A Brief History of "Rate-All"
From the moment he was young, Douglas Axelrod enjoyed rating things. When presented with various objects as a baby, he cried when he did not like the object, and laughed or made assorted gurgling noises when he liked it. As a full-grown man, Mr. Axelrod still makes those same gurgling noises when he sees something he likes [see: 16 year old girls]. The problem he found with this system is that although anyone can tell whether or not he liked something, the degree of love or hatred towards that object was difficult to discern.
"How am I going to reveal this information to others?" Mr. Axelrod pondered, "How do I reveal that I like the green apple more than the red apple, even though I like both apples?"
On his soul-searching quest to try to resolve this problem, Douglas wandered into a high school cafeteria and sat down with people he had never met before. They were in the process of rating different classmates on a scale from one to ten in attractiveness, and asked Mr. Axelrod to play along. He agreed to do so, and after rating about fifty people, he reached an epiphany.
"Eureka!" he shouted with glee as he bounded out the door of the cafeteria, clutching the wallets of several of the high school students he had pickpocketed. He quickly ran back to his office [see: bedroom] and programmed a sophisticated interface where one could rate any item by giving it a value in stars, from one to ten. And thus, rate-all.com was born.
Written by: George Ingham
