Churning Madness

Quite awhile ago, I was encouraged by one of my closer friends to put a picture of myself up on hotornot.com, to challenge my underwhelming sense of physical appeal. I hesitated at the time, and let it go back-burner, (like many things.)

But I did it about a week or so ago on a whim. I used a photo that I’ve used on many “social” websites (friendster, orkut, facebook, etc.) I got this photo taken by my friend Ping when we were waiting around for a group Banquet, so I was in casual shirt & tie. Anyway, the voting result seems to be hovering around 6, which they purport to be 56th percentile. Well, I suppose being average isn’t so bad….

You get to see the distribution of the votes over ratings of 1 through 10. Mine’s roughly flat for 1-3,5-7 with 4 being much higher, and 8-10 drop off to zero quickly. First, it’s weird that results in an average of 6. Secondly, it’s sad that I got very little high-votes. If I cared, I’d get another photo taken of me in a more relaxed manner, and see how that does. I think it would get a better ranking. Maybe if I’m still thinking about this a few weeks from now I will.

The other interesting subject is how people & I vote on others. That peak of 4 on my vote distribution for one implies allot of people default to that one. When I vote on people, I decided ‘4′ was for “unattractive”, ‘7′ was for “attractive”, and everything else was for modifications of those ratings. I quickly realized that I was being very critical of others, voting low values about 80% of the time. Or is it common for others to be as critical? It’s an interesting question of psychology & perception.

Now that I’ve gone to this website several times this past week, it’s starting to loose its amusement value. Although I must admit that ranking so many people seems to come unnaturally to me. I don’t normally go about my day critically viewing and assigning a 10 point value to everyone I see. Maybe I should a bit more…