This Is Why You're Fat

» see thisiswhyyourefat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

By 2009 I was at the end of the university years and on TTNet broadband, which meant the English-speaking internet arrived in Ankara on the same day it arrived anywhere else. This one still did not carry across. The photographs were an argument with American portion sizes and you needed to already find that argument funny, whereas the equivalent excess here is a kokoreç at three in the morning and nobody has ever thought to photograph it as a warning.

The site itself was a Tumblr with almost nothing on it. A photograph, a short caption naming the thing, and a submission link. Richard Blakeley, then a video editor at Gawker Media, built it with Jessica Amason. The format was deliberately dumb. Readers mailed in pictures of food they had made or found, the more structurally implausible the better. The site posted them without any commentary at all. The subtitle did the commentary.

What went up was bacon woven into sheets, things deep-fried that should not survive being deep-fried, and hamburgers using doughnuts where the bun goes. Some of it was staged for the site. Some of it was somebody's actual dinner. The submissions kept coming for years after anybody was still linking to it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ ten million in a month ~

The number that got it written about was ten million page views inside the first month, reported at the end of March 2009. That is the kind of figure a Tumblr could still produce in 2009, when a single link on a large blog moved real traffic and there was no algorithm standing between a page and the people who might want it. Newspapers in the United States and Canada wrote it up, German papers followed, and CNN put it on television.

It arrived in the same window as a dozen other single-joke sites with a submission box, and it was better executed than most of them. One idea, no navigation to speak of, infinite supply.

~ the book deal ~

In March 2009, roughly a month after launch, HarperStudio signed it. That was HarperCollins' experimental imprint, set up to move faster than the rest of the house and to pay smaller advances against a bigger royalty share, and a website that had existed for four weeks was exactly the sort of thing it had been created to chase. The book came out the following year under the site's own subtitle.

Printing a website was standard practice for about three years either side of 2009. The joke transferred badly in every case, because the thing that made the site work was a stranger sending in something new while you were looking at it, and a book is finished before you open it.

~ the aftertaste ~

What killed it was not a lawsuit or a server bill. Instagram launched in October 2010 and within a few years every phone in every restaurant was pointed at a plate, which meant the supply of absurd food photography went from scarce and worth collecting to infinite and worth nothing. A site whose entire value was aggregating something rare had the rare part taken away from it.

Posting slowed through the middle of the decade and stopped in 2018. The domain answers nothing now. The book is still in print, the two founders both went on to bigger jobs in the same industry, and the phrase itself outlived the website by a wide margin, which is a decent result for four words somebody typed under a photograph in 2009.

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