Interviews: Ask Fark Founder Drew Curtis a Question 127
For many, the day would not be complete without checking Fark.com for the latest funny or weird news. Inspired by the numerous links to interesting news stories he'd send to friends every morning, Drew Curtis created Fark in 1999. By 2009 it was one of the top 100 English language websites with 3-4 million unique visitors, and 60 million page views per month. Recently Drew has been in the news after he announced that he was running for governor in his home state of Kentucky with his wife Heather as his running mate. Calling himself an independent "citizen candidate," the campaign website says: "We have a theory that we’re about to see a huge change in how elections and politics work. Across the country, we have seen regular citizens stepping up and challenging the status quo built by political parties and career politicians. They have been getting closer and closer to victory and, here in Kentucky, we believe we have a chance to win and break the political party stronghold for good." We'll be checking back in with Drew as the race heats up, but for now he's agreed to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.
Duke (Score:4, Funny)
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I'm so sorry to hear that seeing 3 ads on a page hurts your brain so much, that you turn into a giant raging spewmachine.
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And if you block ads, you get a "please don't block ads" nag screen that moves.
Boobies (Score:2)
How effective would you say the filters have been for Fark?
What happened to Fark? (Score:1)
It used to be huge, but then it died. Do you blame yourself? Whose fault was it?
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The readers never got over it.
A question close to his heart (Score:2, Interesting)
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One old person's old meme is a young person's new meme.
Depends on succession (Score:3)
How much longer can a site that's largely based around the same handful of tired old memes remain relevant?
Well it all depends on how much longer Florida is around.
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How much longer will the community itself keep going on with the same memes? There's a lot more to Fark than memes.
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"huge change" (Score:1)
Improving photoshop contests (Score:3)
Fark used to have some of the best Photoshop contests, both in terms of what people came up with (thinking of the Lukket fake Rand Corporation computer as an example), and in the way that the in-line display and voting for the entries worked. What would you like to do with these going forward to get more involvement for these contests?
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I think one problem is that a lot of the old participants don't do it any more, for whatever reason. Photoshop contests used to regularly pull in 80 or 100 comments or so, now those are the outliers. You could go into one and expect to see 10 or 15 people making entries, but it seems like those people have moved on for whatever reason and haven't really been replaced.
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I can tell you why I left. In my day I was a major contributor to their Photoshop contests. I submitted thousands of entries and had well over 100 wins. What happened was a steady decline of the old users, many of whom were very prolific, and had skills beyond the realm of Photoshop. You see, the contests on Fark are really only part of the equation. Fark doesn't track stats like votes, win percentages, etc. For that, we needed a third party stat tracking site. There were several such places over the years.
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If it was actually a
Ironic Slashvertisment... (Score:1)
* Slashvertisment:
For many, the day would not be complete without checking Fark.com for the latest funny or weird news. Inspired by the numerous links to interesting news stories he'd send to friends every morning, Drew Curtis created Fark in 1999. By 2009 it was one of the top 100 English language websites with 3-4 million unique visitors, and 60 million page views per month. Recently Drew has been in the news after he announced that he was running for governor in his home state of Kentucky with his wife Heather as his running mate. Calling himself an independent "citizen candidate," the campaign website says: "We have a theory that we’re about to see a huge change in how elections and politics work. Across the country, we have seen regular citizens stepping up and challenging the status quo built by political parties and career politicians. They have been getting closer and closer to victory and, here in Kentucky, we believe we have a chance to win and break the political party stronghold for good." We'll be checking back in with Drew as the race heats up, but for now he's agreed to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.
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Sounds like Drew will fit right in with Congress, where we have senators who never sent email sitting on the technology committee.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2... [addictinginfo.org]
While I'm saddened that Drew has had to "clean up" Fark of its foobies and more aggressively moderate racist photoshop themes and pics, I applaud more tech geeks taking the plunge into politics. Here's hoping for a campaign that's more transparently data-driven by the people being represented than money-driven by shadow financiers.
My question (Score:5, Funny)
Mr. Curtis, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?
closet skeletons (Score:1)
Drew, what is the worst possible thing that a political opponent could dig up on you - what don't you want people to know?
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I want to know why Drew Curtis hasn't yet denied that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. It's not just that he won't show us proof that he didn't rape and murder a young girl in 1990, but that Drew Curtis has so little respect for the American people that he doesn't even bother denying that he raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. If you were a parent in Kentucky, wouldn't you be concerned that this story hasn't been talked about in the mainstream media? Wouldn't you find it important to inve
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For those who may want to mark this AC down, understand that this is a reference to a counter-stupid campaign popularized at Fark.com. (http://goo.gl/A4yFf)
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Phrase it in the form of a partisan attack ad.
Prevent Party Rollup (Score:2)
Say your political campaign is successful. Do you have a plan in place to stop one of the "two" parties from co-opting your message and claiming to be a part of the same movement? I'm thinking Tea Party -> GOP and 'Occupy' -> Democrats. Both only 'sorta' worked (TheTea Party was much more successfully assimilated IMO), yet ultimately were co-opted.
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Bar Towel? (Score:5, Funny)
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I have received both my Guinness Bar Towel and BIE ... still waiting on a hot cocoa sampler box....
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Litigation (Score:5, Interesting)
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Fark isn't relevant (Score:2, Interesting)
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Slashdot isn't relevant either, it's just some tech rag owned by Dice anyway.
Your biggest challenge to getting elected? (Score:1)
Fark is dead (Score:2)
Mods killed it
Why bother?
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This gubernatorial race is really just a ploy for attention to get someone, anyone, to go back to Fark after the pro-censorship PC police took it over.
Funny, because it used to be a decent place when it wasn't rife with PC nanny-staters.
You censor speech, you get routed around, end of story.
Culture Change (Score:5, Interesting)
Drew,
There was a time when Fark Boobies links were mixed in with news links. Then it became its own tab. Then it was reborn as "Foobies"-- a wholly separate site. More recently, a strict "Anti-Misogyny" standard on Fark discussions was implemented which included the dis-allowance of the use of the word "rape" except in the academic sense, dis-allowing the use of demeaning terms in describing women, and suggesting that a female victim of a crime was somehow asking to be victimized.
Examples of dis-allowed uses include the meme "40 lbs. Box of Rape" (http://goo.gl/XipVh1), references to the Whoopi Goldberg differentiation between "rape" and "rape rape" (http://goo.gl/u3YDuW), and Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" gaffe (http://goo.gl/dyxpy).
To say that the change was met with disdain would be an understatement. The ensuing threads were filled with battles back and forth between those who assert that such references and jocularity is proof a genuine hatred of women (misogyny) while others assert that lumping together edgy attempts at comedy with the genuine hatred of women is prejudicial and incredibly offensive.
Given Fark's historic culture of pushing/punching the boundaries of political correctness (see: "Welcome to Fark" memes) where almost nothing is so sacred that it cannot be joked about (see: "Window seat, please" memes), why was this decision made? Why were so many genuinely non-misogynistic actions/comments/memes lumped in with that term?
My partner and I have discussed the change at length. We're both fans of audacity humor, so we actually "get a kick out of the replies" (http://goo.gl/a6xyao). Together, we came up with the following potential rationales. Which did we get right? Which didn't we?
1. I got older and my tastes have changed. I don't want to run a site that goes counter to my own sensibilities.
2. I received pressure from external organizations (other sites, special interests, advertisers).
3. I want to grow the site to be more inclusive of people who would be offended by such jokes.
4. I'm running for public office and Fark.com, if not cleaned up, would destroy my campaign.
5. I've received overwhelming negative feedback regarding the state of Fark comments and the numbers supporting a change greatly outnumber those who didn't like the change.
6. I actually believe that everyone who jokes about women hates women and they should be stopped.
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Disdain? The Internet as a whole has been applauding and attempting to follow, where it can.
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It really doesn't matter what the "internet as a whole" applauds when dealing with the internal matters of an individual community. Different communities have different sensibilities and priorities.
Scenario:
The Slashdot community values discussions based on science and good logic. Imagine that Slashdot declares that comments are no longer allowed to question the scientific validity of anti-GMO or pro-Vegan articles. Everyone who questions the assertions of PETA and the anti-GMO crowd will be officially labe
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I wholeheartedly agree. If I were defending sexism (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/sexism), I would be out of touch. However, as an egalitarian feminist, you'll never find me doing as much. I'm asking questions about a decision made contrary to (what I measured to be as) overwhelming disagreement within the Fark's commenting community.
Still, if you were Drew Curtis and responding to my question, you would select "6. I actually believe that everyone who jokes about women hat
Four questions (Score:3)
--- Discussions on Fark don't go to infinity and beyond anymore. Is the attempt to make Fark more PC a response to that or a consequence?
--- You're HTML 2.0 compliant, it seems. Ever planning on updating the back end?
--- A few times a year there's a post to TFD asking for ideas on how to improve things. Nothing changes: why?
--- The ethos of Fark used to be say anything --- smash any idols ---just be funny doing it. Has moving away from that basically made Fark no different from a lot of other discussion/aggregation sites?
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"Drew, how can you possibly say there is no problem with you taking you wife into the running for a position as a "ride-along"?"
Check how the site has changed. Misogyny is no bueno but misandry is a-okay.
Drew sold out to the likes of Gawker/Jezebel and other media sites.
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Yup. Fark is getting less fun ever day because Drew sold out. The very reason we go to fark is for the outrage and silliness. But all too often a moderator obviously born a Puritan steps in and ruins the fun.
Also, their moderators are idiots. When I called out someone who said something extremely racist and offensive, I got a 24 hour ban. When I complained the fucking moron of a moderator insisted the statement I referred to wasn't racist. Yes it was. It was extremely offensive to Filipino women. I
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But all too often a moderator obviously born a Puritan steps in and ruins the fun.
A Puritan? Hardly. The social justice warriors enforcing political correctness everywhere aren't, and have never been, from the Right, let alone the Christian Right.
Evangelicals haven't had serious sway in this country for 75-175 years (depending on your specific issues in question and threshold). It's all about the left wing and grievance-mongering. Reminds me of the mid-90's, before South Park made being politically incorrect palatable to the masses again.
Will you Shadowban as governor? (Score:3)
You have in the past (and probably still do) ban people from posting from you website, including paying customers, in a fashion that makes the users not aware of their status. Given that this is fraud, do you plan on implementing any sort of Shadowbanning as governor? Perhaps billing constituents for state services without providing them?
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Better question - why aren't you getting word about this out to the people in Kentucky? If he is committing fraud as you say, then why the hell aren't we letting everyone in Kentucky know and fucking up his election bid this very second?
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" Nowadays, you might as well be in the comments section on Gawker."
Given one of the Fark mods is a Jezebel shill/SJW, that's EXACTLY what the site has become.
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I wonder if they're also doing extra duty in Reddit. Given the willingness for them to go between
By the way, since Slashdot has no rule against naming them, what's the name of the shill?
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On Fark? Handle is Genevive (ieve?) Marie.
Raised awareness of "scary" news (Score:4, Interesting)
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SJW Mods (Score:3)
When are you going to get rid of your SJW mods and go back to what made Fark worth a FUCK in the first place?
Posting standards (Score:3)
I was a regular Fark user for some time, and hopped on TotalFark. However, over time I got annoyed with the "cafes" and other social cliques, and found 4chan much more to my liking because moderation was lax (at the time), focusing on spam and obvious trolls, with little censorship.
While I haven't used Fark regularly for years now, I do have some friends from my time there that are active participants, and my understanding from them and other sources [slashdot.org] is that the posting standards on Fark have gotten even stricter. How much of the moderation standards are due to your personal views (or views of your moderators), how much due to legal concerns, and how much due to member concerns (trolling/stalking/aggravation, keeping various wordfilters to make it more SFW, etc.).
As a followup question, have you ever considered a moderation system like of Slashdot?
(As an unrelated question, if you won your bid for governor but a candidate came along with a better name, would you resign and have them take your place?)
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Yes, the Photoshop contests have always been of the vein "first submission=99% chance to win". With rare exception you can take the votes per post only and reasonably guess the order in which they were posted. I think TotalFark was even advertised as a way to get a leg-up on Photoshop contests (one of which I won [fark.com] primarily because I was the first to post an entry thanks to my TotalFark membership at the time, and my entry didn't completely suck.)
There are ways to make them work much, much better if they wou
Tiamat Shrugged (Score:2)
Dear Drew,
HELP I'M STUCK IN SOMETHING CALLED HUNCH HOUSE AND I CAN'T FIND MY WAY OUT i killed the hunch but theres no exits and i need to be in class in 15 minutes and im out of sp from all of this shouting will somebody pleeeeease help me?
Sincerely,
Confused in Chaos
Is Fark still filled with schills and sockpuppets? (Score:1)
Why run Government like a Business (Score:2)
The most important question, why would anyone be stupid enough to think running a government like a business works. In small business under capitalism, only 1 in 10 succeed, by far the majority go bankrupt 90%. So what, try out new government services only to have the majority fail is somehow sound. That some how trial and error are preferable to careful but admittedly expensive research. Perhaps government needs to set up multiple branches of the same service so they can compete and one wins while the res
Drew, your site has gone all SJW (Score:1)
Why do you appease individuals of the SJW crowd, namely Chelsea van Valkenberg (you know who she is, but I can't mention that on Fark), by strictly enforcing their narratives, even in the light of truth?
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For those out of the loop, Chelsea van Valkenberg is AKA Zoe Quinn.
C'mon, guys (Score:2)
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You do not work for Drew.
And if you do, I've got enough Internet Archive history of FARK.com to show you out as the fucking lying scumbag you are.
Wanna dance?
since I can't ask on fark (Score:3)
who is fb- the father of?
No, my actual question is "can you elaborate on the reason why freep-impact was asked to stop posting in politics threads?"
FOX hacker (Score:2)
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1. Why do you hate America? 2. Why do you hate white people so much? 3. Why do you hate men so much? 4. Why do you hate the 1st amendment? 5. How does your site spawn libtard SJWs? 6. Why so many of them? 7. Do you realize your site is not that funny anymore? 8. Do you realize no on cares anymore? 9. Do you realize you're not relevant anymore? 10. Will you please stop spawning libtard SJWs?
No shit. When I skimmed the summary here I was a bit floored he isn't running as some leftist party or just as a democrat.
The mods there are clearly leftist female, gay, or some wound up race baiter if not all of them in one and then turned loose to enforce their personal ideals rather than run a site that's worthwhile.My bets are they are all very young... they lack the judgement that comes with age.
Sorry Mr Curtis. You had a good site at one point. But, it's gone, and it's going to taint (read, reavea