Hot or Not Built the Internet We’re Still Swiping Through

Launched in 2000, Hot or Not invited people to upload photographs of themselves and be rated by strangers on a scale from 1 to 10. It was crude, addictive, and, within weeks, one of the most visited sites on the web. More importantly, it turned an intensely subjective judgment—whether someone was attractive—into structured data that could be ranked, compared, and used to organize human behavior.

Twenty-six years later, the dating industry appears to be retreating from the internet Hot or Not helped create. Earlier this month, Bumble founder and chief executive Whitney Wolfe Herd said the company was moving away from its swipe format toward “fewer, better, more considered signals.” A day earlier, Match Group, the company behind Tinder, said that the app will introduce more in-person events by the end of the year.