hello, hn. i built a website where you can rate a human out of 5 stars and write a review of them. i remember reading an article here about who would win the war as the measure for a person's online reputation. would it be quora or stackoverflow, linkedin, twitter, etc.?

everyone here on hn recognizes, say, patio11. big burly dude, hairy chest, stalking the halls with his smoking hot cheerleader girlfriend. online reputation in the forms listed above can give a sense of how cool someone is and how nice their clothes are, but it doesn't provide much room for dissenting opinions and critique.

i built chattel.me as a reaction to high school, consensus, the level of online activity as a measure of worth, etc. on chattel.me, someone can say their piece about how great or horrible you are in spite of what the crowds have concluded. or it's like picking a restaurant via yelp -- above, say, 4 stars, a restaurant is game, but reviews can be read to determine kind apart from quality.

as far as i can tell, the internet is useful for two purposes: 1. to explore deviate sexual practices in greater detail; and 2. to rip each other the shreds anonymously. satre's famous quote is that "hell is other people", a reference to how the opinion of the other shapes the way you experience the self. i've aspired to create the "hell" on the internet.

and by hell i mean the livejournal to blogger or the myspace to facebook, where the foil to chattel.me is about.me/flavors.me, personal branding, and "beautiful design". the former are typically internet ghettos, but they're places of more raw human emotion where anything goes versus the superficiality of self-constructed narrative and advertisement. chattel.me is what some might call "hella emo".

i'm trying to speak to the nerds, rejects, losers, etc., what i was in high school and what i'm again on the high school that is the internet. nerd heros these days spend all day communicating with customers via social media, are highly popular, etc., which requires a degenerate level of engagement and polish. what happened?

fair’s fair, and i’ve added a page for myself here: http://www.chattel.me/humen/walter-chen-new-york-ny. i’ve already scoured my mental rolodex for who would merely think of me as “meh…” to no avail, and i’ve hit refresh a few times. i imagine that the site’s primary engagement mechanism will be neurosis and narcissism and it’s working fairly well on me.

i taught myself rails and did this. check it out, and give me your deepest thoughts.