And to compare themselves against their friends.

Every girl in my high school was all over this when it came out. They all wanted to know who was prettier and friends stopped talking over it.

A lot of the guy were too. One of my stoner friends would agonize about his score.

if by brutal you mean fun and not full of corporate bullshit, yeah.

At the time, I worked nights in a tech call center. There were generally three guys working the shift but it wasn't the same people every shift, it was a small but rotating cast. There was also a supervisor but they spent the majority of their time in a private office halfway across the building from us.

One of the three guys who was there most nights would mostly ignore calls and would do a pretty poor job with them when he did answer. Instead of working, he'd spend the whole night browsing HotOrNot, occasionally vocalizing his opinion on some pictures.

Since there were only three people on the shift and it was in a call center built for a hundred or more, we were permitted to sit at any desk (they had roaming profiles). Only one member of the night shift ever sat close to the guy I described more than once. Besides being personally unpleasant, he was a heavy smoker and thus olfactorily offensive as well.

The HotOrNot guy was there when I got there and I'm pretty sure there when I left. No idea how he kept his job.

My dude, we were flying planes into buildings, committing genocides, burning a Woodstock event, and throwing shoes at misunderestimated presidents.

IIRC this was just about voting on the hotness of random pictures, you couldn't actually do much in the way of social media stuff. You'd just upload your photo, and be able to check back on how it scored later for an ego boost, bragging rights among your friends, or whatever.

I don't know if the user interface was the same but yes, facebook started like this. With only pictures of women from the campus