Need a break from doomscrolling the news? Try this addictive chicken rating website
The news has been something of a hellscape lately, and the urge to doomscroll is destined to worsen rising anxieties about tariffs and the cost of living. Luckily, there’s a new website that you can turn to if you need a bit of a brain break, and it’s all about chickens.
Chicken.pics is a site from the mind of Erika Hall, cofounder of the design consultancy Mule. In a new subsection on the site, called Clickens, users are presented with two paintings of chickens and asked to judge them based on a hyper-specific adjective: For example, one might have to choose which of two hens is more maladjusted, mephistophelean, or persnickety.
All of the chickens are hand-painted by Hall, and there are over 200 of them, as well as more than 200 potential adjectives, which means the chicken show-down options are functionally infinite. It’s a nostalgic concept that harkens back to an early 2010s era of the internet, when silly stunt websites were everywhere—and it’s a reminder that sometimes, the internet can still be fun.
Which chicken is more punk?
The idea for Clickens hatched back in 2021, when Hall was on a sabbatical to write her book, Just Enough Research, and was, by her own admission, looking for ways to procrastinate.
She took up painting with watercolors and gouache as a sufficiently distracting side-hobby, but soon found it difficult to imagine new things to paint. Chicken was top of mind at the time because Hall’s senior pug, Rupert, had begun preferring the meat over his usual canned food.
“I thought, ‘You know what, if I have to cook all this chicken for my silly little dog, I need to do something for the chickens, because we take chickens for granted,’” Hall says. “Like, there’s 33 billion of them on the planet, and we just turn them into nuggets and things. And I thought, I’m going to honor these chickens that I’m feeding to my dog by really trying to see chickens and help other people see chickens.”
So, Hall started painting chickens—and just didn’t stop. Soon, square “profile pics of chickens” were covering her kitchen walls. Last year, she set up Chicken.pics to as a gallery to display the works.
“I made this website last year called Chicken.pics—which is, like, the greatest domain ever—because the web has gotten all platformized, and there just aren’t fun, stupid websites anymore,” Hall says. “So I decided I was going to restart the web from first principles and just make a website. It’s not trying to sell you anything. It’s just got pictures of chickens.”
In the last week of February, a friend helped Hall add the Clickens feature to the website, which pits two random chickens against each other in a battle of adjectives, “hot or not” style, Hall says. In just over a month, more than 74,000 votes have been cast on the site.
“People need something to do that isn’t doom scrolling—that was the intention,” Hall says. “It’s just a silly thing for people to do.”