The forgotten joke website influenced YouTube, Twitter, Tinder, and so much more
Before MySpace, before Facebook, before Twitter, before YouTube, before Instagram, before Tinder there was HOTorNOT.
Created on a lark in 2000, HOTorNOT became what we’d now call an overnight viral hit by letting people upload pictures of themselves to the internet so total strangers could rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. Twenty years later, it’s a conceit that smacks of the juvenile “edginess” of the early web. It s now seen at best as superficial and crass, at worst as problematic and potentially offensive. However, the deeper you dive into HOTorNOT’s history, the more surprised you ll be by the thoughtfulness bubbling below its shallow surface and its fundamental impact on internet history.
Multiverse Closes $17 5 Million Funding Round To Take Your Tabletop RPGs Online forbes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forbes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
US developer Multiverse has raised $17 million in a round of Series A funding.
The round was supported by several executives across the industry, notably including Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Crunchyroll co-founder Kun Gao, and Oculus VR co-founder Nate Mitchell.
Venture capitalist firms Makers Fund and Anthos Capital also contributed to the round.
Multiverse aims to use the funding to further develop its new platform One More Multiverse, a platform for creating a hybrid combination of tabletop RPGs and video games.
The studio, founded in 2016, has also developed a number of titles for PC, including award-winning VR game Seeking Dawn.
Multiverse s new platform is currently in closed beta, with a full release planned for Q3 2021.