What Happened to Hot or Not?

Hot or Not let strangers rate your photo from 1 to 10, starting in 2000. It was sold in 2008 and later came back as a dating app.

current mood: nervouscurrently listening to: ♫ refreshing to see my new score

Written by Natalie Brooks · October 9, 202656k: ~1 min

Hot or Not was a website where people uploaded a photo and strangers rated it on a scale from 1 to 10, and it launched in October 2000. Your score was the average of everyone's votes, and you could see it change as more people rated you. It got huge fast, with nearly 2 million page views a day within its first week. The site was sold in 2008, bought again by the dating company Badoo in 2012 and turned into an app, and its simple idea showed up in a lot of what came after.

Two roommates and an argument

Hot or Not was started by James Hong and Jim Young, two engineering graduates from UC Berkeley who had been roommates. According to Hong, it began with an argument over whether a woman Young had seen at a party was a "perfect ten." They decided to build a website where other people could settle that kind of question.

The first name was "Am I Hot or Not." The site was simple. You saw a photo, clicked a number from 1 to 10 and immediately got the next photo, along with the average score of the one you'd just rated. That instant result made it hard to stop clicking.

Hong had been working at HP before going to business school, and he started the site while still paying off school debt. Neither of them expected it to take off the way it did.

How did Hot or Not work?

Hot or Not worked by showing you one photo at a time and asking you to rate it from 1 to 10. Once you voted, the next photo appeared, and you saw how your vote compared with everyone else's. People who uploaded photos could check back to watch their average move up or down.

There were a few rules. Photos were checked before going up, and the site tried to keep things from getting too mean. Still, the whole site was strangers judging how you looked, and it never pretended otherwise. Plenty of people uploaded a photo as a joke, or uploaded one of a friend, and some found it more stressful than fun.

It was the kind of page that belonged on any list of websites we rushed home from school to check. Within a few months, it ranked just behind big sites like CNET in NetNielsen's list of top advertising sites. Not bad for a project that started with an argument over a party.

Meet Me and making money

Running a site with that much traffic wasn't cheap. To pay for it, Hot or Not added a dating feature called Meet Me. If you liked someone's photo, you could say so, and if they liked you back, you could message each other. Subscriptions to Meet Me ended up bringing in most of the money.

By 2008, the site was earning about $7.5 million a year, most of it profit. That February, it was sold to Avid Life Media for a reported $20 million. Avid Life also owned other dating sites, and a few months later Hot or Not tried out a gossip section.

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Why people uploaded anyway

Why would anyone ask strangers to score their face? Part of it was curiosity. Before social media, there weren't many ways to find out how other people saw you, and Hot or Not offered an answer in a few minutes. Part of it was a dare. Friends talked each other into uploading, then compared numbers at school the next day.

There was also the comedy side. People uploaded photos of pets, celebrities and blurry pictures of their thumb, mostly to see what score they got. The site cleaned a lot of that up, but plenty of strange photos slipped through, and finding a blurry thumb between two portraits made the whole spree worth it.

Vote: What was the most you'd have accepted as a score?

Anything under an 8 is an insultorA 6 and I'd be happy

You'll need a free crib to vote.

The sites it inspired

Hot or Not's influence went further than its own site. In November 2003, a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg built a site called Facemash that let people compare photos of classmates, a lot like Hot or Not. Harvard shut it down, but a few months later he started Facebook, home of the mysterious poke.

YouTube's founders said in a 2006 interview with Time that they first set out to build a video version of Hot or Not, long before early YouTube had five-star ratings of its own. And the idea of looking at one face at a time and making a quick judgment came back years later in swipe-based dating apps.

Hot or Not wasn't the first site like it. RateMyFace was around in 1999, and AmIHot.com was registered in early 2000. Hot or Not just happened to be the one everyone talked about at lunch.

What happened to Hot or Not?

Hot or Not is now a dating app. Badoo, a dating company, bought it in 2012 and turned it into a mobile app. The new version showed you people nearby and ranked the most popular ones in local lists. It worked more like a dating app than the old website, and it was later renamed. The original site, with the 1 to 10 buttons and the instant scores, is long gone.

Things people remember

• Uploading a photo, then checking your score every ten minutes
• Rating photos for an hour without noticing the time
• Friends uploading a photo of you without asking
• Arguing over whether a 7 was good
• Taking new pictures with the MySpace angle to get a better score
• Feeling a little bad about the whole thing, and clicking anyway

Be honest about your score

Hot or Not was simple and a little cruel, and it showed early how much people cared about being seen online. That feeling moved to other places, where likes, followers and swipes took over the job a single number used to do.

No scores here

FriendCrib doesn't do ratings, likes or follower counts. You put up the photos you like, and your friends leave comments if they want to. That's it. Make a crib and post a picture, and the only number you'll check is how many friends said hi, and none of them will say it was a 7.

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