Fark.com Launches

1999

Date: 1 April 1999 · Place: Lexington, Kentucky · Figures: Drew Curtis, founder · Squidly the Fark squirrel mascot · Tags: Weird News, Photoshop, Headline Tag 01. It's Not News, It's Fark Drew Curtis launches Fark.com on 1 April 1999 from Lexington, Kentucky, as a personal dumping ground for the weird news links his friends keep emailing him. Within a year it has a submission queue, a moderator team, and the iconic green tag system: Florida, Stupid, Asinine, Cool, Hero, PSA, Photoshop. The Florida tag, applied to any story involving Florida Man before Florida Man is a Twitter account, codifies a regional joke into a national one. 02. Photoshop Contests As Folk Form Fark's Photoshop contests, launched in 1999, are the first sustained mass-participation image-manipulation events on the open web. A weekly thread posts a source image, users submit edits, the funniest go to the front page. The format trains a decade of meme-makers in compositing before image-macro generators exist. By 2003 Fark serves four million daily users. The site is older than 9/11, older than Google's IPO, and is still owned by Drew Curtis from Lexington. It is the longest-running independently-owned major aggregator on the English-speaking web. "It's not news, it's Fark." — Drew Curtis, Fark.com tagline, 1999 Sources • Drew Curtis, 'It's Not News, It's Fark' (Gotham Books, 2007) • Fark.com 10-year retrospective post (1 April 2009) • Wired, 'The Drew Curtis Interview' (April 2003)