The Hoar,

Cynical student movement

Look back and wince with me at the ‘provocative’, asinine and generally unhelpful shit-shoot that accidentally grew a massive audience we didn’t want.

Astonishingly, the Hoar used to get 60,000+ daily unique visitors.

The unusual thing about the Hoar, which we ambitiously called satire, was that readers were encouraged to submit articles – a process that took them two clicks and permitted total anonymity. Naturally, this was a terrible idea in practice.

The Hoar’s white book.

Once the whole thing had got out of control and we’d hastily withdrawn, we bound the Hoar’s eighteen months of output in a great big paperback (a sort of rebuttal to anyone who thought they could say what they wanted because it was the internet) and tried to flog it.

Desktop screenshot of the article ‘I wrote my dissertation in the and a half minutes’.
Story page on desktop.
Mobile screenshot of the article ‘I wrote my dissertation in the and a half minutes’.
And on mobile.

The heels and fishnets came about when it turned out our name had a rude and vulgur homonym. As you probably know, hoar is a heavy frost. Our official student paper was called the Boar, prominently advertised a well-known investment bank and ran native ads for an equally well-known accountancy firm.

thehoar.org