Hot Or Not's Co-Founders Are Today". US: ABC News. 2014-06-03. Retrieved 2015-10-01.
  3. ^ Facemash.com, Home of Zuckerberg's Facebook Predecessor, For Sale TechCrunch, October 5, 2010. Retrieved January 9, 2012.
  4. ^ HotOrNot Apparently Very Hot: Acquired For $20 Million TechCrunch
  5. ^ "HotOrNot: From Nothing to $20M in 7 years!". YouTube. 2007-06-15. Archived from the original on 2021-12-11. Retrieved 2011-07-27.
  6. ^ "Hot or Not gets creepier: It's now a dating app".
  7. ISSN 0190-8286
    . Retrieved 2024-01-16.
  8. ^ "faceoftomorrow.com". Archived from the original on 1 August 2015.
  9. ^ Manitou (2006). Hot or Not – Attractiveness Face Scale (composite images), Flicker, May 4.
  10. ^ Wittlin, Maggie, "Hot or Not – Women’s brains respond to erotic images as quickly and strongly as men’s". Seed Magazine – Brain & Behavior, July, 13.
  11. PMID 16712815
    .

References

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