Editors Note: I wrote this article in mind for males specifically, however, the same process should work as well for females if not better.
Rise of the Picture Rating Sites
Back in the early 2000s, a small little picture rating site know as HotorNot.com hit the Interwebs in a big viral tidal wave with it’s unique but simple concept of rating people based on their looks. Though not quite novel in the history of men, as we have been rating women for on some sort of scale for ages. However, with this new innovative move to the Internet, the practice of objectifying everyone and anyone on a one to ten scale could now be streamlined on a massive scale. Essentially, HotorNot became the Henry Ford of objectifying peoples beauty and lack thereof.
Regardless of whether people found this type of mass objectification demeaning or not didn’t seem to matter much, as the HotorNot site flourished, along with hundreds of other photo rating sites like: Rate My Body, Rate My ExGirlfriend, Rate Your Rack, Rate My Bottom, and so on.
Though these various rating sites can seem a trivial waste of time, which usually they are, they do have some usefulness to those in the online dating game. These sites can serve as an independent and somewhat unbiased source for determining the attractiveness of our own pictures. These same pictures, the good ones, can then be used for placing on our dating profiles.
Using HotorNot for Your Photo Rating
So which photo rating sites do we choose from since there are so many? Well, the easiest one is the one that started it all, HotorNot.com. The reason to use HotorNot is because it’s the most popular, has the most people who vote and rate pictures and thus will make your job a lot quicker.
Now, despite HotorNot being our best option for rating profile pictures, it’s not completely ideal for a few reasons.
First, the majority of people doing the rating are of the male species and they mostly only vote on the female of the species. This is why, while browsing the site, you’ll notice a huge disparity in the number of votes between females and males. Sorry fellas, that’s just the way it is. Luckily though, we don’t really need thousands of votes to get a good determination of what’s good and what isn’t.
The second reason, so I’m told, is that some of the votes you get will come from other guys, mostly of the homosexual variety… not that there is anything wrong with that. These ratings and opinions are still useful as they are objectifying your picture the way we want, however, it’s not exactly the target market we are shooting for… unless of course it is.
So with those two caveats in mind, you’ll need to understand that the ratings you get from these sites may not be completely accurate, but should be good enough for our purposes.
The Picture Assortment Process
The first thing to do is get a crap load of pictures of yourself. This includes simple profile shots, to activity shots, to professional pictures. Anything taken within the last year that you look reasonably good in.
Now most of us might not be able to pick out the most attractive pictures of ourselves but we should be able to get about a dozen or so pictures that come close to what we think is attractive. Then from here we start narrowing them down.
If you don’t have that many good photos, then it’s time to break out your camera and do a photo shoot. If you can have a friend take them that’s even better, but if not then you’ll have to figure out how to take your own pictures. It’s complicated but it can be done.
Also, don’t get too caught up in picture quality, it doesn’t have to be from a 20 megapixel camera or anything, it just has to be clear. There is even some research that suggests that there isn’t much difference in peoples profile selection criteria on dating sites between those with cell phone pictures and those with professional quality pictures.
Your main concern is to capture your natural photogenic qualities, which could mean taking hundreds of shots from all different angles and lighting. This is the way models do a photo shoot to get their best pictures, so why shouldn’t you?
The Picture Rating Process
The process is simple. You upload your pictures to HotorNot, wait until they get approved and then start rating other peoples pictures. Once you begin your rating, then your main picture goes into the queue for other people to rate. The more people you rate, the more people that rate you, simple right?
Just repeat this process until each picture gets around 50 or so votes. This ought to be enough to get an objective rating, which in most cases will be above 6.
Since the HotorNot ratings are a little skewed in the upper echelon of the rating scale (most people rate from 5-10), then you have to consider anything from 6-7 to be mediocre and anything 8 and above to be good.
Personally, I would get rid of any pictures that rate under an 8 and since I’m a bit picky I try to really find a great picture of myself that has a photo rating of 9 or above.
Once you’ve gone through about a dozen to two dozen different pictures, keep the top 3 to 4 to use for your online dating profile pictures. Make sure they are not all too similar though, like I said previously, you want an assortment of simple profile pictures to activity shots, etc. Variety is important.
The Backup Plan
So you’ve got your best profile pictures, you’ve tested them on the picture rating sites and now you’re all set to stick them up on your dating profile. Well, hold on just a second, there is one last thing that we can do to help insure that we have our best profile pictures.
That one thing is to ask a female friend of yours to look at your dozen or so pictures and have her pick out what she thinks are the top 4 pictures that she thinks is the most attractive. Thus we get some redundancy on the picture rating process.
If the female friend’s top suggestions mesh with the rating sites’ top rated pictures then you know you’ve done well. If they don’t match, then it might take some consideration on which you feel would be more reliable. In either case, you can always swap out pictures down the road anyways, so try not to hurt your brain too much when reconciling your top 4 photos.
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Stay tuned in the next couple of days for how to test your “About Me” section of your profile.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Good stuff here. I love to use ‘pre-tested’ content on my online profiles. Pictures that have got good ratings elsewhere on ratings sites.
I think it’s too much to bash Hot or Not as being “objectifying”.
1. It’s rating people’s pictures. A picture is an object. Yes, it represents you, but they’re still rating the picture.
2. The option to ‘online date’ thru it — guess what? Looks matter in one’s choices. Bigtime. It’s what people see. They see a thumbnail looking at profiles, and they click on it. Why? Looks. Everything’s ‘objectified’ when it comes to taste issues.