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The Opinions of Attractive People
- jhrobert 16y agoHow long before someone implements this? one day? two days?
- rumpelstiltskin 16y agoTry hours.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Alex3917 16y agoBigthink.com is basically the same thing, and it's already been online for several years at this point.
- foenix 16y agoThat doesn't mean that someone can't do it better…
- hugh3 16y agoOnce implemented, how long before the top-rated video is a facially deformed fat man discussing how Hitler had basically the right idea? There's more pranksters out there than there are people who would take this seriously.
- acqq 16y agoYes, before you invest, just think of the chances of becoming an owner of the 10-second version of ChatRoulette.
- riffer 16y agoThe problem with user-generated video is that YouTube has a huge network effects advantage. This may not be a bad way of trying to finesse that, especially if it's combined with an attempt to do a really good job recommending clips, since the training period would pass quickly in clock time (30 votes in 5 minutes).
- kilian 16y agoSo you let people upload on youtube and post that on your site :)
- pavel_lishin 16y ago> Imagine a TV show about your favorite hobby, no matter if that is cooking, cars, technology or whatever. You wouldn't watch that show unless it had a lot of humans in it, preferably attractive ones, showing their faces. Except I love "how it's made" type of show, and don't really care about the people involved. Put halloween masks on them all, and I'd still watch.
- BrandonM 16y agoThe food network also has a lot of shows that rarely show faces. Ditto anything on Animal Planet.
- mdg 16y agoI would say Food Network shows DO show a lot of faces. They are very much about selling a brand. Just walking through the local Target housewares aisle, I see Rachel Ray, Giada, Paula Deen, Barefoot Contessa, Bobby Flay, etc, all with their own brand of cooking accessories.
- BrandonM 16y agoOf course you are right, but there are also several shows that spend a lot of camera time on up-close shots of the food and the food preparation process, only occasionally showing the host. Those are the ones that I was referring to.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoIron Chef does a decent job of this. I wish they offered different "cuts" of episodes - I don't care about anything the judges have to say until they're chewing.
- nickbw 16y agoAnimal Planet shows animal faces. Anything with a recognizable mouth and set of eyes is still pretty engaging to our wetware. (In fact, I just tried "Animal Planet" on Google images, and got mostly face shots -- human and otherwise.)
- jacquesm 16y agoAnybody that posits an idea as 'brilliant' should go and implement it themselves.
- Mystalic 16y agoNot everybody's born to be an entrepreneur; not everyone likes the challenge to build things from scratch. Everyone has a comfort zone.
- vlad 16y agoAnd that's the point. Nobody wants to put in effort to find out that their genius idea is not.
- AndyKelley 16y agoWell put. That being said, I'm happy to have put in the effort to find out that my genius idea was not. It caused me to have the right amount of humility.
- nollidge 16y agoAlso, maybe someone does like the challenge to build things from scratch, just not companies.
- loup-vaillant 16y agoBetween the lines, I've also read "manipulative and creepy and potentially evil". You wouldn't implement that, now would you?
- jokermatt999 16y agoScott Adams seems to enjoy submitting ideas for discussion moreso than actually developing them. I'm guessing he's already rather financially stable, so it may not be worth the hassle to him to actually do it.
- jacquesm 16y ago
- tomjen3 16y agoOne problem with this is that we don't want to see beautiful people giving their opinion on stuff - we want to see beautiful people who are doing stupid things (so that we can feel better about ourself) and/or who are of the attractive sex and dressed in as little as possible.
- hasenj 16y agoI'd even go further and say that when a beautiful celebrity voices an opinion that we strongly disagree with, we stop liking him/her.
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- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- david_p 16y agoThe described system exists since a couple of years and is commonly know as "Television". Or is it ?
- gaius 16y agoIt's video hotornot.com
- bfung 16y agoupvoted back up. Although hotornot has a negative stigma associated with it, I think you're spot on. Or how about okcupid w/video instead of the pictures? Photos and text profile only say so much about a person.
- blasdel 16y agoThis is what YouTube was originally. Turns out people just upload clips from film, sports, and television instead.
- sesqu 16y agoSome of the most upvoted submitters on YouTube are quite attractive. I have no actual data, but off the top of my head I can think of the word of the day girl, the trainer girl, and the old spice guy.
- jimlyndon 16y agoI liked this the first time I saw it, on every media outlet ;) http://futuremd.blogspot.com/2005/12/candy-crowley-and-blonde-babes-of-fox.html http://futuremd.blogspot.com/2005/12/candy-crowley-and-blond...
- prawn 16y agoIt's said that you use a blonde woman if you want your message received by males, and a brunette if you want it received by females. I believe this tactic is commonly used in advertising.
- dmor 16y agoIsn't this what Seesmic did long long ago?
- hasenj 16y agoI thought of micro-blogging before I knew twitter existed. Oh, and I think twitter is a failed idea. It mostly has turned to another form of RSS feeds. The intended use-case has failed (small updates on your daily life, e.g. "I'm drinking tea with my wife"). This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service. If you allow people to post 30 second videos, they'll use it to send messages to each other instead of expressing opinions on public issues. Or, they might just post short funny videos ("epic fail" videos, etc).
- derefr 16y ago> twitter is a failed idea Nobody cares about Twitter-the-idea, and that's never what anyone means any more when they use the term. What everyone loves is Twitter-the-platform, which is a huge success. > This idea will also fail; you can't tell people how to use a service. Yes, you can. When the site is small, you can manually moderate all submissions, literally telling people how they may use it. After the site grows, the "base" will continue to obey the site's culture. As long as the base has more power (in some metric or another) the site will continue in that direction without further work. (This is basically how HN has been set up.) Note that this might keep the site small—like HN, and unlike Twitter. But that's still entirely monetizable, especially if you have a much larger viewing population than submitting population.
- lsc 16y agoI know a guy who not only thought of the idea, but implemented it. He wrote a AIM to LiveJournal bot. You send it an instant message, and it would post to LiveJournal. I mean, he thought the idea was silly and not very useful, but it was an actual implementation of micro blogging before twitter arrived. I am certain there were other implementations that I don't know about.
- melissamiranda 16y agoHow is it then that Justin Bieber is the most popular thing on YouTube?
- tfh 16y agoJust ask your teenage sister. She knows the answer.
- ig1 16y ago> "You wouldn't watch that show unless it had a lot of humans in it" It's called "radio" or "podcast".
- roc 16y agoWhere you see the exact same effect, with voices.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoShort messages can be easily categorized, searched, favorited. Easier to browse than youtube. SoundByteFace.com!
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoPretty faces spouting opinions turn me off. Most hollywood "celebrities" sound ignorant when they soapbox on their favorite cause.
- BlazingFrog 16y agoHe's right on at least one thing. None of us thought of Twitter.
- reduxredacted 16y agoIt's an interesting idea but I have a few small concerns. Billing the site as a site where people can vote on attractiveness of the person giving the opinion would personally turn me off. Speculate as you wish about my attractiveness, but it's just not something I'd be crazy about participating in as either a person who is posting (my lack of desire to have many strangers judging how I look) or as consuming (my assumption that anyone posting a video would simply be an ego-maniac). Yes, those are quick and possibly unfair judgements, but with the myriad of sites out there vying for my attention, they'd be my first ones. A tweak would be to keep quiet about the attractiveness angle and have someone Academia point that out later in a groundbreaking study of influence on "FaceOpinionSpace" (best I could come up with in two seconds). One might need to incorporate something to ensure that users are really posting a face (Imagine a /b/ campaign called "Post Your Penis's Opinion"). Or maybe that last part is a whole other business idea. Automated video analysis and Flagging of videos could help avoid this, but if it wasn't handled well I wouldn't visit the site. Lastly, it would take a lot of capital. Video isn't a low bandwidth endeavor and if the big "feature" is attractiveness of the person posting their short opinion, quality would have to be somewhat reasonable.
- jared314 16y agoSeesmic. I think the lesson learned there was that everyone wants to watch others, but few want to record themselves, out of fear. Solve that, though force like chatroulette, or inspiration like funny or die, and you could make something I would visit...but not participate in.
- Helianthus16 16y agoReading Scott Adams almost invariably just makes me irritated. A number of semi-plausible speculations coupled with intellectual smugness that's (dishonestly, in my opinion) protected by virtue of being explicitly just a guy's opinions. It's more of the same here. Attractiveness is not universal and is often _tied_ to the opinions a person holds--so people that disagree with arguably attractive people will think them _ugly_. The other big problem is that no one really cares about a pretty face repeating words they don't understand. Pretty faces might get famous just for being famous, but they don't get respected, only thronged. The hell of it is, this could _work_. It wouldn't work by the mechanism he declares, though--it would work because we connect with real people, and it's fun to experience people in short snippets with no obligation. The problem is that we've just described Chatroulette, only decoupled from the present time--and sharing the present time is what makes chatroulette interesting.
- Tycho 16y agoBut there's fairly objective standards that are correlated with attractiveness in any study of the phenomenon, eg. facial symmetry. Physical attractiveness, of course, which presumably is what SA was talking about. From my own observations about how people react to amateur video productions on the Internet, eg. "omg who is that lecturer she is so cute!!", I think Mr Adams is onto something.
- Helianthus16 16y agoCorrelated. Just because we can say "This person is generally more attractive because of facial symmetry, well-aligned teeth, and x,y,z" doesn't mean we have any particularly useful quotient to judge the attractiveness of a person. Such a general measure is way too broad. And you missed my point: the perception of physical attraction is not based solely on physical traits! Look at Sarah Palin--some would say she's attractive, but if you mentally recoil at the thought of a Palin presidential run I'm sure you would not think so. Your amateur video productions _prove my point_ because the attractiveness is in the ordinary, the "just a person at home making a video." It is in the fact that the person is presumably contributing something valuable. So why would people care if models were paid to say something? This is why Adams articles frustrate me: because it provokes discussion without moving anything forward, because he's used a terrible model to abstract attraction and as a consequence our definitions are semantic (read: fucked) to begin with.
- duck 16y agoI think a lot of the threads missed what Scott was talking about. In general we like to look at other faces, no matter what they look like - the Dilbert comic is exactly that. The attractive part is where we will listen to / believe them more.
- filmschool 16y agoTED. Intelligence is attractive.