
Pic A Fight: Instagram meets FaceMash - jazzychad
http://www.picafight.com/
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Skywing
What's the purpose? Like, what are my votes to be based on? FaceMash was based
on hotness, or something. What is this? I see a picture of a C3-P0 helmet
versus a picture of a VoIP phone. Am I supposed to just vote for the picture
that somehow touches me the most?

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jazzychad
Yep. Nothing too serious, just some fun; which ever one is more visually
appealing to you, or (as you say) touches you the most. It will be interesting
to see which pics rise to the top this way.

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russell_h
It might be good to state that somewhere. When I looked at the site I felt
like I was being called on to answer a question, but I couldn't figure out
what it was. Led me to skip a lot of comparisons. Once I decided it didn't
really matter it was a lot more relaxing.

Also, gorgeous layout!

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kalendae
Hi, I've a identical project but for flickr photos: elograde.com with over
200k comparisons so far and some very quality photos. tho the flickr community
has not really taken to it too much. (been up about a year now)

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cdevroe
kalendae: Nice site. I think the major thing that separates Paul & Chad's site
and your's is that you can start voting without any sign up whatsoever.

Perhaps you three should collaborate or you could simply remove the
registration portion and let people start voting from the homepage.

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kalendae
you are absolutely right, most hotornot sites have that kind of low barrier to
entry. my problem is that people who vote but don't submit photos don't really
add to the project (not an ad site like hotornot and especially if they vote
poorly and are taken out, the votes have to double up for them to have meaning
to prevent random voting etc), right now there are actually way more votes
than needed in proportion to people who submitted their photos.

but yeah it might need some re-examining.

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benjaminlotan
Wow, i was in the middle of making one of these. Ha. should i stop? i was
almost done.

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notphilatall
Cute, I like the overall design a bit more than the voting to be honest. I did
something similar over the weekend, plotting instagram pictures on a map. You
can see it at <http://insta.notphil.com/map.html> \- click on a place on the
map and then on the pins that appear to see pictures taken there.

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cdevroe
notphilatall: I get "oops" on every click. :( But, I'd LOVE to see my
Instagram photos on a Map!

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aepstein
Chad, you are a machine.

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hwong
This is fun. I'm curious; what technologies are being used in the backend?

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jazzychad
Nothing special.... rails 3, ruby 1.9.2 (this is my first rails app ever!),
mysql, hosted on aws. stammy used Sass for the css styling. I wrote a few
scripts to spin up more servers as load increases.

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empire29
The idea isnt inspired imho. That being said, allowing the user to vote using
the arrow keys is. The fact that I could vote with barely any hand movement
got me through ~10 votes which is 8 more that I wouldve had I been required to
click on each image.

Also, the design was simple, clean and effective. Good job.

~~~
jazzychad
most ideas aren't, it's the implementations that are. we added the arrow key
voting to reduce friction for exactly the reason you stated. Stammy did the
design, all props to him for that. we hope you had some fun with it, that's
what it was made for.

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dsims
Do you limit the number of photos? Seems like if the number of photos in the
pool far exceeds the number of votes coming in, each photo would only ever
have a handful of battles. I've build a similar voting system before but the
purpose was to find a winner amongst all entries.

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jazzychad
hey daniel, long time no see! we're probably going to cull the pics and delete
the ones that fall below a certain elo/win/loss threshhold, so it should keep
the quality of the pics high. and we can adjust the threshhold so that it
keeps the total number of pics from getting too huge.

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ecto
I like the design, very clean. I did something similar at
<http://mugshotwars.com/>

Elo is a fun algorithm. You can read about my implementation at
<http://campedersen.com/>

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VomisaCaasi
I had an idea of building a similar dueling site using memes. Actually, I even
designed and built the site, but decided to ditch the project it just before
paying for a domain.

The reason? I didn't want to turn into that guy who runs lolcats franchise.

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benjaminlotan
bad call.

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VomisaCaasi
You may be correct, but aside from wasting 2 weeks to plan the site, 2 weeks
to the design the site, and another month to build that site, I don't
particularly feel any other regrets as looking from mine point of view, there
isn't anything more important than to achieve inner peace with oneself.

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melissamiranda
Nice! Give it a day then see how it compares to the Flickr interesting photos.
I bet there's more off beat and a better variety of photos. Human vs. Machine.

Are you sharing what rises to the top via some feed? I'd love to plot them on
a map.

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dmpatierno
Looks great. I've been working on something similar for iOS, but with themed
challenges. There's a lot of potential here.

<http://photochallengeapp.com>

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ericflo
> The site got twenty-two hundred hits within two hours? _Thousand. Twenty-two
> Thousand._

Is this generated dynamically? If so, awesome. If not, still cool.

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jazzychad
This is a quotation from _The Social Network_. It's static. However, at the
current rate, we could easily be passing that number... yikes! According to
mixpanel, we've processed nearly 18k battles in less than one hour.

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tlrobinson
Nice, though to be fair your potential user base includes all of the internet
vs. just Harvard students.

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jazzychad
Quite true, but of all the Twitter/Social-related websites I've built (a lot),
this one has seen more hits and buzz than all the rest already. Please allow
me to be excited :)

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stevefarnworth
Nice concept - not only as a bit of fun, but as visual feedback as to what
types of photos your followers prefer to see from you.

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EGreg
One constructive criticism: it makes it too easy to just mash the left and
right arrows. Take that feature away :)

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abi
Cool stuff. Are you doing any face detection or do you just pick two random
Instagram pics?

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jazzychad
Completely random at this point.

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wmboy
Cool idea! Just out of interest, how long did it take you to build it?

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ericxtang
Do you have a particular algorithm when selecting pictures?

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PStamatiou
selecting is random, rating is
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system>

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aquarin
I am surprised how people spend too much time on useless things instead of
solving really interesting problems. You can at least use some machine
learning to present a pictures of increased interest to each user. Or present
pr0n pictures based on personal taste.

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jazzychad
I am surprised how many people spend too much time trashing other people's
work. Also, I think the entire gaming industry would like to have a word with
you.

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aquarin
I am gamer. Do you created any interesting game, or just this useless site?

