The inspiration for this tool originated in "Ligma" jokes. The basic idea that you get a friend to ask what Ligma is, and then you tell them "Ligma balls"

There are tons of variations on this joke format, and it became a small trend in the broader gaming community - including within my gamer friend circle.

We were constantly trying to get each other to say things like "Did you hear about SawCon this year?" (saw con these nuts) and "I'm planning a trip to sugandees later this Summer, has anyone visited?" (Sugan deez nuts)

The trend lasted for a couple months at most, but during it's height, I thought it would be funny send jokes like this over text, in the format of a reputable article link.

I got hit with a few jokes like that in high school. Someone online would create a fake article with an enticing headline, and it would lead to a Rick Roll video, or something obscene as a trick.

I knew how to build websites well enough to control the title, description, and thumbnail image when a website page is shared, so I thought it might be fun to turn those Ligma Jokes into articles themselves. What if you got a news link that says "Steve Jobs died of Ligma," and when you open the article, it says "Ligma Balls."

I discussed this idea with my friends, and after a little brainstorming session, I went and built a prototype. The first version only took me around an hour and I did it in a hotel room while on vacation with my mom - and it worked!

My website links looked real when I sent them to my friends on Discord, and we started making all sorts of jokes to send to our own social circles.

I set up a basic automated system so my friends could submit their own ideas and I wouldn't have to load them on the website myself, and made a post on Reddit about it in r/ligma. (I was surprised such a subreddit existed)

The post did really well for such a small subreddit, and I saw a bunch more people use the site shortly after the post's success. It was fun watching all the weird articles people would come up with.

After a while, I came back to it, and decided to build it a landing page at fakearticle.net, and market it as a real thing hoping it would lead to increased traffic.

It did, and because of the steady trickle of existing users, google actually ranks the site decently for "fake article creator" which I didn't expect.

After building the front page, I streamlined the article submission process and the automation behind it. I ran into a number of errors, and the site glitched silently on multiple occasions, so users weren't getting their articles.

I can only imagine that led to a loss of users, but I think I've stabilized the tech running in the background at this point. I also started seeing some users try to create actual fake news using my tool. I guess I should have expected it if the domain name is "fake article" - so I made some changes to the site so it's even more obvious all of the articles are jokes.

Since that point, I've essentially done nothing with the site, but it's continued to grow steadily, currently fluctuating around 200-300 users on the homepage per month, and around 1000 views on the actual joke articles themselves per month.

Maybe it's accruing users through google, but my theory on it's steady growth is that the site markets itself. When someone gets a fake article from a friend, their friend sees how they can make their own, and might try it themselves.

The product is inherently shared, and I'm guessing that's leading to most of the growth.

There's not really anything I can do to monetize this, nor would I really care to if I could. It exists, people use it and like it, and it's fun seeing what my users create.

And as with many of my other projects, it makes for a good joke.