Inside Snopes: the rise, fall, and rebirth of an Internet icon

June 2, 2023 7:46 AM

FastCompany's Chantel Tattoli looks at the troubled history of what used to be everyone's favorite "debunking" site "In the early ’90s, shortly before he helped think up Snopes, the first (and favorite) website for fact-checks, and way before he was banished from the very thing he’d helped build, David Mikkelson was quite a character on message boards. He wasn’t looking for love necessarily, but it found him nonetheless..."
posted by briank (36 comments total)

Usenet, a precursor of sorts to Reddit? How have the mighty fallen.
posted by zadcat at 8:15 AM on June 2, 2023 [33 favorites]

Yeah I took a long pause over that same sentence.
posted by jquinby at 8:21 AM on June 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

I stalled on that line, too, then I was even more confused when the article went on to refer to a "site," by which they were also presumably referring to Usenet.

Still, it's an interesting read beyond that. I always vaguely thought the "downfall" of Snopes was mostly an early iteration of Trumpism's rejection of reality and facts, and while that's there, a lot more was going on than just that.
posted by solotoro at 8:26 AM on June 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oddly, “Reddit is kinda like USENET” is how I explained it to my wife once.
posted by MrGuilt at 8:33 AM on June 2, 2023 [12 favorites]

"IRC is Discord for old people."

Real quote from real teenager on Reddit.

So it goes.
posted by ocschwar at 8:46 AM on June 2, 2023 [25 favorites]

So anyway, as to the rest of the article....

I appreciate the work Mikkelson started doing, but damn does he ever sound like a jerk.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:50 AM on June 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

Are there still USENET clients and a user base and all that? Because it looks like reddit is going to shit.
posted by Naberius at 8:57 AM on June 2, 2023 [7 favorites]

Can we not derail about USENET?
posted by cooker girl at 8:59 AM on June 2, 2023 [13 favorites]

Trolling was named after the fishing practice in which anglers bait hooks and pull them on lines through the water. and a happy convergence with trolls who live under bridges and eat the unwary. The writer has a superficial understanding of the history of the Web, and, whatever, I'm old, cranky, don't have enough energy to get my pedantry on. Kids these days.
posted by theora55 at 9:11 AM on June 2, 2023 [18 favorites]

What a fascinating article. I was a Snopes DORK back in the 90s - I'd read basically every article on the site many times same checked multiple times a week for new stuff. I knew they were locals (the site claimed to be owned by "the San Fernando Valley Urban Folklore Society" or something of that nature), and I was a valley kid myself and took a certain amount of hometown pride in the site. I think I emailed them questions and tips a few times, even. Here's hoping the new team gets their shit in gear by the next election and/or pandemic.

I agree the reporter is probably too young to have experienced any of the internet from the top of the article firsthand, but that isn't their fault. Most living humans don't remember that internet.
posted by potrzebie at 9:16 AM on June 2, 2023 [19 favorites]

Are there still USENET clients and a user base and all that? Because it looks like reddit is going to shit.

No. USENET is gone. It no longer exists in any form. There is nothing to see there. There never was. Look away. Look away.
posted by The Bellman at 9:20 AM on June 2, 2023 [25 favorites]

I wish this story didn't sound so much like so many other stories about asshole misogynists getting a hold of a decent idea, running it into the ground and ruining a bunch of people's lives for years, hiring a couple more asshole misogynists, and doing it some more. But that's life, far too much of the time.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:35 AM on June 2, 2023 [11 favorites]

Because I like you and think you are a very valuable member of our community, potrzebie, I cannot bring myself to say what I really think about Snopes — you are a living demonstration that they did do some good, after all.
posted by jamjam at 9:50 AM on June 2, 2023

It might feel unfair to expect a pillbox to keep up with the papers of record, but less so as it left the realm of hobby to be a media business in earnest.

I’m not sure what the article means by pillbox here. The fortification? A small object? Some other metaphor? Are they confusing it with soapbox?
posted by zamboni at 9:58 AM on June 2, 2023 [9 favorites]

That's an interesting question, zamboni.

I would guess a chain of associations took place in the mind of the author, something like this: Snopes-> snipes-> snipers-> pillbox.

For me almost everything I read or hear is subject to haunting by a ghost of something the author or speaker came close to saying, one way or another, but didn’t quite.
posted by jamjam at 10:14 AM on June 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

Aww, shucks jamjam, that's an unexpected compliment for a Friday morning. If it makes you feel any better, I was an obnoxious little shit of an early teenager in the 90s back when I was geeking out on snopes.com, and lost track of what they were doing probably around 2001 when I got too into LiveJournal to have time for much else. Luckily for everyone involved I've improved with age. It sounds like Snopes did the opposite.
posted by potrzebie at 10:25 AM on June 2, 2023 [7 favorites]

Metafilter: a ghost of something the author or speaker came close to saying, one way or another, but didn’t quite.
posted by joannemerriam at 11:37 AM on June 2, 2023 [17 favorites]

I stalled on that line, too, then I was even more confused when the article went on to refer to a "site," by which they were also presumably referring to Usenet.

To be fair, it would be a bit hard to explain what exactly Usenet was, to someone who has only ever experienced distributed computing in the form of the modern Internet. Which would describe the author, who seems to have been in an MFA program about 10 years ago. "Kind of like reddit" is actually not too bad a way of putting it.

I tried to read TFA but flamed out about the time the young techbros get involved.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 2:47 PM on June 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

The fishing technique is trawling, not trolling.

It seems this article is trolling older internet users on multiple fronts.
posted by eviemath at 3:07 PM on June 2, 2023 [9 favorites]

It's like the article is written with all kinds of little inaccuracies or weird word choice or whatever. What it written by Mikkelson himself? An elaborate troll/trawl in and of itself?
posted by hippybear at 3:30 PM on June 2, 2023

The fishing technique is trawling, not trolling.

Trawling is different from trolling.
posted by The Tensor at 3:31 PM on June 2, 2023 [20 favorites]

To be fair, it would be a bit hard to explain what exactly Usenet was, to someone who has only ever experienced distributed computing in the form of the modern Internet.

Unfortunately, no one can be told what Usenet was. You had to see it for yourself.
posted by The Tensor at 3:33 PM on June 2, 2023 [6 favorites]

I’m not sure what the article means by pillbox here.

I think it means "small", like an actual pill-holding container usually is. They're not such a thing anymore, but when they were, they'd be about the size of small mentos tins, I believe, and made with silver and decorated.
posted by fatbird at 4:06 PM on June 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Could it be this article was written using AI? I cannot possibly find a definition for pillbox that makes even really metaphorical sense in that sentence.
posted by hippybear at 4:14 PM on June 2, 2023

I was on AFU a little bit back in the day (mostly read, only posted a few times), and I remember the Mikkelsons pretty clearly. They didn't seem any worse or more trollish than other people on that group, that was kind of just how the culture was.

While it does seem like Mikkelson (and a few others) made a lot of bad decisions and is kind of an asshole, I'd be a little bit wary of taking this as gospel. I wouldn't be very surprised to learn that Fast Company, a business magazine, is more sympathetic to the venture capitalists in this story than to the people who actually created the thing they invested in. I'd love to get another perspective to complement this.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:26 PM on June 2, 2023

The fishing technique is trawling, not trolling.

No,trolling is correct. Trawling is also a fishing technique, but trolling is the one that matches this online behavior.

I know from both going trolling for striped bass in Buzzards Bay with my grandfather and being online when UUSENET was a thing and the term was actually born.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:50 PM on June 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

As someone who entered a world of post graduate training and family obligations circa 2013 and therefor abandoned all but the most superficial aspects of the Web... if Snopes is anything other than a pretty straight forward examination of urban legends and popular misconceptions in a manner the prizes evidence and the belief in truth... please don't correct me.
posted by midmarch snowman at 9:25 PM on June 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

I cannot possibly find a definition for pillbox that makes even really metaphorical sense in that sentence.

I think pillboxes are probably where the author is a Viking
posted by Jon Mitchell at 1:12 AM on June 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Are there still USENET clients and a user base and all that? Because it looks like reddit is going to shit.

Usenet (in the US, anyway) was dealt a fairly mortal blow 20 or so years ago when Comcast, the largest ISP in the nation, dropped access to Usenet as part of their services. I used Usenet (heh) quite a bit before Comcast cut access. I’ve not tried to get back in (via paid web-based services) ever since.

Other than the powers-that-be trying to drive users to the app and new-reddit, Reddit is fine. There are so many esoteric subs that are sincerely interesting and fun, that have nothing to do with right-wing edgelording or OnlyFans promos. Much like Usenet, you just have to find them. I actually find the Reddit=Usenet description pretty apt/helpful.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:03 AM on June 3, 2023

I always got a slimy feeling from modern Snopes.

Mikkelson really feels like the 1990s equivalent of today's guy who pays for twitter. Just the worst person you know.
posted by zymil at 7:39 AM on June 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

> Can we not derail about USENET?

It's not a derail; without AFU, there would have been no Snopes. (And nobody would know how to find Perth on a map.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:24 PM on June 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

"pillbox" definition #2 from the OED:

figurative and humorous.Something likened to a pillbox, esp. in size, as a very small or cramped space, vehicle, etc.; something paltry or inconsequential.

"It might feel unfair to expect a pillbox to keep up with the papers of record" as "It might feel unfair to expect an outfit run by a couple half-serious people in their home to keep up with the New York Times and the Washington Post" seems like a not-horrible interpretation to me.

Also, Usenet as "a precursor of sorts to Reddit" doesn't seem terribly objectionable to me as a fast-and-loose explanation intended for today's audience.
posted by Flunkie at 6:59 PM on June 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm amused enough about this to add in another final clarification of the trolling-vs.-trawling question, because I somehow found myself having this exact conversation in real life with someone in my garden this weekend. He also questioned whether it was trolling or trawling that fit the term, and I clarified it thus:

Trawling is when you drag an entire big-ass net behind your boat and scoop up EVERYTHING, even stuff you maybe don't even need. Usually it's the bigger commercial fishermen who do this. But trolling is where you just have a couple fishing lines or two baited and hanging in the water, and you're slowly driving the boat along, trailing the baited lines behind you and luring the fish into biting what they think is a moving target. It's more of a deceptive fake-out situation than the brute force trawling, and works well with certain kinds of fish that swim in the slightly deeper parts of the water and are used to moving targets.

Yay the thread has now yielded fishing advice!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:06 AM on June 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

Trowelling is when one is spreading, smoothing, forming or scooping with a trowel, which in turn is a flat-bladed hand tool.
posted by Dez at 1:54 PM on June 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

“I was on AFU a little bit back in the day (mostly read, only posted a few times), and I remember the Mikkelsons pretty clearly. They didn't seem any worse or more trollish than other people on that group, that was kind of just how the culture was.”

I was on AFU a lot in the 90s and knew snopes a little — I was there mostly after he stopped posting — but I knew Barbara quite well, as well as Teasley (who maintained the FAQ) and most of the other regulars. I've only browsed the beginning of the article — calling it a "channel" was weird (although that's what CompuServe's live chats were called; evoking CB radios) and I think I'll read it later when I have more patience.

David was a jerk, though. He was very funny and people loved that; but there were a bunch of funny and smart people on AFU. I was the expert on the "glass flows" UL; AFU was also the first place I encountered expert linguistic stuff presented to a general audience.

We sort of did debunking more as a response to newbies asking questions about ULs than anything else because debunking really wasn't exactly the point of talking about urban folklore. But ascertaining the truth status of ULs became pretty popular.

I was there when the Mikkelsons (after Barbara and snopes got together) tried to assert "ownership" of everything that they'd written that was archived on TAFKAC when they were starting their site and while Barbara remained well-loved on AFU, snopes made a lot of enemies.

Trolling before the turn of the millennium had absolutely nothing to do with mythical beings and only meant quietly dangling bait that snagged the unwary, like mentioning offhand that the "T" in James T. Kirk was never said to stand for "Tiberius" in TOS. The fun was to hook someone and play dumb. It wasn't really mean-spirited in the way modern trolling is.

It wasn't so much a surprise that snopes screwed-over Barbara, really. I always liked Barbara quite a bit. Madeleine Page was my favorite person from those days and I still miss her.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:06 PM on June 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

> archived on TAFKAC

Now, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:24 PM on June 6, 2023 [2 favorites]