Drew Curtis Celebrates 25 years of Fark

 
I quit going on Facebook when I realized that every time I logged in I couldn’t remember anything I’d just read, and most of the time I also came away angry and couldn’t remember why. I realized that if Facebook were a restaurant offering up a similar dining experience, I’d never go back. All I miss by not going on Facebook is lost time, grief, and cat photos. I think everyone could do with less of all of those in their lives. Except for cat photos — those are great.”
So if you want to find Drew Curtis these days — other than his recent announcement of the 25th anniversary celebration for his news aggregator site, fark.com — don’t look for him on social media.
He says, “I prefer spending time with family and friends. I’m a fast-casual cyclist so I spend a lot of time riding around the back roads of surrounding counties, because being in shape just makes life easier, and it’s awesome being outdoors.”
The site remains his fulltime job though. “I do still spend most of my day choosing what links to post on Fark. So I’m still around on Fark in an ever-present ephemeral sort of way. My fingerprints are everywhere, even though I don’t pop into the comments much.”
Fark has always headquartered here in the bluegrass, part of a trend that’s been aggressively catching on in tech for the past decade — a migration away from the pricey coasts to remote work in affordable communities in the south and midwest.
Asked about the biggest evolution in the job, post-pandemic, he says, “I don’t travel anymore. I used to be in LA, SFO, or NYC at least once every two weeks, sometimes even more often. I haven’t been to NYC in almost five years now. This is mainly because remote work is so widespread in tech now that the people I need to see aren’t in those cities anymore either. They live in Bozeman or Miami or, most surprisingly, Toronto, or wherever else they happen to be. I loved traveling, but it’s nice not having to do it.”

Launched here in 1999, Fark.com is a news aggregator site delivering over 20 million impressions a month, where you might find user-submitted headlines like “tiny deer rampage across Pennsylvania,” or “what’s worse than being stung by a scorpion in a Vegas hotel room?”
The roots of Reddit, launched six years later in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, found inspiration in Fark, and both sites maintain a retro vibe today, with surging popularity among Gen Z. Redditors exchanged threads this past summer about how they saw “the internet being born.”
“Going back years before 1999, I had a knack for coming across weird news stories — which was an actual talent in the days of print and early digital,” Curtis says of the site’s origins. (A book about the first 25 years of Fark is on the way.)
“In the mid 90s,” he says, “I’d just email the stories out to my friends when I found them, but by 1999 I was finding so many that it seemed like I was sending too many emails. So I grabbed the domain fark.com and started posting them there instead of emailing everyone.
“Initially the idea was [that] Fark would be a central place for all things Not News. Over the next 25 years though, Not News somehow absorbed the entire news cycle. It was a happy accident. Well, for me anyhow, I don’t think it’s done the rest of us any favors.”

Stephen King wrote a jacket blurb for Curtis’s first book, saying, “I laughed so hard I almost threw up.”
Curtis said at the time, “everybody claims to want real news, but no one really does.”
Has that changed for the better or worse as we’ve added 24/7 news, podcasting, and AI to the media landscape?
Curtis says, “When I wrote my book in 2006 (It’s Not News, It’s Fark), I accidentally predicted a lot of what actually ended up happening, but even I was surprised by how far things have actually gone since. For example, when Fark started we were considered very edgy. Nothing’s changed on our end, but everyone else continued racing towards the bottom.
“One of my friends works for a mainstream news company which I will not name but you can pretty much assume it’s all of them at this point. He says they have multiple AIs reading both social media and other news sites 24/7 trying to figure out what’s trending —they even have one that reads Fark. Every morning when he comes to work he gets a huge document on Slack breaking down what the AIs think is trending, a dozen news stories he might consider writing that morning, and several sample paragraphs of those articles already written by the AI if he wants to use them. There’s also an option to just have it write the entire article for him, but the entire staff has been warned to carefully comb over what it writes because AIs hallucinate — a lot. Hilariously so in some cases. Just yesterday I read an article about a guy whose neighbor lived about 100 years down the road from him. Time traveler I guess.”
“To me the even greater question is if every news outlet is reading every other news outlet to try to figure out what’s trending, who’s flying the plane? No human is actually deciding what’s trending. Social media is of no use, it’s mostly bots screaming at each other.”
He adds, “It’s also not entirely clear if AI in general will ever be able to do anything useful at scale. There aren’t many good tests for AI capabilities. For example GPT4 can pass the bar exam at 90% percentile and well, that’s great, but how many bar exams are in its training data? Probably hundreds.”
Not to mention, he says, “the whole AI industry is stacked up with scammers who pivoted from crypto because —since no one can empirically prove how good a given AI is — it’s really easy to drive a hype cycle. Just last week another nine figure valuation startup’s product was exposed as being just a wrapper around Claude 3.5 on the backend. This happens often.
“The crux of the problem is AI companies started using the term AI before we actually had AI. We’ve got Derek from The Good Place, instead. So far.
“Elon Musk thinks his Grok AI is going to replace all legacy news media, but what he’s really going to end up with is an AI that aggregates millions of other AI bots trying to counter-jam media narratives to overthrow governments, and repackages that as ‘news.’ A news media AI human centipede if you will. If you don’t know what that is, do NOT google that. Ask your kids. Then ask them how they know what that is, because you have failed as a parent.”

Curtis doesn’t claim to be a disruptor, explaining, “I’ve always felt like the term ‘disruptor’ was just another way for someone to brag about not being careful with other people’s lives. However, while I won’t claim ‘disruptor,’ I’m often about three years ahead of the curve. This keeps happening over and over again. It’s not actually an advantage, because if you’re the first person to see an opportunity, no one else sees it. There’s a sweet spot between when a new thing appears and when that new thing gains traction, I have yet to hit it.”
Curtis and his family still live just outside Lexington, as he and his wife Heather are headed for empty nest syndrome, with their oldest son now a freshman at UK, and the younger two in high school. But “empty nest in the 21st century isn’t the same as it used to be,” Curtis says. “We still hear from our oldest at least once a day. He’s back to join us for trivia night at the local bar every Wednesday. He and I still work out together at a gym twice a week. It’s a new world out there. No one’s ever far away.”
How did these two savvy tech parents handle screentime for their kids?
Curtis says, “When I was in fourth grade, a couple classmates of mine had parents that didn’t let them watch TV. At the time TV was the devil, as was radio decades before that and even books in the 19th century. Anything fun is bad, basically, at the time. Anyhow, not having TV didn’t help my classmates at all, it actively harmed them socially. They couldn’t join in conversations about what the rest of us had watched the night before. They were cut off from their peers’ cultural zeitgeist.
“The Internet is different obviously, because there’s dark stuff out there. I’m not saying we let them run wild, but whenever they found bad stuff, we’d talk about it. Digital parenting is mainly recognizing when your kid is being radicalized by algorithms — and I don’t mean dangerous ones, I mean stupid ones. For example, my middle kid popped up one day with an opinion about video game journalism — we put an end to that real quick. For those reading this who have no idea what I’m talking about, consider yourselves lucky. You’re welcome to google it but I promise it will make no sense.”

As the site celebrates 25 years, he says, “ In general my path has been a strange and winding one. Fark is at an interesting crossroads right now for a few reasons. One good thing is Gen-Z loves Fark and they’re just now hearing about it — they’re half our daily audience now.”
As for watershed moments, when he knows he’s made the right choice, he says, “I’ve made many right choices that ultimately made Fark less successful, and by less successful, I mean not a billion dollar publicly traded company. I’m fine with that, I sleep well at night knowing I’ve managed to go 25 years without enabling genocide in a single foreign country. Not many other social media platforms can say that. In fact, none of them can say that.”
He adds, “And sign up for TotalFark, keep us going another 25 years.”

Fark’s 25th anniversary celebration is scheduled for Saturday October 12, 2024 at Lexington’s Lyric Theatre. Tickets are available via eventbrite. 

This article appears on page 10 of the October 2024 print edition of Ace. To subscribe to digital delivery of Ace’s monthly print edition each month, click here.

BONUS LIGHTNING ROUND

Name two things on your nightstand.
DREW: One million charging cables and a lamp I never use because screens produce their own light.

What are you reading? 
DREW: I’m in an unintentional book club.  It wasn’t supposed to be a book club, we just wanted to pretend it was one and just drink instead.  The problem was people started picking excellent books that the rest of us regretted not reading after the fact.  So now, we read the books.  And drink.

The last book we read was Neuromancer, which I haven’t read since the mid 80s.  It is amazing not only how much Gibson got right about the future we live in, but how much he still continues to get right. He even predicted algorithms that would act like narcotics on the human brain, like Instagram and Tik Tok. He was way ahead of his time.

Favorite thing to eat in Lexington?
DREW: Anything from SRO. The menu changes weekly.

You revealed in a 2010 talk the secret to all media: “write good content; make it easy to share; don’t suck.” Is it still that simple?
DREW: It’s still a prerequisite but it’s not the whole ballgame anymore.  AI is really throwing a wrench into things.  Now that anyone can write an AI scraper, entire news organizations are springing up out of nowhere that do nothing but read everyone else’s material and rephrase it. Original reporting is in danger of not cash flowing, even moreso with Google writing AI summaries of articles instead of sending traffic to the original author.  We’re going to end up with AIs hallucinating at each other at this rate.  

You’ve long predicted the imminent demise of mass media. How’s that going?
DREW: Nailed it.