UT Dallas Student Revives Mark Zuckerberg’s Facemash

So apparently someone recreated Facemash one weekend. You know, that sketchy site Zuckerberg made at Harvard in 2003 where you rated people’s looks? Yeah, that one.

It popped up on Sidechat (the anonymous app Harvard students use) and went viral immediately. Same concept as before, two photos, pick who’s hotter, Elo rankings like it’s a chess tournament but for people’s faces.

Here’s the wild part: two Harvard juniors hacked into it and shut the whole thing down in about two hours. The site came back up later that night, but then the guy who made it just gave up and took it down himself.

Turns out it was this senior from UT Dallas named Nirav Rohra. He built it for HackHarvard, the big hackathon they do every year. And honestly? He wasn’t trying to start drama. He was hoping to get attention for his AI startup and thought this would be a clever way to find a business partner.

Spoiler alert: it was not clever.

The whole thing is kind of a perfect snapshot of how fast things move now. What took Zuckerberg days to blow up in his face happened in literal hours this time. And instead of waiting around for Harvard to do something about it, students just… fixed it themselves.

Source: Harvard Crimson, UTD Mercury