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2000·Early web, before YouTube

Hot or Not

The site that taught the web to rate strangers out of ten, and set the shape of everything since.

You might remember it as HOTorNOT, rate my photo site

From the early web

This Moment began as a web page, not as a video.

The story

What this was

Two Berkeley engineers put up a page in October 2000 where you submitted a photograph and strangers scored it from one to ten. Within a week it was serving nearly two million page views a day. YouTube's founders have said they set out to build a version of it for video before the idea widened, and the swipe every dating app uses descends from the same binary.

It first appeared in 2000, during early web, before YouTube.

The same internet

Early web, before YouTube

More like this

Related

Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a web page, not as a video.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
Two Berkeley engineers put up a page in October 2000 where you submitted a photograph and strangers scored it from one to ten. Within a week it was serving nearly two million page views a day. YouTube's founders have said they set out to build a version of it for video before the idea widened, and the swipe every dating app uses descends from the same binary.
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