San Francisco’s Hot List Proves That The Ragebait Economy Is Still Raging

On Monday night, Celeste Amadon posted a selfie; pouted lips, chestnut hair pushed elegantly to the side, a notebook laid out in front of her. If you stopped scrolling for the photo, you were greeted with her actual message: Amadon had been “keeping a list of SF’s most dateable people.” She was making the so-called “San Francisco’s Hot List” public, and provided a link to nominate yourself or a friend. The first 10 finalists would be posted the following evening.

“Chosen through nominations, referrals, research, and our own scouting, with five things in mind: Attraction. Ambition. Accomplishment. Reputation. Aura,” the nomination site declared.

Soon, my entire feed was filled with people engaging with Amadon’s post. The people of San Francisco were quickly dubbed spiritually LinkedIn, unbearably cringe, totally sociopathic, and our biggest sin of all: we are ugly, so ugly, so hideous it bears repeating that we are doomed to die alone because we could not be more repulsive.

When most people think of San Francisco, they think of the stereotypical nerds who put little effort into their looks. Our costumes consist of startup-branded-tees, a pair of ill-fitting jeans, and dowdy but functional sneakers. Any profession of hotness by a denizen of this city is sure to be shot down mercilessly by droves, and I mean droves, of online hecklers.

That didn’t stop a brave few who dared to publicly self-nominate, typically young singles who list their traits like a resume paired with a flattering photo. British accent. Slender physique. Achieved some technical feats. It’s as if Hinge had self-replicated into the X algorithm, but of course, without the safeguards that might protect one from harassment.

At 7 P.M. the following night, the Hot List was live. Black and white headshots of five women and five men appeared, some of whom are high-profile personalities like Dwarkesh Patel, a fellow podcast host and writer, and Jasper Carmichael-Jack, founder of Artisan, a startup that runs provocative billboards which infamously read “Stop hiring humans.”

Others were less-known, at least by techies on X, like Vica Sokoloff Cortes, a 21-year-old who, per her website, is a Colombian computer science student slated to finish her undergrad in Chicago next year, and Ariana Pineda, who just graduated Northwestern with a Master’s in biomedical engineering and had won Miss Asia USA in 2023.

“I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I don’t even have X,” Mia Loosmann, a 23-year-old nominee for the list, told me over the phone. She started getting tons of LinkedIn requests, which was entirely confusing until a few hours later when a friend told her what was going on.