Am I Hot or Not?

October 25, 2000 11:38 PM

Am I Hot or Not?
Beware of this link. If you click on it you will be sucked in for hours. The idea, rate people's looks on a scale of 1 to 10. The people? Anyone who uploads their picture to the site, both men and women.

I have never found a site more habit forming in my life. Like Dack (who I got the link from) I skipped food, drink and missed my bus.
posted by DragonBoy (47 comments total)

Rate My Face is a prettier designed version of the same theme (I blogged it before)
posted by owillis at 11:47 PM on October 25, 2000

See also: RateMyPicture, and Rate-me.net. Am I Hot Or Not wins on UI, but the comments and the way people get round the filth-filters gives RateMyPicture the edge, I think.
posted by mattw at 12:02 AM on October 26, 2000

Am I Hot Or Not also has a far better name. Much more memeable.
posted by kindall at 3:48 AM on October 26, 2000

I can't get it.
What's so 'addictive' or 'fun' in rating people's looks?
It's a nonsense, IMHO.
posted by kchristidis at 5:32 AM on October 26, 2000

To each their own. I'm enjoying myself.

Oh. It's lunch time? ;-)

They've certainly found a way to increase those banner counts, too; ain't they?
posted by baylink at 8:05 AM on October 26, 2000

Honestly, I think it's good practice in figuring out exactly what you do find attractive in the appropriate sex.
posted by baylink at 8:06 AM on October 26, 2000

I practice a diffrent way.
posted by stbalbach at 8:34 AM on October 26, 2000

I got sucked into this thing via Dack myself and blew about 30 minutes at the site. "Chronovore" is the term that comes to mind. But then I started to get an ugly feeling: how many of those photos do you suppose were really uploaded by the actual people in them? I saw an awful lot of pictures that virtually screamed, "This was sent in by someone really malicious." After that, I kind of felt like I should boil myself in a sort of cleansing/expiation ritual.
posted by Skot at 8:54 AM on October 26, 2000

I've seen a ton of sites like this and never taken the time to "rate" anyone, not even for scientific purposes. It all just felt too creepy.

But amihotornot.com is just brilliant. The voting mechanism refreshes the page and instantly you can see how other people voted on the last person, and then vote again on the next. I easily blew five minutes there playing around before I got bored (as opposed to the other sites where I was immediately bored and offended).

The concept is still totally strange, but al least someone got the user experience right.
posted by fraying at 9:56 AM on October 26, 2000

Way too much fun. There goes another morning down the Cyber tube!
posted by jaz at 10:11 AM on October 26, 2000

easy way to rack up money with CPM banner ads...

posted by physics at 10:25 AM on October 26, 2000

My thought exactly.

I saw about 5% stuff posted from Usenet, and about 10% things I figured were posted by other than the subject.

For me, the interesting part was seeing where I was off the curve, how much, and in which direction. An interesting calibration of my tastes, and how they differ from others.

I could usually tell fairly accurately when I'd be off the curve, and which way. I think that's a good thing.

Makes me feel a little less silly when I rate women to myself in RL.
posted by baylink at 12:13 PM on October 26, 2000

It's interesting to see how what I'm attracted to stacks up to the mainstream, or at least the Internet mainstream. Like I've found that I find the innocent-looking, everyday photos more attractive than the borderline porno pix. heh.
posted by veruca at 1:47 PM on October 26, 2000

I was disappointed at the flagrant lack of statistics/rankings on "Am I Hot or Not?" You can supposedly get the top 10 men/women sent to you every week, if you sign up for their mailing list, but it smells like a spam trap.

So I wrote a script to repeatedly hit their site, pull out the URLs, ratings, and number of votes. If it hits a duplicate URL, it updates the votes/rating. You can sort by rating, sex, URL, and number of votes. I'm updating the database every couple hours, though their site seems to be crippled from the meme.

It seems like the only way for women to score higher than a 7 is to wear very little clothing. Go figure. Anyway, let me know what you think.
posted by waxpancake at 2:23 PM on October 26, 2000

We might be wrong, but here at work we find the low end of the chart the most entertaining.

Like this for example.
posted by mutagen at 4:16 PM on October 26, 2000

And what kind of friend posts this of you?


posted by mutagen at 4:20 PM on October 26, 2000

here's what I've found:

if someone looks to me like they think they are hot, I give them a low vote. if someone looks to me like they are going to get extremely low votes, I give them a 10.

I'm not deliberately trying to mess their ratings up, but the "I think I'm hot" thing is so unattractive, and I guess I feel bad about the bad pictures. on the other end.

I have venus in libra: I'm probably just trying to balance things out.

so, anyway, I learned a lot more about myself than I did about what I think is attractive in either sex.

also, there are lots more attractive women than men up there.

rcb
posted by rebeccablood at 4:25 PM on October 26, 2000

Well, the people that created the site probably won't like this very much, but I added a direct link to the image, so you can bypass their site entirely if you don't care about voting. My script is crawling through their site right now to pull down the image URLs, so it'll take a little while.
posted by waxpancake at 4:54 PM on October 26, 2000

I agree with you Rebecca. The harder someone tries to look "hot", the less attractive they are to me. I usually score all the women in skimpy clothing lower than a fully clothed attractive woman. Unless the photo seems more like a snapshot of them just doing their thing than a fake pose. ;-)
posted by veruca at 5:28 PM on October 26, 2000

Chris, you should post your work in their little Yahoo club!
posted by veruca at 5:37 PM on October 26, 2000

wow, waxpancake, you rock! Didn't Dave Winer put his mug up here? I wish you could search for specific users.
posted by mathowie at 5:41 PM on October 26, 2000

You talking to me, Veruca? I'm not Chris. But anyway, do me a favor and don't post the stats URL in there. I try to avoid litigation at all costs, thank you.

And thanks for the compliment, Matt. Coming from you, it's an honor. Metafilter rocks my little world.
posted by waxpancake at 5:42 PM on October 26, 2000

Then again, if they know what they're doing, they'll just look in their referrer logs and see traffic originating from my page and Metafilter. Oh, well.
posted by waxpancake at 5:46 PM on October 26, 2000

I've come to the conclusion that too much of what I find "hot" doesn't show up in still pictures. There seems to be something about the way some women move that turns my head faster than surface appearances do. Not that there doesn't seem to be some correlation between the two...
posted by harmful at 5:53 PM on October 26, 2000

heh...yeah, I was talking to you. I'm a doofus, apparently. And I was teasing about the Yahoo club. ;-)
posted by veruca at 5:54 PM on October 26, 2000

This whole rate-my-picture concept makes me uncomfortable, even stripped down to the level of simplicity at amihotornot.com. The biographies and whatnot found on some of the other sites make it seem more like a popularity contest; this site is strict picture ratings, which is a bit less cruel, I suppose.

All the same, the idea that any meaningful judgement about a person's attractiveness can be made on the basis of a single photo strikes me as absurd, and the idea that attractiveness can be measured on a numeric scale is equally confusing.

I just couldn't shake the tendency to make ratings at least partly based on my perception of the person's personality rather than strictly on their appearance. People who looked like they were having fun, were comfortable in their own skins, and didn't particularly give a damn whether I thought they looked good or not always seemed to get higher marks than people who were posing or otherwise trying too hard.

Like Rebecca said, I think this site tells you more about yourself than it does about the people whose photos you're scrutinizing.

I was rather amused to notice that people with high-quality photos always scored higher.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 5:54 PM on October 26, 2000

I just adjusted the script to print the URL of the image. And all the image links are now available, for both men and women.
posted by waxpancake at 6:12 PM on October 26, 2000

OK, waxpancake, you rule. Thanks to your script, you can really watch the cheating in action . . . there are at least two top-rated people that are the same photograph, hosted on different freebie sites.

Heh. Funky little cheaters -- wonder why they bother?
posted by aramaic at 7:30 PM on October 26, 2000

waxpancake - your script rocks! A nice additional feature would be to produce a list with the most recent additions. Then we MeFi folks could have our fun by messing with the results.
posted by DragonBoy at 9:39 PM on October 26, 2000

Okay, you can sort by date. Obviously these aren't the dates that the images were added to the "Am I Hot" database, but the date my crawler stumbled across them.

These tables are going to get messy for people surfing at lower resolutions. Any suggestions to fix it?
posted by waxpancake at 1:02 AM on October 27, 2000

Um... Nov 27, 2000? Drat, have I missed an entire month again?
posted by Aaaugh! at 7:54 AM on October 27, 2000

Mathowie, here's Dave Winer's pic. He's only a 2.9...
posted by daveadams at 8:04 AM on October 27, 2000

Oh yeah, and waxpancake, you are THE MAN. Assuming you're a man, that is...
posted by daveadams at 8:05 AM on October 27, 2000

Yes, the site is a despicable meat market and it certainly can't take into account such factors as intelligence and personality. But, like Rebecca, I learned a lot about my own taste in attraction. It certainly isn't biased in favor of women, given the alarming number of images that have been put up with a target audience that can be best described as gonads, 18-25. I find the high ratings given to women who are practically unclad to be shocking -- given that I attempted to put in my vote based on all-around attractiveness (which helped in an extremely minor way to push up the cuter clothed ladies up a bit). It only demonstrates that most people seem to be voting with their testicles, as opposed to an eye devoted to beauty in all forms.

And that's disturbing in itself.
posted by ed at 8:35 AM on October 27, 2000

You mean it's not November yet? Hehe. Remind me never to code drunk again. It's fixed.
posted by waxpancake at 8:36 AM on October 27, 2000

And another thing: waxpancake, you rock!

Interestingly enough, here are the source websites for the top ten voted females:

1. FHM: a Rouze-like "e-zine."

2 and 3. A site devoted to Jesus Christ paintings.

4 and 7. A site encouraging the user to "please vote for these hot girls!"

5. A questionable personal site featuring merely one photo that looks nothing like the photo featured on Are You Hot.

6. This picture is of model Estella Warren!

8. Vanessa's Magical Land Where Ponies Fly and There Are Bubbles Everywhere: The first potentially genuine personal site thus far.

9. Another one of those I made this site just for you hooks that appear to be a poorly fabricated lie.

10. A dead link.

So that's one out of ten images that are genuine in the 8+ range.

I suspect that anyone participating in this site should give themselves a three point handicap.
posted by ed at 8:58 AM on October 27, 2000

I have a pic of rate my pic and I must say most of the men are totaly perverts who leave comments. The amount of email I was getting too. Starts to get on your wick after awhile.
posted by FAB4GIRL at 10:52 AM on October 27, 2000

Ugh! I have a pic ON rate my picture and totally , not totaly. I hate it when I mess up! I must correct myself!
posted by FAB4GIRL at 10:53 AM on October 27, 2000

Pancake Rocks!

Pancake Rules!

Love it; very good one. I hadn't realized they were linking the images right off the original site; good catch.
posted by baylink at 12:09 PM on October 27, 2000

Uh, oh. It was linked off of Wrong Way Go Back's front page. I better get this thing off of OP's webserver before it gets any more popular. I doubt the nice people over at OP magazine would like to be affiliated with "Am I Hot or Not"?
posted by waxpancake at 12:15 PM on October 27, 2000

Okay, the script has been redirected to http://log.waxy.org/hot/ and has a couple new features. Image source URLs are now limited to 60 characters to fix the unwieldy table display problem. I changed the "Ascending/Descending" text to up/down arrow images. And the crawler script now runs 24 hours a day, so that new images are always being added to the database.

Maybe it's a bit too much for something as inherently pointless as "Am I Hot or Not?" but I thought the interface was lacking. Is that so wrong?
posted by waxpancake at 12:29 AM on October 29, 2000

Interesting things learned from waxpancake's index onto amihotornot:

1) The top rated picture in the male category is... a woman.
2) Of the top few dozen pictures in the female category, all appeared to be photos of professional models taken by professional photographers.
3) Of an approximately equal number of pictures in the male category, a third to a half appeared to be photos of real people taken by amateurs.

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 2:17 PM on October 29, 2000

Have you also noticed that there are roughly twice the number of male pictures than female, and less than 10 times the number of votes? Men on that site are vain, but unpopular.
posted by waxpancake at 11:13 PM on October 29, 2000

One thought: no, I don't think that the percentile rankings are optimal; I'd like to see the actual rating off their site. Or have I misunderstood your change?

Nice output, BTW; is the code from a toolkit?

... and if I link to you too, will you link me back?

Cheers,
-- jr 'will slut hits for food' a
posted by baylink at 12:06 PM on November 1, 2000

The creators of the site changed the ratings; not me. See their announcement on their Yahoo message board. My page reflects the ratings listed on the official site, as it always has.

I coded it all in Perl. No toolkits involved. (Unless you count the standard CGI/LWP modules as "toolkits.") The HTML output is my own design. Boring, but functional.

And feel free to link to me. I check the referer logs pretty frequently, so I'll add you if I see your page. (Link whore.)
posted by waxpancake at 7:10 PM on November 1, 2000

When I visited amihotornot.com , I stumbled on a pic with an ad, atractive girl drew me to look at her site!

www.spl.at they have a story board that the users can vote on and control the character. Its called Help The Girl Out, great idea that I have seen no where else on the net.

Power to the voters that's what I say!
Jon
posted by jonpanky at 3:21 PM on November 5, 2000

feelingdizzy
posted by feelinglistless at 3:26 PM on August 26, 2001