Fark.com was originally a community created and primarily operated by
Drew Curtis as a mere mailing list sent out to friends and family, and has evolved into a giant community website with influence in all corners of the internet. Fark lists links to funny or cool (well, subjectively) news stories, about 50 a day, and some of the more important serious ones. It's basically a digest for, let's say, the type of audience that watches
The Man Show. Users can submit new stories to the queue to be evaluated for addition to today's links, and discuss links in the comments section provisioned for each link. Generally 50-200 comments are posted eventually for each story by various users, and the banter can be pretty amusing. Fark is so popular it's one of the few sites that has its own, mild version of the crushing "
Slashdot effect" - a site is said to be "farked" when all the traffic has brought it down.
Fark also holds Photoshop contests, where an image is posted (sometimes from previously posted story) and users post doctored versions of those images in the comments to be voted on by other users. The now-insipid "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten" picture that has so quickly become nearly an internet phenomenon originated in a PS contest.
Each story or other item has a tag next to the headline, indicating something of the category of the story. "Photoshop" for Photoshop contests, "boobies" or "weeners" for porn (yes, the site is more than a bit juvenile, if you haven't guessed already), "Weird" for stories like "Man robs pharmacy, serves time, robs it again 20 years later, same clerk still on duty", "Obvious" for stories like "Thai government warns against cockroaches as pets," and on and on and on and on.
Fark even has a celebrity in its ranks - Wil Wheaton. He joined Fark after a convoluted series of events involving (among other things) FHM magazine, the online comic Superosity, and a multi-million dollar jewel heist. Well, okay, maybe not that last one. Anyway, he even has his own Fark tag, "Wheaton" (Christopher Walken has one too, for less overt reasons).
A subscription service, TotalFark, is also available for $5 a month, or $50 a year for a six month or year subscription. In addition to Fark's ordinary links, you get the many extra ones that don't make the cut (about a 10-1 ratio).
Drew occasionally goes on TechTV's The Screen Savers to go over some of the latest links.