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Confirm and continue. Enjoy your new account! As a reminder, you can change your profile and email settings in your profile. Return to browsing View account. Let's get started by creating your account. Sign up with Twitter. Sign up with Facebook. Sign up with Google. By signing up you agree with our communications and usage terms. Already have an account? Let me clarify: as a preteen in the early 's, I signed up for some internet forums and left some probably truly garbage posts in my wake, but those were places built for communication.
There's a thin line separating a forum from a platform driven by user generated material what's a forum without users? Now, as of earlier this week, YTMND seemed to be officially a thing of the internet's past: dutifully archived but dead at its own domain Reports of its absolute , final death may have been premature, as the site currently directs to a maintenance page with a live chat window. The site, created in by Max Goldberg, let users create their own riffs on Goldberg's earlier creation yourethemannowdog.
In the frequently misleading and all-caps titles for YTMNDs — the only thing you could see before clicking through to the page — it was not unlike YouTube at the height of the "clickbait" title and thumbnail craze not to mention building popularity off of myriad copyright violations. In the way memes spread like wildfire through the site, with dozens if not hundreds of users putting their own spin on breakout jokes until every last drop of blood was squeezed from the stone, YTMND presaged the better or maybe worse?
As Goldberg told Gizmodo in — when YTMND, though still hosted, was practically dead already — he struggled to keep up with the bad actors that the site attracted, citing the same kinds of disgusting and abusive behavior that plague platforms today "People would upload child porn and make death threats and people uploaded other people's addresses". Casual racism, sexism and outright Nazi shit lived alongside high-effort gags and clipped jokes from "Spongebob," same as they do across platforms today.
Still, to YTMND's credit, given the relatively barebones discovery features you'd probably have to purposefully go looking for the worst shit you could find to see a constant stream of it. There were no overt commercial motives or real clear way besides banner ads to turn a site hosting countless NSFW GIFs and ripe for DMCA takedowns 1 into a moneymaker for anyone but Goldberg, and it never really cleaned up its act or became attractive and safe enough to get gobbled up by some corporate buyer.
You can imagine that as mids nostalgia-driven movies and television become more of a thing that some marketer somewhere will think to copy the YTMND format to promote something, but the simplistic construction of a YTMND and the inability to share them as anything but links made them a fundamentally old internet medium no matter what, and thus hard if not impossible to monetize.
It was a format for net savvy shitposters and the site was their haven, representative not of a better time on the internet, but at least of a time where people were less incentivized to position themselves as marketable brands and vice versa. While something like Vine can be and was easily wiped out by its owners, leaving archives mainly of YouTube compilations that raise new questions of curation and ownership , at present YTMNDs are more threatened by the changes in web browsers than the problem of actually saving them.
It's a gift that we still have them, and one I hope isn't squandered. I'm convinced that there are plenty of YTMNDs worth holding on to for nostalgia's sake none of my own, of course and a ton of insight into the nature of internet communities for smarter folks than me to glean by doing deep dives into the archives.
YTMND may be gone, a figment and mystery to the next generation of internet users, but its influence lives on. It would be the biggest boost of federal aid to Amtrak since Congress created it half a century ago.
Flynn said in an interview Monday. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. Tags: ytmnd gifs nedm sean connery world wide web More. Most Viewed Stories. Lawmakers are filing a formal resolution to censure Gosar for posting a clip in which his face is imposed on a character who kills Ocasio-Cortez.
Most Popular. Some passengers with wheelchairs are charged extra on every ride, according to a Justice Department lawsuit. Why Joe Biden and climate hawks are not responsible for soaring fossil-fuel costs. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. The gif-and-looped-sound site was one of the earliest homes of internet culture. YTMND had been in decline for years, having slowly lost its place in the internet pantheon, just like the rest of its peers from the old internet. Many of them have struggled for years to monetize their large and often quite toxic user bases.
The web, too, has changed; creators of internet culture can expect to make some money from their contributions now, and as the internet transitioned between web 1. The site, named after a throwaway line in a Sean Connery movie, was founded in Developer Max Goldberg registered the domain name ytmnd.
It became one of the first mainstream internet communities, something akin to 4chan or Something Awful, its peers. The site quickly became one of the dominant purveyors of internet culture; it was a place where memes flourished and spread, all before people called them that. It also hosted a very popular copy of the original hamster dance. You can browse the site as it was through the Wayback Machine; although, as with most cultural products created by anonymous users, a lot of the offerings are at least somewhat offensive.
The site, however, started disappearing long before then — the last admin post was made in , and the site had been bleeding users for years as its popularity waned and social media became the place where memes were created and spread. As more people came online, and the web became less a place for nerds and social misfits, and as the internet became more centralized because of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, community-first sites like YTMND became less and less important.
The locus of online culture had shifted to places that were predicated on massive, unchecked growth and propped up by millions in venture capital. Creators — the people who would have made YTMNDs back in the early s — also now have more places than ever to post what they make, and they get paid for it, to boot. YTMND withered because we all moved on.
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