'True Rate Me.' Why women are posting their photos on the internet for strangers to score.

A woman posts a photo of herself online: her curly brunette hair is swept to one side, her bright blue eyes stare straight at the camera and she has the slightest hint of a smile. The photo would be fairly unremarkable, if not for what is unfolding in the comments section below – over 1,200 comments assigning this 32-year-old woman a number. 

"5.4."

"7 or an 8." 

"6.2, nose is a little on the big side and you could care for the skin around your eyes better. But objectively a very well-proportioned profile and very good skin overall." 

Commenters are also arguing with one another. One reply reads "If this girl isn't a 9, truly I can't stand this [forum]". 

Another remarks, "If this woman is a 6 in your interpretation... then everybody in the street is a -3." 

This is the 'True Rate Me' universe, a forum (or subreddit) on the news aggregation and discussion website, Reddit.com. True Rate Me is a world where people – mostly women – post photographs of themselves and ask for an objective rating of their attractiveness (or at least, what they believe to be an objective rating) from the audience. In fact its tagline is 'Accurate, objective ratings'. 

The subreddit is also incredibly popular, with well over 170,000 members and multiple people posting their faces every day for the consideration of this bizarre community.

There are other places on Reddit and social media where users can ask others to 'rate' them but True Rate Me is unique for its brutal judgement system that doesn't allow sympathy, take into a person's circumstances, or their self-description – this system purports to be 'scientific' and users can be cautioned or booted out completely for 'over' or 'underrating' a submission. 

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It's a seductive concept for an online community and there is something unquestionably compelling about it (no matter how morally questionable that is to admit). 

An invitation to comment brutally on another person's appearance is not welcomed in any part of polite society, so this forum provides a true vacuum in which to abandon all kindness and basic human decency and reduce others to numbers. 

True Rate Me is both wildly addictive and deeply problematic. 

So, how does the system work? 

The forum states that their rating scale is built on a "standard normal distribution" i.e. a bell curve that takes into account "objective measurable factors that contribute to one's attractiveness" including facial harmony, symmetry, midface ratio (the distance between pupils and the top of the lips) and features like face shape, eyes, nose, lips, bones, and jaw (particularly for men). 

The creators of the forum have also designed 'objective' rating scales of human attractiveness, featuring examples to follow. The female rating system (which maxes out at a 9.5 out of 10) places supermodels like Adriana Lima, Taylor Hill, Kelly Gale, and Melodie Monrose at the top, followed by descending tiers of other celebrities that may be used for reference. For example, coming in at the "average" score of 5.0 are actors Saoirse Ronan and Constance Wu. 

There is also a ranking scale for men: models Mukasa Kakonge and Herman Drago make the top tier of men and Ed Sheeran is ranked as a 4.0 out of 10 – "below average".

While both the female and male scales incorporate faces from multiple ethnicities, there is an uncomfortable lack of representation of people on each scale's top tiers who do not adhere to Westernised beauty standards, including women who do not have straight, long hair, people with broader noses, or bodies that do not conform to restrictive standards of thinness for women and muscular builds for men (even if this forum claims to be committed to only judging faces). 

Why would anybody submit their photo to this? 

It's a very good question. 

Dr Luke Balcombe, a researcher from Griffith University tells Mamamia that young women (the most frequent posters on the forum) are under an immense amount of pressure from social media platforms, which perpetuate "unrealistic and idealised" expectations of beauty, which is distressing and could lead people to seek reassurance, even in a forum as bizarre and toxic as this. 

But there could also be deeper psychological reasons that people would engage with True Rate Me. 

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Speaking to Mamamia, Dr Lillian Smyth, a senior lecturer and psychology researcher from the Australian National University, says that these forums can be extremely appealing for reasons besides low self-esteem. 

Dr Smyth believes that people posting on forums and requesting ratings from strangers, which can seem disturbing for external observers, may actually be a form of 'reality checking' with others. Reality checking refers to ways that we have for verifying our perceptions, says Dr Smyth. 

"If I want to know if this table is really there, I can reach out and touch it, I can take a photo, I can put an object on top of where I think it is and see if the object falls. If I want to know if my coworker genuinely dislikes me and has just never said anything, asking for others' perceptions is about the only option I've got." 

So, posting photos on True Rate Me may not simply be motivated by people who need superficial validation from others, it may be about simply verifying parts of reality for the people who are posting their photos. We are very rarely given the opportunity to have somebody, unrelated to our personal lives, provide external observation – about our looks or anything else. 

Dr Smyth notes that this reasoning might apply to why people use Reddit forums in general – places where they can ask strangers about relationship problems, for general advice or if 'they're the asshole'. 

"For people who have few (or no) social connections, and also for those who feel like they cannot trust their social connections to provide honest feedback, building an understanding of the environment and constructing meaning from the information available can be genuinely difficult," Dr Smyth explains. 

"[This] can lead... to a situation where someone whoo struggles with making friends, advancing at work, on social media or in their dating life might find themselves genuinely not knowing if their lack of success can be attributed to the way they interact with others – or maybe if they're [not attractive] and nobody said? 

"While being told you're a 3/10 might not make someone feel good about themselves, it will still make them feel more certain of reality and more able to plan a way forward." 

There may also be a gendered dimension to this and an explanation as to why women in particular seem to engage with True Rate Me. Dr Smyth explains that in a Western context, women are socialised to think of themselves in competition with other women and to assume that men will "say anything" to get access to sex. 

"In that sort of environment, who can you trust to tell you honestly if you're attractive? Who is a safe sounding board with whom to build a sense of reality?" 

Is there something darker going on here? 

While the reasons that people post on True Rate Me may be understandable, there are also rumours about the forum that suggest there is something much more insidious about the culture of the subreddit. 

For example, Reddit users have posted rumours that the forum has been used by moderators who will alter scores to hurt posters' feelings and directly impact their mental health. A blog post written by a person that claimed to be a former moderator of True Rate Me that was published back in 2020 claimed that the creators of the forum celebrated that it could be used as a place "to encourage people to kill themselves based on warped self-image". 

The writer of this post also pointed out (the fairly obvious fact) that "photos just don't show people accurately" and that, while some people may be unphotogenic or not able to pose well, "it's hard to convey what kind of person you are and all the good things you have to offer." 

On top of this, some Reddit users claim that members of online incel communities will steal photos off the True Rate Me forum and post on dark corners of the internet for people, often misogynistic men, to criticise and mock. 

Taking into account the most sinister aspects of the forum, it's important to reflect on how people's need for 'reality checking' could be better served outside of a community like this. Dr Smyth says that this is a bit of a "golden question" – how do you help somebody with few meaningful social connections establish trust in the people around them? 

Dr Smyth says that part of it is about being "authentic in your own social relationships", setting expectations of honesty in the friendships that people do have so they don't feel as though they need to rely on strangers on the internet to give them realistic feedback. 

"It's about honesty and openness – so that you can build information exchanges in authentic ways." 

Image: Canva + Mamamia.