Before the internet learned to like, match, and swipe, it learned to ask one brutally simple question: hot or not?
Launched in 2000, Hot or Not invited people to upload photographs of themselves and be rated by strangers on a scale from 1 to 10. It was crude, addictive, and, within weeks, one of the most visited sites on the web. More importantly, it turned an intensely subjective judgment—whether someone was attractive—into structured data that could be ranked, compared, and used to organize human behavior.
Twenty-six years later, the dating industry appears to be retreating from the internet Hot or Not helped create. Earlier this month, Bumble founder and chief executive Whitney Wolfe Herd said the company was moving away from its swipe format toward “fewer, better, more considered signals.” A day earlier, Match Group, the company behind Tinder, said that the app will introduce more in-person events by the end of the year.
Tinder Events was launched earlier this year, offering offline experiences in response to its declining user base. The more immediate plan is to expand into 26 cities worldwide by the end of September.
After a quarter-century spent optimizing how we rate and reject one another, the internet may finally be experiencing hotness fatigue. Dating apps are struggling inside a culture saturated with the behavior Hot or Not helped standardize: the endless loop of judging other people while volunteering to be judged ourselves.
About Face
In the early 2000s, submitting your photograph to the open internet was still unusual. Hot or Not asked people to volunteer their own faces and allow strangers, at scale, to determine their fate.
In 2000, this was groundbreaking stuff. Not because people were more sensitive back then, but because putting your own photograph on the open web was still pretty deviant behavior.
The site, conceived by founders James Hong and Jim Young, became one of the most trafficked sites on the internet within weeks. Not to mention, this was one of the first cases where human judgment could be converted into structured data, and structured data could then be used to organize human behavior.
“The design itself gamified physical attractiveness, while helping to normalize the type of ranking, rating, and scoring that is now endemic to social media,” says Brooke Erin Duffy, professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University.
Public scrutiny of appearance traces way back to the offline days of paparazzi culture and gossip columns in tabloid print media. What Hot or Not changed, thanks to the internet, was that it let ordinary people volunteer for the microscope.
Duffy’s phrase for it is that people could now “willingly thrust themselves under a high-powered lens,” and that willingness itself was the innovation, the one every platform since has monetized.
From Rating to Swiping
Hot or Not’s “Meet Me,” the paid matchmaking feature the founders added in 2001, introduced the concept of the mutual opt-in (meaning neither party could message the other until both had expressed interest).
This was later the very mechanism Tinder was built on, though it combined it with the concept of the rating loop. The swipe is the score and the match at once.
Tinder has long been reported and criticized for having an internal desirability rating for every user, an invisible ranking that shapes the algorithm. At least Hot or Not had the decency to tell you your score.
Treena Orchard, associate professor in the School of Health Studies at Western University and a long-standing critic of dating app design, says “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.”
She traces a broader inheritance too, one that goes well past dating. Hot or Not, in her reading, cultivated an insatiable digital appetite for the public consumption of personal information, and ushered in an era where beauty and body standards were set by anyone with a computer. “It ignited something new that can never be put back in the proverbial bottle,” she says.
And the parallel with putting yourself up to be rated on Hot or Not back then, and putting yourself online nowadays, is a shared willingness to open ourselves up to be judged, roasted, and subjected to online vitriol.
The Prototype Everyone Copied
Hot or Not can, however, be let off on a technicality, and Hong himself has made the argument over the years that the site did not create such an appetite for judgment—it merely gave it a platform. It was an attractive model to copy. YouTube’s founders said that a first draft of the site in 2005 was pretty much Hot or Not for video.
FaceMash, Mark Zuckerberg’s 2003 Harvard imitation (that people now misremember as the same thing), scraped student photographs—without permission—and pitted them against each other. At least Hot or Not was honest in its approach. Hong has also said the company gave free hosting to ZipDash (which later became Google’s mobile maps) and to a young Twitter.
And though it existed to rank people’s attractiveness, it actually helped incubate parts of the infrastructure of the internet that eventually made rating everything normal.
Hot or Not itself didn’t survive the internet it helped design. It couldn’t compete with free, ad-funded rivals, was sold to the company behind Ashley Madison in 2008, and was eventually offloaded to Badoo, which relaunched it in 2014 as, of all things, a Tinder-style swiping app.
Hot or Not was, at its core, an early prototype for the participatory internet, where the user became both the product and the judge. Twenty-six years later, the same internet is discovering the uncomfortable inverse: that the whole loop business of liking, rating, swiping, and validating is actually starting to eat itself.
This story originally appeared in WIRED Middle East.
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