Whether the internet is hot or not, we continue to browse it. – The internet learnt to ask one brutally basic question before it developed the ability to prefer, match, and swipe: is it hot or not?
When Hot or Not first launched in 2000, users could submit pictures of themselves and have strangers assess them on a scale of 1 to 10. In a matter of weeks, it became one of the most popular websites on the internet despite being nasty and addictive. More significantly, it transformed a highly subjective assessment of someone’s attractiveness into organized data that could be compared, graded, and utilized to categorize human behavior.
Twenty-six years later, the dating business seems to be pulling away from the online space that Hot or Not contributed establish. Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and CEO of Bumble, announced earlier this month that the firm was switching from its swipe format to “fewer, better, more considered signals.” Tinder’s parent company, Match Group, announced a day earlier that the app will add additional live events by year’s end.
In response to its dwindling user base, Tinder Events was introduced earlier this year, providing offline experiences. By the end of September, the more immediate goal is to expand into 26 locations throughout the globe.
The internet may finally be suffering from hotness weariness after 25 years of perfecting how we evaluate and reject each other. The culture that Hot or Not helped standardize—the never-ending cycle of criticizing others while offering to be judged ourselves—is overwhelming dating applications.
Concerning Face
It was still uncommon to post your photo online in the early 2000s. In order to let strangers decide their fate on a large scale, Hot or Not requested participants to contribute their own faces.
This was revolutionary in 2000. It wasn’t because people were more sensitive at the time, but rather because posting your personal photo online was still considered abnormal.
In just a few weeks, the website, which was created by James Hong and Jim Young, rose to the top of the internet traffic rankings. In addition, this was one of the first instances in which human judgment could be transformed into structured data, which could then be utilized to categorize human behavior.
According to Brooke Erin Duffy, a professor in Cornell University’s Department of Communication, “the design itself gamified physical attractiveness while helping to normalize the type of ranking, rating, and scoring that is now endemic to social media.”
Public examination of appearance dates back to the offline era of tabloid print media gossip columns and paparazzi culture. The internet allowed regular individuals to volunteer for the microscope, which is what altered Hot or Not.
People could now “willingly thrust themselves under a high-powered lens,” according to Duffy, and that desire was the innovation that all platforms have subsequently made money off of.
From Swiping to Rating
The idea of the mutual opt-in—that is, neither side could communicate the other until both had expressed interest—was first presented in Hot or Not’s “Meet Me,” a premium matchmaking option that the founders added in 2001.
Later on, Tinder was founded on this exact principle, but it merged it with the idea of the rating loop. The swipe represents both the match and the score simultaneously.
Tinder’s internal desirability rating, an unseen ranking that influences the algorithm, has long been documented and criticized. At least Hot or Not was polite enough to let you know your score.
“The success of swipe culture on dating apps reflects our willingness to be seduced by tech promises of easy, efficient fun, when in reality what these apps have done is drive a wedge between human beings, to our profound detriment,” according to Treena Orchard, an associate professor in Western University’s School of Health Studies and a longtime critic of dating app design.
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