One of the internet’s oldest spots for weird links turns 25 this month, and it all started with a photo of a squirrel with giant nuts.
In October 1999, Fark.com began posting links to wacky stories along with user-submitted headlines that were invariably funnier than the originals.
Founder Drew Curtis said that for two years, before he started the site as it exists today, he used a photo of a squirrel with giant testicles as a placeholder.
Curtis said he used to use the word “fark” a lot as a euphemism for profanity in his daily life, but registered it as a domain name in 1997 after he heard the internet was running out of four-letter domain names.
“I had no idea of what to do with the site, so I put a photo of the squirrel with giant nuts,” Curtis told HuffPost. (The well-endowed rodent can still be seen on Fark’s FAQ page.)
Eventually, Curtis decided the website should be a place where he could post links to weird news stories he found, a knack he told Ace Magazine “was an actual talent in the days of print and early digital.”
With its links to news stories recaptioned with alternative headlines, Curtis turned Fark into what he hoped “would be a central place for all things Not News.”
A funny thing happened, he told Ace Magazine.
“Over the next 25 years though, Not News somehow absorbed the entire news cycle,” he said. “It was a happy accident. Well, for me anyhow, I don’t think it’s done the rest of us any favors.”
Fark’s popularity grew slowly at first, but Curtis said things really took off after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when a lot of websites were having trouble staying online.
“We didn’t crash and traffic doubled,” he told HuffPost.
The real-time experience did change how the site worked, though.
“Right after 9/11, no one wanted to laugh, so we did real news, but a week later we transitioned back. However, people told us, this is where we get the news. So we added better headlines to those stories as well.”
Fark, as an aggregator that repackages existing content in a new way, hasn’t always been easy to explain. When speaking to a college class, Curtis said he compared his site to “The Daily Show” and the Drudge Report, but his young audience didn’t get it.
Still, Fark does have many famous fans, including Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who has called Fark an inspiration for that website, as well as TV host Conan O’Brien and humorist Dave Barry.
Curtis said he’s also heard longtime journalist Dan Rather has enjoyed perusing Fark.
“I heard that Rather visited a newsroom once and borrowed a computer, and when the owner got it back, it appeared as if he was reading Fark,” Curtis said.
These days, Curtis’ biggest challenge running the website comes from artificial intelligence tools.
“The number of AI-generated stories submitted is insane,” Curtis said. Along with everything else he has to do when considering whether to post a given story, he now has to figure out “if it was written by a human being.”
Although aggregate sites like Fark lost some luster when social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter became the go-to place for sharing wacky news, Curtis believes that recent algorithm changes to various social networks that downplay news content actually make his site “more valuable” to people looking for hard-to-find, underreported stories.
Curtis will officially celebrate Fark’s 25th birthday on Oct. 12 with a live event in Lexington, Kentucky.
“We’ll do a livestream where we will focus on some of the epic threads we’ve had on the site,” he said. “Not famous, but weird.”