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Comment by rurban | Hacker News Reader

I like that you could use swear words by paying for it.

> You can purchase FarkUnits for $10 for 100 FUs, or you can get a discount if you purchase in bulk.

> Using it is easy. If you type a word with "fuck" or "shit" in your comment, a new button will pop up that says "Add Comment using SwearJar - 20FUs." Just click or tap that and those words won't be filtered to the customary 'fark' or 'shiat.'

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This implies that the website is really called fuck.com (but censored), which is certainly … a choice.

But wasn’t that obvious? Fark is a cleaner, sillier way of saying f*ck.

What the fark are you talking about? ;)

This reminds me of how "Rooster Teeth" is a more polite phrasing of "cock bite"; a phrase which was used in their first online content.

that's so obvious? Even as an American

Maybe if you're British. :-) Or maybe I'm just one of today's lucky 10,000.

Drew has commented on the origins of fark.com. Basically, he was drunk and looking for a funny name. Fark.com come was available.

So, basically, a "here, hold my beer" domain name.

I preferred Something Awful's payment system, where you could pay to publicly shame other users for poor behavior

That was beautiful. You could also pay to troll.

I recall one person posting a photoshopped picture of a woman who had two sets of eyes, "this picture gives me the creeps every time I see it, what are pictures that unsettle you?" Not much later their avatar had been changed to that exact photo, with text like, "I am so sorry."

The extra smart thing was making users pay to undo it so it could go back and forth as long as users had money to spend and an axe to grind. Though making a source of revenue proportional to the level of drama may had some negative impact on toxicity. And yet still somehow less toxic than places like 4chan?

Reminds me of the dialogue in the movie Johnny Dangerously which made it past censors because many of the lines were spoken with very thick accents. For example, 'you fargin ice-awhole' ...

A classic "Whale oil beef hooked" moment.

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