Maybe it’s because I’m a woman on the internet with a lot of public, critical opinions on tech, video games, and sexism. Or maybe this kind of violation (which used to frighten us in pre-HOTorNOT culture) is now just the accepted price of admission to the world wide web, especially for women and other marginalized people. The truth is that I’d experienced far worse online harassment elsewhere that same day. Some Reddit dweeb calling me and my friends equally “whore-y” and “uglier than the last” was the least of my concerns. The Phone NFT game has 30 levels, with the Level 1 NFTs initially limited to just 20% of all users and Level 30 Phone NFTs only limited to 0.001% of all users on the Hot or Not Dapp. After selling Hot or Not, James Hong went on to become a husband, dad, and angel investor. He also purports to stay in his pajamas and watch a lot of MTV.

At the time, I believed it was harmless fun. Now, I can see how it’s superficial and could contribute to sexism,” said Ngo. After all, social platforms bear the biases of the people who make them. “Yes, heterosexual men affect social media culture. HOTorNOT may have been the beginning of this, but I think it is a reflection of culture and not the origin of sexism online.” Avid Life Media ran HOTorNOT into the ground. Adding salt to the wound for Hong, he effectively cashed out of the Silicon Valley game right before the ubiquity of smartphones changed everything again, opening up another world of startup possibilities. It also soon turned their million-dollar online speed-dating concept into the multi-billion dollar idea copy-pasted by Tinder (opens in a new tab). By 1999, James had already cycled through a lot of ideas for “what he wanted to be when he grew up.” He originally wanted to be a doctor so he started college majoring in biology, then he switched his major to electrical engineering, then he switched his major to computer science, then he went to business school. After that, he started a company for construction industry software. More than anything else, James’ biggest problem was that he would lose interest in what he was doing and get depressed. To foster community involvement, we intend to offer bounties to community members who come up with innovative moderation ideas. We strongly believe that moderation should be a collaborative effort driven by the community, rather than being determined by a select few individuals. PHONE NFT Game Levels (Level 1 to Level 30): The PHONE NFT game has been thoughtfully structured with different levels, starting from Level 1 and progressing up to Level 30.

During the pandemic, I’ve been watching a lot of ‘80s and ‘90s movies and there are a lot of classics that would now be considered problematic. HOTorNOT is sorta like that. It was great for its time, but there’s no way you could get away with something like it in today's culture.” The way we used it was a major departure from the norms of the time, but I wouldn’t call it an ‘invention,’” Young insists. “It took like 10 minutes to figure out and was just a few lines of Javascript code.”

HOTorNOT showed us that anything was possible on the internet,” said Gao. “That it can serve as a social playground instead of just a place for utility services to buy cheaper books and look up sports scores. It connected online and offline social interaction in new ways never imagined or implemented before. It gave all of us that went through its doors the realization that the internet was one big social experiment.” I have been following this Hot or Not/GoBazzinga app for a while and its never added up for me. The idea is to take on TikTok/short form video content platforms but in a decentralized way. Hot or Not seems to take the approach of using tokenomics to support content creators and use predictions to get the best videos to go viral while rewarding the curators/betters of the video along with the creator of the video. All this done on a platform that is owned and controlled by the users (pure decentralization). That sounds great but there seems to be a few issues in my mind. When you go onto the app you get a little bit of tokens for free so there is no friction and a new user can start betting. Where are those tokens coming from? My guess is there is inflation/user onboarding costs to grow the application. This is not a sustainable model and would devalue any tokens you bought or invested in. Is that going to change? What happens when tokens are given to users that just log in once and arent spending them? The people you find attractive can reveal a lot about you. For example, if you find someone who is very physically fit and attractive, it might mean that you are a lover of passionate people. If you find someone who looks quite unusual attractive, it might mean you’re a very creative person. Anokhin, A.P.; etal. (2006). "Rapid discrimination of visual scene content in the human brain". Brain Research. 1093 (1): 167–177. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2006.03.108. PMC 2174912. PMID 16712815.

According to a 2006 edition of Time magazine, the founders of YouTube said that their original intention was to build a version of Hot or Not with video. Not everyone ( including Hong himself (opens in a new tab), for various reasons (opens in a new tab)) sees some of the social web conventions HOTorNOT innovated as something to celebrate. In her 2016 book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers (opens in a new tab), Nancy Jo Sales critiques HOTorNOT as the genesis of misogynistic social media platforms that were created mostly by men and promote valuing women and girls’ for their physical appeal above all else.

The gamification aspects mentioned above provide several avenues to earn COYN tokens through various voting mechanisms in different games. Users can participate in these games and voting processes to either earn or lose COYN tokens. Currently, all players are engaged with the Hot or Not ecosystem, where the platform’s canisters create new tokens as rewards for winning voting games or burn tokens when a user loses in these games. Creation Fee for Creator DAOs: Aspiring creators will need to pay a creation fee in HOT tokens to establish their presence within Creator DAOs, driving demand for HOT.

Hot or Not Successors

In those first days, James says he would go rollerblading in a nearby company parking lot. Every day, he would skate up to at least one random person and tell them about Hot or Not. After doing this several times, word of Hot or Not spread among employees who worked there. Most people hear HOTorNOT and think of the ranking feature, which is crude and sort of questionable in today's light,” he said. “But there was always a deep caring and humaneness in how they did things that wasn't necessarily apparent if you weren't part of the community.”