It's been a long time since I wrote about personal pages, especially those outside the RuNet. However, there are still completely private projects that can really surprise you. And I'm not the only one who noticed the site I'm going to tell you about today - several hundred thousand people visit it every day. We're talking about a simple invention of two young Americans called "Am I Hot or Not?" (www.amihotornot.com), i.e. "Am I Hot or Not?" What attracted so many people here? The authors simply played brilliantly on one of the oldest human desires - to see people and to be seen. To see, just go to the site. One of the many photos of real people will automatically load, which you are immediately asked to rate on a 10-point scale. After that, the user sees the total rating of this person and the next photo. You can customize the display so that you rate only men or only women (the latter are the clear majority here), or both. The most tempting opportunity is to find out how you look against the background of others. To do this, you just need to have your (or someone else's) photo online (for example, on some free site). It should be placed in the database and you can watch the rating. You won't be able to "wind up" the counter (i.e., give yourself a "10" many times), since the photos appear randomly.

The site has a clever system of "public" filtering to exclude all sorts of shocking photos and maintain the fairness of the competition. Under the photo there is a special link that the visitor is asked to click if he finds the current photo to be of poor quality, protected by copyright, or related to advertising, pornography, animals, children, celebrities, models, all sorts of jokes and rudeness. If a photo receives a suspiciously large number of such signals, the question of its deletion is considered.

However, real jokers don't care: the database includes Katherine Harris, Florida Secretary of State, who became famous thanks to the story of the American presidential election, and, according to rumors, Vladimir Putin and Gennady Zyuganov. Either their photos are unsuccessful, or they really are far from sex symbols, but, according to the same sources, their rating is below average. This joke, by initial design, began to bring its creators a good income, not only from advertising (several million impressions a day, no joke!), but also from the banal sale of T-shirts and mugs with the project logo.

The author is an employee of the radio station "Echo of Moscow". This review was written especially for "Vedomosti"

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