Rating sites
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On the Internet, rating sites or rate-me sites are websites in which users can vote or rate aspects of a person, such as physical appearance, body parts, voice, personality, etc., or a person's occupational ability, e.g. rate teachers, professors, lawyers, doctors, etc.[1] Moreover, rating sites have recently begun to appear in which users can rate short video or music clips. The rating site phenomenon began in 1999 with sites such as RateMyProfessors (May), RateMyFace (August), and then began to take off in the following years with the October 2000 unveiling of HotorNot and with RateMyTeachers in August of 2001. Currently, there are hundreds of such sites dedicated to numerous topics, such as pets, nightclubs, clothes, etc. In fact, there are so many "rating sites", that some such as Rating Paradise or Rating Spot are dedicated to categorizing them all. When rating sites are dedicated to rating products, services, or businesses rather than to rating people, they tend to be called review sites, although the distinction is not exact. In general, rating sites have a social feedback effect; many high school principals and administrators, for example, have begun to regularly monitor the status of their teaching staff via student controlled "rating sites".[2] Recent rating sites have been developed that are "competition-style" using the Condorcet method in which pairs of images compete with each other, such as Pick the Hottie and BabeVsBabe.com.
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[edit] Overview
In rate-me sites, users generally upload images, songs, or video clips for other random users to rate, generally with a score of 1 through 10. Typically any user can join by submitting their image to be rated, and they will then be provided with a score based on the results. Many rate-me sites also function as a form of dating service, in that for a fee they allow you to contact other users. The first known Rate-me site was RateMyFace.com, launched in August 1999. The most popular rate-me site of all time is Hot or Not. Other uses of the format have appeared - including at least one site related to politics HateMyTory.Com.
Rate-me sites have come under criticism by some[citation needed], stating that these sites promote vanity and self-consciousness, or could encourage eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Criticism of rate-me sites also points out that users of such sites are more susceptible to approach by sexual predators. In response, others claim that these sites are merely for entertainment purposes and do not actively promote these negative aspects.
Some social network services and image hosts also double as rate-me sites. For example, MySpace and TradePics has an optional "rank" feature that allows users to let other users rate them.
[edit] History
The year 1999 is generally considered the inception year for internet-based rating. The formula, however, that people or abilities can be scored on a scale, such as 1-10, traces farther back to at least the late 19th century.
In 1883, Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, devised a technique called composite photography, described in detail in Inquiries in Human Faculty and its Development, which he believed could be used to identify 'types' by appearance, which he hoped would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces. In short he wondered if certain groups of people had certain facial characteristics. To find this answer, he created photographic composite images of the faces of vegetarians and criminals to see if there was a typical facial appearance for each. Galton overlaid multiple images of faces onto a single photographic plate so that each individual face contributed roughly equally to a final composite face. While the resultant “averaged” faces did little to allow the a priori identification of either criminals or vegetarians, Galton observed that the composite image was more attractive than the component faces. Similar observations were made in 1886 by Stoddard, who created composite faces of members of the National Academy of Sciences and graduating seniors of Smith College.[3] This phenomenon is now known as averageness-effect, that is the highly physically attractive tend to be indicative of the average traits of the population.
In 1990, one of the first computer-based photographic attractiveness rating studies was conducted. During this year psychologists Langlois and Roggman wanted to systematically examine whether mathematical averageness is linked to with facial attractiveness. To test this, they selected photographs of 192 male and female Caucasian faces; each of which was computer scanned and digitized. They then made computer-processed composites of each image, as 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, and 32-face composites, averaged by pixel. These faces, as well as the component faces, were rated for attractiveness by 300 judges on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = very unattractive, 5 = very attractive). The results showed that the 32-composite face was the most visually attractive of all the faces.[4]
As more and more of these types of studies were conducted, such as using 7-point Likert scales, soon the 10-point scale began to be favored. A perfect "10" has always had great appeal. In the Olympics, for example, the first person to receive a “perfect 10” was 14-year-old, 4-foot-11, 86 pound, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, who in 1976 received the first-ever perfect score of 10, ever given to a man or women in the history of the Olympics.[5]
The 1979 romantic comedy film 10, directed by Blake Edwards and starring Bo Derek, Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews, is an example of this. The title derives from a rating system used by people to rank members of the opposite sex based upon beauty, with a 10 being the epitome of attractiveness. It came into common usage as a result of this film. Ironically, in the film, Bo Derek's character ranks in Moore's eyes as an "11."
In 1992, the seeds of the now popular magazine Perfect 10 began to develop. The magazine is an attempt to show only women who have been rated, on the visual scale, as being a perfect “10”. Perfect 10 was created by Edward Rasen, the original executive editor of SPIN magazine and creator of SPIN Radio. Perfect 10 Video was launched during 1992 and Julie Kruis, a noted swimsuit model (Miss Swimwear Illustrated, etc.) was the original spokesmodel.
In 1996, Rasen created the first “Perfect 10 Model Search” as a six-week event at the Pure Platinum club near Fort Lauderdale, FL. The contests were videotaped and initially were broadcast on Network 1, a domestic C-band satellite channel. During 1998 Mr. Zadeh began promoting an unrelated Perfect 10 Model Search contest which Ashley Degenford won and Marisa Miller was the runner-up. Ms. Miller later became a Victoria's Secret and Sports Illustrated magazine model.
Thus, on these models, between 1999 and 2001, internet-rating came into its own. The first site was RateMyProfessors (May, 1999), then RateMyFace (August, 1999). The following year the very popular HotorNot (October, 2000) was introduced. The following year, in August of 2001, RateMyTeachers was introduced for high school students.
[edit] Rate My Professors
RateMyProfessors.com is a review site or "teacher rating site" founded in May 1999 by John Swapceinski, a software engineer from Menlo Park, California, which allows college and university students to anonymously assign ratings to professors of American, Canadian, British, Irish, New Zealand, and Australian institutions. The site contains more than six million ratings, for over 500,000 professors.
[edit] Rate My Teachers
A spin-off of RateMyProfessors is RateMyTeachers, is a review site used to rate elementary school, middle school and high school teachers' performance (and popularity) as a service to students, parents and the teachers themselves. Participants give numerical ratings on a scale of 1 to 5 in three different categories to their current or former elementary, middle and high school teachers. Visitors can also leave an optional brief comment based on their experience with the teacher. All comments are screened by over 7,000 volunteer moderators for appropriateness.
It is possible for the same student to leave hundreds of ratings for the same teacher and they often do. Many student boast of ruining a teacher's reputation by posting many negative revieiws under different user names.
[edit] Hot or Not
Hot or Not is a rating site that allows users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted voluntarily by others. Photos are approved by a panel of volunteer moderators, who strive to keep the site "fun, clean, and real". However, in recent times there have been changes to the moderating system, see below. Founded in October 2000 by two Silicon Valley-based engineers (both graduated from UC Berkeley), James Hong and Jim Young, the site was originally called Am I Hot or Not, and quickly became very popular. The site allows people to submit their pictures, and visitors rate them on a scale of one (not) to ten (hot).
Within a week of launching, the site had reached the level of serving almost two million page views per day. Within a few months, the site had penetrated the NetNielsen Rating's Top 25 advertising domains, placed immediately behind CNET and NBCi. In order to keep up with rising costs, Hong and Young added a matchmaking component to their website called "Meet Me at Hot or Not", i.e. a system of range voting.[citation needed] In the December 2006 issue of Time Magazine, the founders of Youtube stated that they originally set out to make a version of Hot or Not with Video before developing their more inclusive site.
[edit] Moderation system
Traditionally, pictures submitted to Hot or Not were vetted by a small panel of volunteer moderators to block inappropriate content. In early 2006 changes were made to the moderating system inspired by James Surowiecki's theory of The Wisdom of Crowds; a much larger group of moderators was recruited and moderators were discouraged from discussion with each other. Opinion is divided as to whether the new system is more or less effective than the old. He then let the project run, without much interaction with the volunteers, hiring an elusive intern known as "Vu", to see if this mass of moderators would continue to moderate the photos in the spirit of the site or eventually sputter out.[6]
[edit] Spin-offs
Hot or Not was originally preceded by the popular RateMyFace which was launched a year earlier in the summer of 1999, although Hot or Not would eventually become a more popular website. Since then, the concept has spawned many imitators. The concept always remains the same, but the subject matter varies greatly. Spin-offs include: (Do I Like U?, WhosHotOrNot, FoxOrMinger) as well as sites for rating pets (PetsInClothes, MeorMyPet), cars (RespectMyRide), douchebags (DoucheBagAlert), bowel movements (RateMyPoo), and unsigned bands (RateMyBand). The concept has also been integrated with a wide variety of dating and matchingmaking systems, including OsDate and aeDating, which both have Hot or Not-inspired plugins.
Other variations on the Hot or Not concept include voting via the Condorcet method, such as BabeVsBabe, where a candidate is compared with other candidates in a series of pairwise comparisons in order to gauge their popularity.
[edit] Research
Some rating studies, such as those done by evolutionary psychologist David Buss, in addition to positive, e.g. 1-10, rating scales, have begun to utilize a negative "repulsion" range in rating studies. The measure of the features of a person may not always fall in the positive "attractive" range and may actually, in some cases, be viewed as repulsive; thus falling off the normal 1-10 scale. Researchers in 2004, for example, conducted a -30 (extremely repulsive) to 0 (ambivalent) to +30 (very attractive) photographic image rating study of eight before-and-after breast augmentation photos in order to discern if "repulsion" is a factor in mate selection. The results of this study, which was concerned specifically with female breast visual appeal, with focus on size, averageness, and symmetry, found that the 'before' photos had an average A-to-R value of -6.28, with a range of 2.8 to -15.4, whereas, conversely, the ‘after’ photographs had an average A-to-R value of 21.0, with a range of 17.3 to 24.9.[7]
In 2005, as an example of using image morphing methodology to study the effects of averageness, imaging researcher Pierre Tourigny created a composite of about 30 faces to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet (as shown above). On the popular Hot or Not web site, people rate others’ attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. An average score based on hundreds or even thousands of individual ratings takes only a few days to emerge. To make this hot or not pallate of morphed images, photos from the site were sorted by rank and used SquirlzMorph to create multi-morph composites from them. Unlike projects like Face of Tomorrow or Beauty Check where the subjects are posed for the purpose, the portraits are blurry because the source images are low resolution with differences in posture, hair styles, glasses, etc, so that here images could use only 36 control points for the morphs.[8] A similar study was done with Miss Universe contestants, as shown in the averageness article, as well as one for age, as shown in youthfulness article.
A recent 2006 "hot" or "not" style study, involving 264 women and 18 men, at the Washington University School of Medicine, as published online in the journal Brain Research, indicates that a person's brain determines whether or not an image is erotic long before the viewer is even aware they are seeing the picture. Moreover, according to these researchers, one of the basic functions of the brain is to classify images into a hot or not type categorization. The study's researchers also discovered that sexy shots induce a uniquely powerful reaction in the brain, equal in effect for both men and women, and that erotic images produced a strong reaction in the hypothalamus.[9]
[edit] See also
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[edit] References
- ^ Pfeiffer, Sacha. (2006). Rating Sites Flourish Behind a veil of Anonymity." The Boston Globe, September 20.
- ^ STAUFFER, KIMBERLY. (2007). ”More area schools monitor online rating sites - CISD officials see benefits and pitfalls to Internet postings.”
- ^ Rhodes, Gillian; Zebrowitz, Leslie, A. (2002). Facial Attractiveness - Evolutionary, Cognitive, and Social Perspectives. Ablex. ISBN 1567506364.
- ^ Langlois, J. H. & Roggman, L. A. (1990). “Attractive faces are only average.” Psychological Science, 1, 115-121.
- ^ Morrison, Mike. (2006). A Perfect 10 – Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci achieves perfection in 1976.” Pearson Education.
- ^ 2004,Speedy.(2007). "The Observations of a Moderator."
- ^ Thims, L. (2004). "Breast Size Attraction-to-Repulsion Survey." Chicago: Institute of Human Thermodynamics.
- ^ Manitou (2006). Hot or Not - Attractiveness Face Scale (composite images), Flicker, May 04.
- ^ Wittlin, Maggie, “Hot or Not – Women’s brains respond to erotic images as quickly and strongly as men’s”. Seed Magazine – Brain & Behavior, July, 13.
[edit] External links
[edit] Images
- List of Image Rating Sites - DMOZ Open Directory
- People Rating and Meeting - Do I Like U?
- RateMeGood.com - Rate Me Good
- TradePics.ws - Picture Hosting with Ratings
[edit] Videos
- Kiss or Diss – Rate Amateur Videos: Humor, Dance, Misc, etc.
[edit] Music
- Rate My Voice – Rate Music: Pop, Rock, Country, R&B, and Random
[edit] Body parts
- RateMyButt.com - Rate Butts on a scale of 1 to 10.
- RateMyChest.com - Rate Chests a scale of 1 to 10.
[edit] Other
- Bike or Not - Rate Motorcycles: Bikes, Choppers, Harleys, etc.
- Rating Paradise - Find and rate miscellaneous rating sites.
- Rank The Ride - Visitors submitted and commented automobiles and motorcycles photos.
