May 12, 2004
Hot Or Not
the ageproject experiment was interesting, though i couldn't resist and checked again. my average age crept up to 34, but this was after 548 guesses. it's a bit younger than i am, so i suppose i can't complain too much.
so what's an anonymous coward to do to top this public display? the unexpected of course!
for no reason other than shits and giggles, i put myself up for display on hot or not. oh yes i did! now i get to be rated for more than just age and the results have been quite amusing so far.
unlike the ageproject, this site actually tries to get people hooked up with one another. so if you don't want to be hassled or are not available like me, it does seem that making this clear in your profile does the trick. my results so far show that i rate a shocking 7.4 after 63 votes. one person even had the audacity to rate me a 10. i guess this site supports the blind. haha!
now being the geek i am as well as being self-critical, i took a peek at the numbers. well, the graph actually. as it turns out, they don't do straight averages. yeah, i knew my rating was too good to be true. i guess i'll have to tear up my latest love letter to olivia newton john and continue on with my life. enough with that... back to the geeky stuff.
as you can tell from the histogram to the left, clearly the actual scores do not average out to 7.4. by my rough estimate based on the graph, my real average is more like 5.3. so why is this? this is apparently answered... kinda sort... in their faq #18:
Official HOT or NOT scores are normalized to account for things such as the fact that different people have different voting styles. For instance, some people, for reasons unknown to us, only vote 1-5. Should a 5 from these people count as a 5?this has got to be particularly brutal to the scores for some of the women! you get some horny bastard clicking 9 and 10 for all the little blondes, and when a reasonably attractive woman pops up and they pick say 6, it's going to get normalized down. i suppose if there is a string of -- um, lesser attractive ladies -- the same could work in the same persons favor. for the record, let me just say -- dumb, dumb, dumb. fellas, just give the raw average. if you want to play with your math skills, how about providing traditional mean, median, and mode. hell, get fancy provide the variance and standard deviations. want to show distribution, calculate out sigma(1), sigma(2), sigma(3) to show whether it's a normal distribution or not. come on guys... be geeky!
Many standard scoring systems use normalization techniques, including the Olympics and the tests people take to get into college in the US. We still give you the chart, which represents raw data, just for fun.
Posted by ac at May 12, 2004 08:49 PM
i was clicking through males and females at first. i noticed anyone w/a fuller face who were cute had lower scores.
i'm a low rating bia. i've use to go to that site before. i've never given over an 8, but today i'm in 1 city.
Posted by: Enigma at May 13, 2004 10:04 AMi also noticed that if a female showed any skin or struck a erotic (for lack of a better word) pose, they'd get scored higher. the wench could be as ugly as sin (imho), but if she was showing cleavage or bent over a chair, invaribly she'd score 8+.
there is also a definite skew towards the young... probably because most of the users are young, so when they see what someone like would consider a hot woman -- they see an old lady. as i went through and rated some pictures, i'm pretty sure i tended to be less than fair to younger girls. it would make me feel like a dirty old man to rate that 18 year old girl in the seductive pose as a 10, so i'd mark her as a 7 for being "cute".
honestly, and i know this is getting long... it would be quite interesting to correlate the age of the rater and the rated to see what differences it really makes.