Thanks

Www.amihotornot.com has become a phenomenon on the Internet with ways for people to rate how attractive people are... How did you first become involved ?

My roommate and I were in the living room having beers, and he mentioned he thought a girl was a perfect 10.
I just had the idea, and we built it over a few days, and that's about it!

Could you introduce yourself, a little about what you do, where your from and how managing the site has changed your life since it went live?

Uhm sure, my name is James, I'm from the San Francisco bay area... I'm in between jobs.. Jim, my roommate, is a grad student at uc Berkeley.
Basically, my life has gotten a lot more hectic.

Hehe, I can imagine, explain.

Just answering emails, creating new products for the site (there's a "meeting" section now), etc.. It takes a lot of time just answering all the emails.

What experience do you have with the web based technologies that drive the site?

None really.. We just started playing around with linux, apache, mysql, and php about a year ago, just messing around. Jim and I are both graduates from uc Berkeley's EEC's dept electrical engineering and computer science. So we have some programming background, that's about it.

Did you expect the site to be so successful, many press agencies and news organization's have run articles on you.

Not really.. It just happened all of a sudden. The day after we launched, there was a long story written up in salon.com, that springboarded into a lot more press. We got our pictures in people magazine, and were in lots of major publications like the NY times, time magazine, newsweek, usa today, and stuff like that. But we didn't really have much to do with that. They all just called.

Interesting, your currently between jobs, I presume the popularity of the site has increased your chances of a new career?

Hope so ;)

The purpose of the site is to rate people based on their appearence, it's rather derogatory, would you not agree ? Or do you think it's just harmless fun ?

Personally, I think it's harmless fun. People already do it everyday, that is, judging other's appearances.
We're not the cause of that. We're just a forum where it can happen out in the open plus, most people don't take the site very seriously.

On the site you limit the votes men can accrue, this seems a little sexist, (women are allowed many more votes) why is this ?

It's a matter of supply and demand. Our system gets more votes made on women, so they get more votes in the beginning, we gave both sexes the same number. We also do it to speed the pace at which people can get votes, and the fact that people's scores don't tend to change much after 50-100 votes anyhow.
If we left everyone in the system for a long time, incoming votes would have to be spread out across all of them, making vote accumulation for any given person dreadfully slow. So that's about it..

I've recently been made a moderator of the site, and I find the amount of male/female photos seems quite even, this may contradict your ideas...

It's not even. I can do one SQL statement to figure that one out.. But even if they were even, that's on the supply side, but the demand is quite different. There are just more votes going to women.. We can't help that.

Would you say that your statistics are a good representation of the mix of male/female users on the net ?

Probably, worldwide stats though, not just United states. It has pretty universal appeal, but there are more men on the net in general these days, globally speaking.

To move back to functionality on the site, you have recently introduced the "meet people" section, has that had a good response ?

Yes, incredible, quite a few people have joined, and lots of matches have been made in the last 2 weeks that it's been running like over 10,000 matches. We just see it as an add on.. Originally, people found each other through putting their address on their pic, but then we got a ton of porn sites doing this to advertise, and the site was flooded with fake pics. So then we outlawed them, but some people complained, so we created the meeting site. The meeting site is interesting because it requires BOTH people to see each other's pic and say "Yes" before a match is made Which means both sides have to actively look for people which the porn site operators aren't willing to do.

What other plans do you have for the site ?

Don't really know. We're still working on making the meeting site run smoother. Some bugs have popped up, so we're working on those these days.

How many accounts do you currently have on the system and are your resources nearing capacity ?

About 420,000 accounts have been created, over 800,000 pics submitted, and over 600 million votes registered since we launched in October. Performance wise, it's still doing OK..

Are the costs of hosting the service paid by the advertising or are you paying from your own pocket ?

They are paid for by the advertising. But its tough making any money in advertising these days. So we still aren't paying ourselves a salary!

And is it a profit making ?

It's on the edge. People are suggesting that they wouldn't mind paying a buck when a match is made in the meeting section, so we're considering that. I don't know, what do you guys think?

I would certainly pay. Have you yourself got an image on the site ?

Yea.. hold on. http://www.AmIHotOrNot.com/r/?eid=B&key=XVTTS

Heh a friendly looking face, mine is at http://www.AmIHotOrNot.com/r/?emid=KEOMA
Taken on a train ride in Munich.

You have people help moderate the site by accepting and rejecting photos that the public have deemed inappropriate, how many people do you have helping out ?

Hmm good question, to be honest, I'm not sure.. There are some higher-level mods who run the mod section. I know there were around 500 last time I checked. They reject quite a few applications, I think less than 20% get to be mods.

* @yeager feels honored to be a mod :)
How much time have you spend building the site?

Well, it's evolved over the last 4 months, it took us 2 days to build the initial site. Then we spent the next few months evolving it to be more scalable. Then we've spent about a month designing and optimizing the meeting site.

How much time do you think the moderators have spent sorting through images submitted to be bad?

Hmmm, don't know, lots. A lot of them do it from work, where they have jobs where they have a lot of downtime And they have fun doing it and sharing the bad ones with each other via their message board (which is the real prize, in addition to just helping to make the site better). Before the mods, lots of porn got through, which made the site very different.

The site doesn't really favor well with porn, it has a very simple and innocent feel to it, I think that is why it's been so successful.

Well, there are tons of sites on the web where you can find porn, so we didn't want to make another one There's something cool about seeing a good looking girl who you know is REAL.

To close the interview I would like to ask how you see the site in 5 years, what you would like to accomplish ?

Make the world a funnier place and give people a reason to take a break in the middle of their workday. If I can do that, I'm happy


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