Old vs. New Part II

Reason 2: We had AsianXO.

In the age of facebook, people can pretty much learn everything you need to know about someone through their profile, unless they refused to add you as a friend and their privacy setting blocked everything. But if you trace a few years back, there was a gem in the world wide web called AsianXO. It's a rating site where tweens (and occasionally old men who digged jailbaits) post up their pictures and have others rate them on at 0 to 10 scale. There was a top 10 of the hottest girls and boys, mostly occupied by actual attractive people, even though occasionally a few ogres end up on the chart here and there. AsianXO was a place where people revealed their true nature, best friends would give each other 0s to make their average go down, and others would beg everyone they can think of to give them 10s.

Asians started on the whole fake complimenting business before myspace even happened. I remember someone somehow discovered the super secretive stats page where you can see what score everyone gave you, and that was when all the ugly truth came out.

For example: "omg ma godsis left me a comment sayin how sexii i am buh she actualli gave me a 0 !!"
Or: "yo wdf man i thought you was ma n****, y da fuck did you give me a 0 son?! meet me in da park aftaschool 2mrw imma fuck yo ass up."

Photoshop wasn't very popular back then because most of us didn't know about torrents or just couldn't afford the software. Therefore many people mastered the art of background lighting, blurring their webcam picture to the point where you can barely see their face, or simply block their most insecure feature. I remember there was this one girl who had really pretty eyes, but her nose was forever covered by either her hand or a piece of paper where she wrote some shout-out to some random person she met on the site. Then one day I saw her in person and I totally understood why - girl had a pig nose. Most others just had a lamp shining in their face which made it nearly impossible to make out their features, thanks to their low-resolution webcams.

AsianXO, along with Xanga and Myspace, breeded a new generation of "social climbers". I recall hearing numerous stories from my friends about how a few popularity-craving individuals would randomly go up to them in the park or on the streets and asked: "OMG AREN'T YOU BLAH BLAH BLAH FROM AXO/XANGA/MYSPACE?!". These people had no shame, and they did not get the clue when they were greeted with the cold shoulder. Anyone who suffered these attacks were bombarded by friend requests once they got home, followed by comments like: "heyy it was nice meeting you today! hope to see you again soon, muah<3" Which left the victim wondering "wtf I didn't even talk to this person, why is he/she acting like they're my new best friend?"

Over time AsianXO eventually died down because people started meeting up in person and realized that pictures are deceiving. Also because it got ridiculous and people started creating AXO crews and guilds that were completely pointless. After seeing that most of its users grew out of it, AXO made a sad attempt by creating AXO2, which failed miserably. I'm not sure when did AXO disappear completely, but it was fun while it lasted it, and still fun to reminisce about.

R.I.P AsianXO.