Millions of people have posted photos at Hot or Not , a popular Web site two engineers founded where visitors rate each picture on a scale from 1 to 10. One of the site’s creators remembers, “Basically, we were sitting around drinking beers in the middle of the afternoon when a comment Jim made about a woman he had seen at a party made us think, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a Web site where you could tell if a girl was a perfect 10?” The phenomenal success of the site spawned hundreds of copycats, many of them not exactly the PG-rated environment this site offers.

Some of the photos people send in aren’t what you would call flattering (especially the ones submitted as jokes on unsuspecting friends); one possible explanation is the psychological concept of self-handicapping, where we set ourselves up for failure so that in case ratings are low we can blame the picture rather than ourselves. Another is that the world is crowded with people so hungry for attention that they will submit to any number of indignities to have others look at them. What do you think—is this practice hot or not?