For the same validation they get today on Instagram
And to compare themselves against their friends.
Every girl in my high school was all over this when it came out. They all wanted to know who was prettier and friends stopped talking over it.
A lot of the guy were too. One of my stoner friends would agonize about his score.
Id be willing to bet that site saw a fair amount of people posting their SO’s / crushes/ exes for validation/ bragging rights.
‘Yeah, my GFs a total 9’ ‘Cindy? Bullshit, shes a 7 on a good day’ ‘Thats not what hotnornot thinks!’
Sometimes I forget how brutal the early 2000s were.
if by brutal you mean fun and not full of corporate bullshit, yeah.
My dude, we were flying planes into buildings, committing genocides, burning a Woodstock event, and throwing shoes at misunderestimated presidents.
At the time, I worked nights in a tech call center. There were generally three guys working the shift but it wasn’t the same people every shift, it was a small but rotating cast. There was also a supervisor but they spent the majority of their time in a private office halfway across the building from us.
One of the three guys who was there most nights would mostly ignore calls and would do a pretty poor job with them when he did answer. Instead of working, he’d spend the whole night browsing HotOrNot, occasionally vocalizing his opinion on some pictures.
Since there were only three people on the shift and it was in a call center built for a hundred or more, we were permitted to sit at any desk (they had roaming profiles). Only one member of the night shift ever sat close to the guy I described more than once. Besides being personally unpleasant, he was a heavy smoker and thus olfactorily offensive as well.
The HotOrNot guy was there when I got there and I’m pretty sure there when I left. No idea how he kept his job.
olfactory offensive
That’s a great bandname you got there.
I haven’t been to many musical events, but in my experience they can be pretty olfactorily offensive by themselves.
It was fun for me, I met friends and a guy I dated on there. You could search for interests keywords and start a convo about those things. Since I moved around a lot it made it easy to meet new ppl in an area. Lots of ppl just posted pics of them having fun, not trying to actually look hot. Maybe it was my age range (maybe 23-25) and interests and the fact that I used it to find friends, but this site wasn’t toxic for me. I never cared about my score and neither did anyone I talked to from the site.
The 2000s were a wild time.
Isn’t this proto Facebook?
IIRC this was just about voting on the hotness of random pictures, you couldn’t actually do much in the way of social media stuff. You’d just upload your photo, and be able to check back on how it scored later for an ego boost, bragging rights among your friends, or whatever.
Facebook was originally literally just a database of pictures of people from the school Zuck went to and a bunch of people deciding if they were, in fact, hot or not.
Excellent point!
I don’t know if the user interface was the same but yes, facebook started like this. With only pictures of women from the campus
Most of the time they didn’t. They were posted without their consent.
You’re the man now, dog
Why would anyone ask why anyone would do this? Look around you *gestures broadly*.
