Snyggast.se

» see snyggast.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The deal was that you uploaded a photograph of your own face and strangers handed back a number between one and ten. Optionally a comment with it. The highest-scoring pictures went onto a top list and got seen by more people, which is the entire engine, and it ran in Sweden for nine and a half years.

It opened in January 2001 at the address snyggast.just.nu, run by a company called Svenska Let to Phone AB, and aimed squarely at 13 to 25 year olds. The idea came off Hot or Not and off an earlier Swedish site called Megapudding. There was an English translation of the interface. There were written rules about what you could post, but nothing was checked before it went up, only sometimes afterward, and members could decide for themselves whether to accept comments and whether those comments were public. In September 2003 the site drew 318,000 unique visitors. By May 2007 it had somewhere near 60,000 registered accounts, which tells you most of the traffic was people looking rather than people posting.

~ the case file ~

~ the dialer ~

In 2003 Snyggast got its first real scandal, and it is the one part of this story I understand from the inside. Software was reaching visitors' machines without permission. If the visitor then clicked through a dialog box, their modem would hang up on the normal connection and redial a premium-rate number, and the phone bill afterward could be several hundred kronor. The people behind the software maintained that this was neither hijacking nor illegal.

Modemkapning is the Swedish word. In Turkey I was on a home modem from 1998 through the university years, 33.6k and then 56k, and a dialer was the thing everybody on dial-up was afraid of in the abstract without quite knowing how it would arrive. The mechanism only works while the phone line is doing double duty as your internet connection, which means this particular crime has an expiry date built into it. ADSL killed it more thoroughly than any prosecution did.

~ what the adults noticed ~

The early criticism was the obvious kind. Underage members were posting pictures of themselves in very little, and a site built on scoring appearance was understood to be feeding appearance fixation, with bullying and eating disorders named as the downstream risk.

The later criticism was worse and more specific. Aftonbladet ran a piece in February 2009 about children on the site being contacted by older users and asked to pose on a webcam or send pictures of themselves. The word for it in general use now is grooming. It did not exist as a common term in Swedish then. The operators responded by putting warning text on the site and linking to the press coverage warning about exactly the users they were hosting, which is an odd artifact: a site pointing its own children at the articles about the danger of being on it.

~ the last bill ~

By September 2009 Snyggast.se was publicly for sale with a price of 250,000 euros on it. That same autumn it introduced registration by mobile phone for everybody, new accounts and old ones alike. It was described as voluntary, but you needed it to reach your own account and your own uploaded material. A monthly subscription fee was then charged against the user's phone subscription or prepaid balance. Until somewhere around November or December that year the site did not say it was a subscription, did not state the cost clearly, and did not explain how to stop it.

The company went bankrupt and the site was pulled down completely on 2 June 2010. The bankruptcy estate kept the web address, which is worth more than the code, and from December 2010 pointed it at Snyggastchatten.se, the chat that a fourteen-year-old had started alongside it back in 2001. In 2016 the domains were auctioned off and the chat stopped existing under that name.

One thing did outlive the company. Snyggast had been popular enough by 2007 to be turned into a television program, Snyggast i klassen, which aired on TV400. A website for rating the faces of teenagers became a broadcast format for rating the faces of teenagers, and TV400 put it on three years before the bankruptcy.

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