Worth1000
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Worth1000 (also w1k.com) is an image manipulation and contest website. Worth1000 opened on January 1, 2002 and hosts over 270,000 unique images made in theme contests such as "Rejected Transformers", "Invisible World", and "Stupid Protests". In mid-2003, Worth1000 began hosting similar competitions for photography, text, and multimedia.
The website was designed by Avi Muchnick and Israel Derdik. Muchnick named it after the old saying "a picture is worth a thousand words".
Worth1000 is one of the most popular sites of its kind and has served more than 5.5 million distinct visitors in September 2004. They have also been featured in many different publications, TV shows, and radio including PC Magazine, Popular Science, Good Morning America, BBC, CNN, New York Times, Weekly World News, Detroit Free Press, TechTV, USA Today, G4, Inside Edition and many others.
Worth1000 and their members have created two books on image manipulation: when pancakes go bad and I've got a human in my throat.
Contents |
[edit] Contests
Competition mostly takes place in a series of themed contests. A subject title is given along with a sample photo and a brief description of what contestants should try to do. Entries are then accepted for a fixed period of time, after which they are posted so that people can vote on them, and the results are then compiled. Examples of contests are:
- Reality manga - Alter photos of real people (celebrities are popular) so that they look like Japanese anime drawings come to life.
- Chimaera – Create a new animal by mating three or four other animals to one.
- Invisible world - Take any object or person in an image and make it invisible using photoshop. No indication or outline of the object/animal/person should be seen, except through its function/interaction with other objects and/or people in the image
- If Goths ruled – Show what the world would look like if Goths ruled it.
Others include mating animals with instruments or plants, zombifying or aging celebrities, combining several movies to one, and many others.
Even if the Photoshop contests are the main attraction of Worth1000, it also has a vast variety of contests for photographing, text and a multimedia section, mostly consisting of illustration competitions. Except for the regular contests, members of Worth1000 challenge each other for head to head-competitions too.
[edit] Voting system and Karma
All members vote on a scale from 1-10 on each entry. Users can not change their votes once placed. While voting is active, the placement of entries in any contest can not be viewed until the user has voted on all entries in a contest. The authors of entries are hidden until the end of the contest. Users are not allowed to have more than one account on the site unless a very special situation is present.
Worth1000 uses a system called karma to prevent cheating. Karma is a way to measure the voters ability to discern actual image quality but still allows plenty of room for individual tastes to come into play. It maximizes the effects that consistently fair and observant voters have on an entry's average, and minimizes the effects that "quirky" or downright dishonest voters can have.
The level of karma you have is automatically determined by your personal voting habits. It drops when you deliberately give an image what you don't think it deserves. It rises when you rate all the images in a contest fairly. New voters begin with 1 karma. Basically it means that when they vote a ten, it counts as 1 person rated the image a 10 toward the image's overall average. The maximum karma of regular voters are 175, so when they vote a ten, it counts as 175 people gave it a 10. For every contest that you vote fairly and vote on all entries in your karma will raise with 3. There are also special “jurors” who receive a karma of 500.
[edit] Forums
The Worth1000 website has a large community as well as a large selection of forums. The forums range from general discussions and humour to discussions on techniques for the various types of contests. Due to the many active Admins and a word-filter that monitors the forums, a high level of troll control exists.
[edit] Terms and Worthisms
- Banhammer - What will strike you if you break the rules, resulting in a ban.
- Losasig - The signature awarded by the winner of a Head-to-Head match to the loser of the match (written humiliation).
- Losatar - The avatar awarded by the winner of a Head-to-Head match to the loser of the match (animated humiliation).
- Worthism - Slang terms / made-up Worth1000 terminology that appear on the site.
- Filter - A feature of the site that changes certain keywords to other words.
- New Jersey - The filtered form of the word "Hell." The most infamous and prevalent of the conversions by the filter.
- Textor - One who participates in the Text Contests.
- Trifecta - When the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winning entries in one contest were all submitted by the same person.
- Worthiversary or Worthday - The celebration of one's x year membership on worth, where x is the number of years.
- Karma - A users earned voting power or value. (See Karma Voting System above.)
- Jurors - Staff of volunteer site users who have a voting karma of 500, almost 3 times that of a normal user.
[edit] Intramural competitors
Similar sites have competed in an intramural tournament with Worth1000.com, including:
- Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday
- Fark.com
- Photoshopcafe.com
