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How to Build a Fad Website: AmIHotOrNot
webword writes: "Web Techniques is running an interesting article written by James Hong, one of the masterminds behind AmIHotOrNot.com (now known as HOT or NOT?). Before you decide to skip over this, consider that Hong and company used Apache, PHP and MySQL to build their site. They found that these open source tools ran much better on a 700-MHz Pentium III than a quad processor Sun E220. Hong also covers their moderation system, advertising arrangements, and how they were able to scale to handle 1.8 million page views per day after being in operation for a mere 8 days."
Trollin trollin trollin
Get them posters goin'
Get them posters goin', Slashdaaaaaaaaaaaaht
Don't try to understand 'em
Just keep the trollin' random
Get them in a flamewar nice and haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaht
By rig-ging mo-der-a-tion
We cause our de-va-sta-shun
How long til Tac' and Hemos finds our plaaaaaaaht
Post it up, mod it up, troll along, mod it down
post it up, mod it down, slash-dot
Mod it up, reel 'em in, mod it down, flush 'em out
Post it up, troll a-long slash-daaaaaaaaaaaaaht!!
Slashdot!
This gets to the fundamental thing people don't understand about measuring the abilities of computers. There are two ways to measure the capability of a systems: speed, and power. They are related but not closely. See, a 5-year-old SparcCenter 2000E with 20 quite slow CPUs and a few gigs of memory is more powerful than the latest and greatest dual 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 peecee and will almost certainly remain more powerful than even the most expensive and fancy peecee for many years to come.
More powerful. Not necessarily faster. Power measures how much work it is possible for the machine to do in a given amount of time. Power is a general measure that assumes you are running a wide variety of different kinds of jobs, or perhaps a large number of similar ones. When measuring power, you must assume that the load of a system should be at least 0.9 per CPU all the time, and that large amounts of data may need to be moved around. Moving data and sustaining high loads for long periods of time without degradation of responsiveness is an indication of power. That SC2000E can serve many millions of pages a day without breaking a sweat. That's power.
Speed, on the other hand, is a concrete measure of the time it takes to run a certain single linear task, such as a kernel compilation or serving a single page to a single client. This measure rarely places any premium on scalability or the ability to move data. Instead, this measure is typically dependent on the speed of the single fastest CPU in the system. Peecees have great speed - the CPUs are clocked very high and execute very complex instructions. Sun systems do not generally fare very well in this area, especially compared to cost.
The design goals of a Sun are evident from the specifications of the systems - buses are wide, not fast. Latencies can be quite high. CPUs are clocked fairly low and execute simple instructions. The system is designed to allow tremendous throughput - power. Load up on memory, disk controllers and storage, and CPUs, and the huge buses will deliver data well as the load rises. For a web server, for example, serving a single page to a single client is fairly slow compared to a machine with greater speed - remember, a single linear task. But serving one more page beyond the 5000 already being served is where the Sun will really shine. The peecee's memory bus will be saturated quickly; it is clocked fast - much faster than the memory itself in most cases - but is fairly narrow, and the system buses contain bottlenecks. The system was designed for speed, not power. The Sun, meanwhile, can serve the 5001st page nearly as quickly as the 1st. That is the difference between speed and power. The inability or unwillingness to understand the difference between the two is the *only* reason there are peecees in server rooms.
Every system has certain design goals. Peecees and peecee-like systems are designed for single linear tasks - the kind you find desktop computers generally do. Because people - especially traditional nontechnical peecee users - generally do not multitask very well, there is no sense designing their architecture for power. Instead, designing for speed makes more sense. In the server room, however, the exact opposite is true. Unless you're expecting very light use of services, the speed of a system is meaningless; power should be the main design criterion. Using an architecture designed for a completely different problem space just because it happens to look cheap (I won't even start on TCO issues with peecee servers...) is entirely inappropriate. I would fire a sysadmin who recommended peecees for a server environment.
and solaris is a bloated pig.
Yep. For systems with four or fewer CPUs I generally recommend linux. Linux on Suns is as stable as solaris if not more so, and the scalability issues don't generally come into play until 6-8 CPUs or so (with recent kernels). For larger configurations, the very design characteristics that make solaris such a dog on smaller boxes make it outperform linux. It all depends on the goals of the system. In most cases, a larger number of smaller systems is more reliable, less expensive, and more responsive than a small number of large systems. Thus, for example, a web server farm might be better designed as a load balancer and 16 Sun 420s running Linux than as a single E6500 running solaris. But that's another issue altogether...
Oh, give me a break! As if women aren't human beings and are incapable of protecting themselves. Oh yes, let's all get around in a circle and protect the pure delicate women from the sexually crazed, "hungry", men. Gack!
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Having made a couple sites that have gone from zero to hero in a matter of hours (and back to nearly zero after a few months), the more important question I'd ask of the HotOrNot people is how to work with an ISP so that, within hours, you can actually get them to do the prep, installation, and load-balancing required for these 'flashcrowd' sites. All it takes is 8 hours of "SERVER TOO BUSY" before your site's viral momentum is shot to hell and your site will decidedly never be hot.
/.ers would be keenly interested in, considering how often we're on that first wave that will bring down sites that aren't prepared for a sudden onslaught.
I'd think this is a question
Any stories, advice?
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
I see things a little differently:
blurred picture: -2
picture too small: -4 (amazing how many pictures can't be made out)
headshot: +2 (you can see her face better)
animal in picture: -2 (she's obviously obsessed or weird)
kids in picture: +2 (shows she is warm and caring)
alcohol in hand: 0 (How could that possibly matter?)
alcohol in my hand: +2 (if I drank while I surfed I'm sure they would be more attractive)
can't see face: -4, she sees herself as just a sex object, or has something to hide
looks angry or pouty: -3 (I don't know where the moronic perception that that is attractive came from).
smiling: +1... I don't care what she looks like...
obviously having fun: +1
I guess I have different priorities. All in all, I'd rather surf http://freshmeat.net.
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
They must have HORRIBLY misconfigured things on the sun if it actually ran faster on the pentium. For a single processor intel box to outperform a sun server is not a sign of how powerful linux on intel is; it is a sign of the difference between an average joe who knows some unix and a real admin who knows all the tricks for real optimization. I should know, I am one of the aforementioned average joes who knows a bit of unix here and there.
It is an interesting subject for speculation. Clearly, the audience for Internet fads/in-jokes like Mahir, All Your Base..., etc. will continue to grow larger and larger as more and more people get on the Internet.
But authoring a fad is an almost impossible task. It would seem that most cases were accidental.
It seems that certain outfits have positioned themselves rather cleverly to monetize some of the fads. Take ThinkGeek. They very recently rolled out an "All Your Base..." t-shirt. One would assume from the prominent placement of the t-shirt on their website and their recent catalog (I'm on the mailing list) that they are selling rather well.
ThinkGeek obviously didn't create the "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" phenom, but they acted very quickly once it was clear it achieved a sort of critical mass. But fads of this sort (based on peculiar, specific in-jokes between net nerds) are very certain to have very short half-lives. As a result, those who author such fads (accidentally or intentionally) don't seem as likely to be positioned to benefit from their own success.
On the other hand, consider the situation of Matt Parker and Trey Stone. They created a South Park short-film, which became a "must-see" piece of entertainment on the Internet. The media began to report on it. Then Comedy Central scooped it up, made the two creators multimillionaires, and rolled out one of their highest-rated series. In this instance, it was transplated from the Internet into the old media system of cable television- then hyped, milked and heavily merchandised.
I think we can expect to see repitions of both of these types of scenarios- essentially, Internet fads that fade as quickly as they came, and Internet fads that become the foundation for a serious commercial enterprise.
Oy, the Old Testament is Immutable arguments.
Maybe you haven't read this letter to Dr. Laura Schlessinger. It's been all over, with some alterations, amplifications, and amendments, but for geek-name-dropping-value, I'll provide the link to the version on Richard Stallman's Personal Home Page. (This is also the top link Google gives me, looking for "dr laura leviticus", by the way, beating out Dr. Laura's own home page.)
http://www.stallman.org/dr-laura.html
An excerpt: [Dr. Laura,] I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as it suggests in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
[
I posted my picture on amihotornot.com
I think that there may be a problem with their moderation system. Most of my 'ranking' fell in a bell curve around 7. However there was an outlying spike at 1 or 2. Now this could indicate two types of rating styles, perhaps. However given the fact that the site reports back to a user what their percentile ranking is (i.e. where they stand relative to other hotornot-ers) this could be an indication that some people are trying to boost their own scores by giving other people bad ones.
Any good moderation system would need to find some way to prevent that- i.e. but ranking a group of several girls 1st second third, etc.
I realize that this would probably make the whole thing less fun, and it isn't supposed to be scientific to begin with. But if it were 'just a site about rating women' then it wouldn't belong on Slashdot, would it?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
For the href paranoid: http://www.amiallyourbaseornot.com/?pic=CABG
I almost fell out of my chair when I saw:
Free Online Woodworking Resources Directory
So are the other 90% immortal? =]
No such creature, I'm afraid.
However, HotOrNot is a "context free" metric. You look at a single picture and decide that the person is hot or not. Unfortunately, this isn't all that useful as the answers tend to be very close to either "1" or "10" A much better implementation would be just "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." K5 also suffers from this problem when it asks users to rate comments on a scale of 1 to 5. Keeping it simple would make the ratings much more effective.
Pick the Hottie on the other hand implements a contextual metric. Instead of rating a picture on it's own you look at two pictures and click the one you think is hotter. It's much easier to decide between coffee or tea than it is to rate coffee on a scale of 1 to 10. Effectively the site is sorting pictures using human judgement for the comparison function. This way you get much more useful results. With this system you can get the "Top 10 Hotties." With HotOrNot there are probably thousands of images that are 10.0 or 9.9.
Justin Chapweske of Open Cola gets the credit for pointing out this one.
burris
I run www.smalldick.org to help oversized men solve their "problem", but am getting few takers.
Wunder why?
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
A great body: +3
Showing some cleavage: +4
Voting your ex-girlfriend a 1: Priceless
There are some things money can't buy...
--
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
Am I Hot Or Not is a site devoted to the facile and superficial estimation of the opposite sex.
Estimation of the opposite sex!
Oh no! Why didn't someone tell me this before I spent so much time there?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
A single P3 faster than quad sun anything? Can we say misconfiguration. I can make my Corvette go slower than my Chevette, too, if I put a Chevette carbureator in the 'Vette. What they should've learned is they don't know how to configure a Sun server.
One of those is more shallow than the other? They are both one-sided representations of people, and both are poor substitutes for actual human interaction. They are simply aimed at different demographics.
I don't see an enormous difference between posting this on Slashdot and then waiting to see how it gets rated, and posting a picture of myself on RankPeople. You're just getting ratings on different aspects of yourself, that's all.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Let's look at the facts for a moment. Geocities gives away free webspace and offsets the cost with banner ads. I am referred to Geocities by HotorNot and set up a dummy account with nothing but a jpg of myself in my Geocities directory.
HotorNot then pulls my jpg off of Geocities server, costing Geocities money and bandwidth in the process, and imbeds the image into a page served by HotorNot.
Since the html file was served from HotorNot, they're the ones racking up banner impressions and revenue, while not a single Geocities banner gets served in the process.
Geocities is still providing the disk space and bandwidth, but they're losing out on the banners, which are their primary source of revenue.
Care to explain how that's beneficial to Geocities, tough guy?
If it looks like FUD, Smells like FUD...
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
Simple. None of the images are hosted on their site. They encourage users to sign up for dummy accounts with Geocities and such to host the jpg, and foot the bill for the bandwidth. Each HotorNot pageview only amounts to a 4 or 5k script for formatting and to access the DB. Contrast that with the fact that when slashdot serves a comments page, it's pulling several hundred k from the MySQL database and over the 'net.
When you think about, HotorNot's scheme is quite brilliant. A little shady, but brilliant.
Slashdot: Open Source, Closed Minds.
If the purveyors of hotornot and similar sites were smart, they would parlay their site's popularity and sell out to the personal care/comsetics industry quickly. Imagine hotornot "augmented" with:
This is a would-be goldmine for predators of the insecure.
I love amihotornot. I visit it at least twenty five times a day, each for about ten minutes each. It's just so addictive how they have it autoload another pic after I've just voted on the last.
But as much as I love amihotornot, I have to wonder: is its unabashed success a good thing?
In every man's generation, there can only be a small handful of success stories. When slashdot won Wired's "Best Sites of 1994" award, it proved it was a damned good site. The fact that we're all reading this article here proves my point.
But the success of one site can often come at the expense of others. When readers' itches are scratched, they might not wonder whether the scratching implement is the most elegant or the most aesthetically pleasing. This is true of amihotornot.
The truth is, amihotornot has so dominated its niche that there cannot be another successful community-oriented mass-voting site. As if to add insult to injury, the same people who run amihotornot have also started other sites like amigothornot in order to deter what little competition may have otherwise arisen. In any other industry, that would've been antitrust. In the pinup industry, it's par for the course.
Could the world have been a better place if amihotornot had never existed? We may never know.
blurred picture: -3
headshot: -2 (gotta see the whole package to judge fairly, ie ass width, boob size, etc)
animal in picture: +1 (shows she is warm and caring)
alcohol in her hand: +2 (self-explanatory)
kid(s) pictured with the girl: -4 (sorry mom!)
apparent boyfriend also pictured: automatic score==0, no exceptions!
"If the Lord had meant for us to fly, He'd have given us wings with which to soar...." William, 14:35
I don't want to ruffle anyone's feathers, but let's look at what James has done here. His web site lets the internet community rate people's physical appearance
Do we really need this kind of site? Is it constructive, like other fad web sites such as slashdot?
Look at the facts:
- 1% of all North American teenagers have eating disorders.
- 10% of these teenagers will die.
The last thing we need is a web site which allows teenage girls to post their pictures for "approval", only to find themselves rated as a 3 or a 2 while airbrushed professional models occupy all of the higher ranks.
Couldn't we have a story on a successful fad website, like kuro5shinz?