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.
Mikkelson, a divorced computer programmer in California, met Barbara Hamel, a divorced bookkeeper in Canada, on Usenet, a precursor of sorts to Reddit, where the two lorded over a prolific channel called alt.folklore.urban. AFU acted like the site’s fact-checker for far-flung urban legends. If, for example, a rumor was circulating around the internet (and watercoolers and lunchrooms) about a cactus that disgorged scorpions, AFU’s job was to investigate.
AFU is ultimately a footnote in the story of Snopes—the now well-regarded fact-checking site for sorting out myths, rumors, and misinformation on the internet, which averaged around 6.4 million page views per month in 2022, according to analytics company Comscore. But it’s an important one: AFU is where some of Snopes’ civic-minded DNA was spun, and arguably where Mikkelson’s blend of aptitude and arrogance was first put on display in a saga that would, in the end, remind the world that sometimes the people who police our messy digital lives are themselves in need of, at a minimum, some adult supervision.
“Snopes.com did not spring fully formed from the cloven skull of Zeus, all right?” says Harry Teasley, one of AFU’s other prominent members. “It came from a place, and that place is AFU.”
AFU’s members had dreaded September because that was when college started up and students would find themselves, for the first time, with access to a computer. Too many of those arrivistes misbehaved, and though the group had no moderator, members worked unusually hard to enforce its standards and reinforce cohesion. They accomplished that through netiquette and in-jokes. But the witty know-it-alls also used a new electronic blood sport—born to AFU—called trolling.
Trolling was named after the fishing practice in which anglers bait hooks and pull them on lines through the water. Online, the bait was a bit of bad info, and a “‘good’ troll,” according to AFU, was “obviously facetious/sarcastic to anyone who has a sense of humor and some intelligence.” But because of pomposity or because people were gullible or stupid, they’d leap to correct a poster who’d spoken in jest. So they were reeled in and informed that they’d “lost.” They’d been trolled. They weren’t worthy company.
In 1993, AOL began providing Usenet access to its subscribers, and tens of thousands of newbies were dumped onto the electronic bulletin board in what became known as “Eternal September.” Trolling became meaner. It became even more of an “insider’s game,” says the user experience designer Michele Tepper, an AFU alumna and author of the first academic paper on trolling. (It would mutate later, of course, into something else—something dark—and the whole web would become its playing field.) But newcomers to AFU were offered “survival guides” and warned against arguing with Mikkelson, a legend, in particular.
