Before the internet learned to like, match, and swipe, it learned to ask one brutally simple question: hot or not?
\n\nLaunched 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.
\n\nTwenty-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.
\n\nTinder 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.
\n\nAfter a quarter-century spent optimizing how we rate and reject one another, the…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/