HOTorNOT: the Forgotten Website That Shaped the Internet
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
HOTorNOT: The forgotten website that shaped the internet:
Created on a lark in 2000, HOTorNOT became what we'd now call an overnight viral hit by letting people upload pictures of themselves to the internet so total strangers could rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. Twenty years later, it's a conceit that smacks of the juvenile "edginess" of the early web. It's now seen at best as superficial and crass, at worst as problematic and potentially offensive. However, the deeper you dive into HOTorNOT's history, the more surprised you'll be by the thoughtfulness bubbling below its shallow surface - and its fundamental impact on internet history.
In ways big and small, HOTorNOT's DNA is embedded into almost every major platform that defines how we interact online today.
It was the genesis for revolutionary concepts like the public profile at a time when uploading pictures of yourself was seen as an oddity or risk, when Facebook wasn't even a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye. Sure, we may have gotten rid of the 1 to 10 rating scale, but likes on Instagram selfies still essentially serve as an implied aggregated score of exactly how hot or not the internet thinks you are.
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