Fast Company
BY CHANTEL TATTOLI
June 2, 2023
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.