Ratings communities are a peculiar phenomenon common in the world of LiveJournal.

Any user account on LiveJournal may be turned into a community, which allows many people to post to one particular journal. Typically, these accounts exist to foster communication; for example, the everything2 community was greatly useful during the long outage of 2003.

Almost every massively popular internet community fosters the creation of weird new subcultures. USENET had the meowers and it own special variety of kook. E2 has serial downvoters, Asamoths, and zany made-up characters. Slashdot, Fark, Something Awful, and pretty much any popular forum starts to create its own set of undesirables, jargon, and whatnot.

The community feature of LiveJournal has started its own line of undesirables and weirdos. These communities have a perfectly innocent purpose: to allow like-minded individuals to have a common journal which they can each update. If you have never explored the wacky LiveJournal social pecking order as I am wont to do, you would probably never even realize just what crazy stuff happens in these virtual places.

Ratings communities act as an in-crowd. They aim to create desirability by making it difficult to get in. Of course, if there's nobody in your little club to begin with, nobody wants to join.

Here's an example. The 17-year-old LiveJournal user petaluv gets together with a couple other vegan LiveJournal friends and forms a community called toohothippies. On that community's info page, there will probably be an application, something like this:

NAME:
AGE:
SEX:
GAY/STRAIGHT/BI:
FAVORITE BAND:
VEGAN/VEGETARIAN:
DISLIKES:
HOBBIES:
AT LEAST THREE PICTURES:
WHERE DID YOU PROMO US:

The creators will probably have agreed to automatically approve the first 3 or so people with complete applications to help gain critical mass. Now they go spam any community of which they are members (probably getting banned from at least one).

Each hopeful member joins the community and submits an application as a shared post. The current members now vote on whether to accept the newbie in comments to that post. The text of these votes will range from "OMG YES so hot" to "wtf no you are fat" to possibly "i am in a bad mood so no" and worse. Sometimes the supplicant will have a pleasant "thank you for being honest" or even a vindictive "u r fatter than me bitch". Depending on the community's policy, this sort of talking back may be encouraged within limits or it may be totally prohibited and banworthy.

Eventually, voting will close, and the supplicant will receive a banner graphic stating the results of the approval process. Community members are expected to place their approval banners in their bio pages.

Sometimes rating communities have meaningful discussion, but I wouldn't count on anything more than harassing applicants and members posting pictures of themselves.

Some well-known rating communities:
• nonuglies - the most notorious
• nonuglylesbians - WOOHOO
• fuckyoucrew - Apply with your elitist musical taste. Be sure to drop one ironic mainstream choice.
• theflickyoucrew - Similar, but with films.
• thebookyoucrew - Similar, but with literature.

Possibilities that I can imagine:
• nonuglynazis - LJ is infected with white pride communities
• sxe_enough - Straight-edgers
• naked_and_hot - I'm sure something like this exists already!

althorrat contributed to this writeup, but doesn't want to be identified with any of these groups.