Its front page featured a picture entitled hello.jpg, showing a close-up of a hunched-over naked man using both hands to stretch open his anus and expose his red rectum lit by the camera flash.
The photo became an Internet meme, and has been used in bait-and-switch pranks, prevention of hot-linking in a hostile manner, and defacement of websites, in order to provoke extreme reactions.
The original photograph depicts Kirk Johnson, a pornographic model who participates in extreme penetration, which is the practice of inserting large objects into the anus.
[4] Later additions to the site by mid-2001 were links to other defunct websites such as dolphinsex.org and urinalpoop.org, and a subpage called "contrib", which consisted of a collection of homages and parodies of the images received from readers.
[6] On January 14, 2004, the domain name goatse.cx was suspended[7] by Christmas Island Internet Administration due to Acceptable Use Policy violations in response to a complaint,[8] but many mirrors of the site are still available,[9] remaining on display on many other websites.
[19] In April 2010, the site was updated after almost a year, containing an announcement for an emailing service called "Goatse Stinger 2.0" that was planned to go into beta on May 9, 2010.
[22][23] In October 2012, it was announced that the goatse.cx domain had been acquired by a new owner, who was advertising a forthcoming webmail service to give users access to goatse.cx email addresses.
[38] Afterwards, the site's domain began redirecting to a group on the messaging board website Telegram connected to the Goatse Coin project.
Trystan T. Cotten and Kimberly Springer, authors of Stories of Oprah: the Oprahfication of American Culture, said that this "seemingly considerable male intrusion drove many of the women elsewhere, and the board was retired shortly afterwards".
[43] Slashdot altered its threaded discussion forum display software because "users made a sport out of tricking unsuspecting readers into visiting [goatse.cx]".
[44] The Los Angeles Times Wikitorial was introduced on June 17, 2005, to be a publicly accessible method of directly responding to the paper's editorials; Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales had consulted on the project, and on its first day contributed a "forking" of the page to accommodate opposing opinions.
[45] Prior to the feature's introduction, L.A. Times editorial and opinion editor Michael Kinsley stated that "Wikitorials may be one of those things that within six months will be standard.
[45] The practice of using goatse.cx as a "fake" link to shock friends became popular, according to ROFLcon organizer Tim Hwang in an interview on NPR, because it's ... the spectacle of the thing, right?
[49] Following Hurricane Charley in August 2004, a photograph purporting to show "the hands of God" in the cloud formations in the aftermath of the disaster circulated via email.
[50] In his book The Long Tail (2008), Chris Anderson wrote that goatse.cx is well-known only to a relatively small Internet-using "subcultural tribe" who reference it as a "shared context joke" or "secret membership code".
Anderson cited a photo accompanying an "otherwise innocuous article" about Google in the June 2, 2005 The New York Times, in which Anil Dash wore a T-shirt emblazoned with stylized hands stretching out the word "Goatse".
[64] In September 2022, news media reported multiple incidents across the US of users of the elementary school interactive app Seesaw having their accounts compromised in order to post links to the image in parent-teacher chatrooms.
[71] The brief explains on page three that "The firm's name is a reference to a notoriously obscene internet shock site" and includes a footnote which reads "For a more graphic description, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse."