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Ask HN: Review my website

hottweeters.com

29 pointswushupork31 comments

You know, I don't get the hate here. 1) These are public profile pictures. Anyone can see them anyway. 2) There's no list of "not" - that's the harsh part. Yeah, people might be a little disappointed that they're not hot, but no one is being called out for being unattractive.

I love that I can start picking my hotties - not rating everyone - without logging in at all; that's very nice. And it's so much quicker to pick up to three hotties than rate and rate over and over again.

I do think there should be a "I'm interested in guys/girls" switch before rating, but other than that, I'm actually incredibly impressed. Whatever you think of the merits of the app, it's incredibly well-executed and well-designed. Everything works exactly the way I thought it would.

The hot-or-not craze at least had the decency to allow you to opt-in for judgment.

point taken. this is a super beta app and many of the desired features were not developed. I wanted to release early and get feedback right away.

Would an opt-out be satisfactory?

No.

Major upvotes for a single word answer? Please clarify your perspective so he understands why you're so adamant.

Do you disagree? Why?

I neither disagree or agree-- which is why I'd love more clarification, actually, to understand the positions.

Overall, I prefer not to see 1-word answers at the top of any comment chain-- they're upvote bait that are typical of sites that are a lot less useful than HN. They certainly don't promote good discussion!

For example, the comment from thesethings helps us understand better the position: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=603676

I strongly agree, so I voted it up. No need to expand on it.

This has already fallen off the front page, so I'm not sure anyone cares, but...

Look, I put my picture onto my Twitter profile for use and recognition by the broader community. So people know who I am. I don't put it out there to be part of some (in my opinion) derivative, uninspired and shallow excuse for "entertainment".

No one puts their pictures on Twitter up for that reason.

So, if you're going to build something in a race to the bottom, at least have the common decency to tell me that you're lifting my profile picture and give me the option of getting the hell out of there. And don't use my picture until you have my permission.

Anything else is just jackassery.

At least the ranking system is all positive -- which is probably for the best. If you were to add the ability to down-vote, you'd have to watch out for some random teenage girl waking up one morning to a -50 because her classmates thought it'd be funny. That could lead to some trouble.

The site works well, I'm sure there's an audience for it.

I agree with sanj. It has to be opt-in. I realize that's probably a bummer, but Twitshirt recently got into some hot water for pretty much the same dynamic, it was opt-out, and people were like, "how am I even supposed to know about this site?!?" There was a big backlash, they took the site down until it was only opt-in.

Plus, the nature of your site, unlike say favrd (which is not opt-out, but you'd only appear there if people loved your tweet, and would never appear there if they didn't) is something people naturally feel self-conscious about, appearance and attractiveness.

I do think the functionality and design is really nice though, you did a great job.

Maybe send the person a message saying "please accept this nomination for being wicked hot." Appeals to vanity tend to work.

Opt-in would also help narrow the profiles to real photos of people. I mean, that logo for the corporate account was hot but I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for.

You'd also have fewer profiles, giving the chance for more votes for top hotties.

And you'd have a better group of people to market dating offers to... :-)

This has a major flaw. Like a massive flaw. There are way too many twitter accounts for the votes to be more than 1-2 per account - meaning your site would not do what it does.

The site is nicely designed, many people like playing the game, but without reducing the number of twitter accounts, it's going to be tough to work. I suggest you search out 100 accounts, add them, and then let new users type in their own twitter name if they want to be added.

To be fair, I recommend taking the "doomed" comments here with a grain of salt-- HN readers aren't likely to be the sort to enjoy a service like this, so there could be a lot more pessimism than you'd see in wider audiences.

In general (and I agree with them) HN users seem to look down on superficiality more than casual internet users would. We got a lot of pessimistic comments here on HN for our site yumbunny.com but we ended up with surprising press coverage (e.g. TechCrunch) and our users really are enjoying the obviously-superficial fun.

That doesn't mean your site will do well even if the HN audience dislikes the site-- just keep in mind the potential differences. A lot of the practical advice on this thread is good, even if it's toned a bit pessimistically.

There have been to many things that try to just take hot or not and bring it to a new network. This might be a short lived fad, but I think people that really enjoyed this would end up using something like hotornot in the long run. I could be wrong but I am not sure of the staying power of the site.

I also agree with others it needs to be opt-in

The profiles are choosen randomly, this is hard that I know one of them, won't it better that the user enter a profile name and then rate it.

Or better idea, display popular profiles

What if the user put in their own twitter ID and then rated their friends?

Liked the idea of starting with several hundred popular profiles (with the ability to submit your own for review). If I was a model or celeb using Twitter, I could see Hot Tweeter being a method for building an audience with teenagers.

Personally, this disgusts me.

We should express admiration for people who earn it, by doing admirable things and being admirable people. Being "hot" is not a valid criterion for judging people.

And, no, it's not "just fun." I don't see how anyone could enjoy participating in this kind of misjustice.

can you then objectively define what's admirable? it seems like a subjectively slippery slope - your admirable might be different than my admirable. admirable is also very context-dependent: on HN, admirable is commonly agreed to adhere to the site guidelines & reflected in earned karma and so here, "hot" != admirable because that's not HN's scope. on a site like the OP though, the common agreement is that the site is used to distill that which the community determines to be 'hot'. if 'hot' means nothing to you, then you probably can't contribute to that community's body of knowledge and as such, you may want to avoid such places. here, though, you can contribute admirable feedback on how a site like this, regardless of the body of knowledge, is implemented/executed/marketed.

if you want to rant about aesthetic injustice and the ills of an over judgmental society, write a blog post about it and submit the link. if there's an interesting conversation to be had on that topic here, this community is relatively good at recognizing those opportunities and you'll get your forum for elucidation.

Give me a fucking break.

What's admirable is intelligent people making the world a better place.

Sad to see that modernist/postmodernist bullshit like this is taking over HN.

Being hot is, however, a valid criterion for judging 'hot tweeters', which is what the site appears to be attempting.

It would be a 'misjustice' if they were being called the best/most amusing/interesting/insightful users, but were still only ranked on their pictures.

As it stands, it's shallow but no great injustice.

To the guy who created, kind of lame that it looks deceptively like Twitter. Otherwise, whatever. Are you really looking for a "review", it seems like you know what you want to do. It works nicely, though.

To all the picture complainers, complain to Twitter.

LOVE the idea, but apparently Twitterers are too damn ugly for this to work- Hot Or Not worked because every few people someone actually hot would come on. Went three pages before marking someone... pimply middle aged geeks kinda ruin the concept.

I've just added the opt out feature as a quick fix to those who object to this superficial website

http://www.hottweeters.com/opt-out/

The speed of grabbing the set of 'random' profile pictures needs to be faster. I think many users will get tired of waiting over and over and eventually leave.

Is there a reason you don't link to the profiles of the top 10? It is quite difficult to determine if someone is hot based on a ~24x24px icon.

i do, you just have to log in. that's the value add - of logging in

I like the concept just because it is built around twitter. I don't tweet myself, but I feel like it adds something to the twitter experience. There was an article talking about how twitter only has a 25% retention rate in their second month and sites like this might help that number get better.

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