YTMND is down for temporary maintenance

No it's not? I've been on YTMND for over 10 years so this was very sad and nostalgic for me.

But I went to ytmnd.com and it was giving some PHP database errors.

And now they have a status message:

> rip db

>YTMND is down for temporary maintenance. This gives us time to optimize the database, free up unused space, deploy new features, and generally just break stuff. This should not take very long, so feel free to stick around and chat or go away. If you have any trouble accessing the site, or concerns about the direction in which your life is heading, feel free to send an email to support @ ytmnd.com (and expect to be ignored).

edit: It seems this is all very poor reporting. Gizmodo, et al have jumped on the story. YTMND has shut down!

All based on some speculation on a forum because the site was down for a while?

RIP. This whole phenomenon was wildly popular with my friend group back in the day. In 2001, the original yourethemannowdog.com went down for a bit and I put up a mirror at a similar domain. It started gaining in popularity, prompting YTMND creator Max Goldberg to send me a realistic looking but ultimately fake email from a supposed law firm threatening me with a cease and desist (unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of this email). We all had a good laugh about that, and the original site was back up soon after. I never would've guessed it would blow up as a meme the way it did.

Edit: It turns out I had the year of the cease and desist wrong; it was 2002. I'm amused that evidence[1] still exists[2] of my small contribution to this meme.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/CYRMvup.png

[2] https://www.avsforum.com/forum/44-movies-concerts-music-disc...

I hope someone accurately attributes SomethingAwful.com to these early iconic internet memories.

Image macros, the lowest form of comedy on SA, became memes and is still the lowest form of comedy.

YTMND was the first time the notion of memes (in the dawkins sense of the word) made literal sense to me. There were a somewhat limited number of themes/motifs -> memes that you'd see combined and recombined. Some were more pervasive than others. Most of them spread with little to no relation to their original meaning/purpose/context. It was interesting to watch the meta level of the thing

Nothing makes this less sad. Not even Doom music.

It's a shame this has happened. I wonder to what extent this has been archived, I've taken a quick glance at it on archive.org, and it seems the main page has been well archived but I'd be sceptical if any of the "deeper" pages so speak were archived.

It makes me wonder what will happen with similar online communities as time drags on, and makes me sort of concerned for them too and the content that could be lost due to their disappearance.

With the web going forward, it seems as if similar memetic communities will primarily exist on platforms such as reddit, and possibly tumblr?

Who else remembers the first time they saw Blue Ball Machine?

If you're looking for a short injection of YTMND nostalgia:

We Didn't Start This Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-DMIf-WZYU

Goodnight, sweet prince.

YTMND was a bit before my time, but I can appreciate it's place in early "meme culture". At least Something Awful is still around.

Sad. Back in 2000-2002 I was in grad school and I have fond memories of setting the home page on the shared imacs to YTMND with the volume turned all the way up and hearing it go off when someone would open up the browser.

This is crazy - was just browsing through the site a bit last week. I just finished a project[1] partially inspired by YMNTD and spent some time... getting inspired. A lot of the pages didn’t seem to have working audio - perhaps modern browsers don’t allow what YMNTD required. (It seems that gifsound.com has also had to adapt over time - you have to click a few times to get it to play, to work around autoplay restrictions.) I didn’t check, but I imagine the site didn’t work at all on iOS.

[1] https://www.kickscondor.com/slaptrash/

Wow, strong nostalgia. I haven't thought about that site since about 2006. What a strange and beautiful thing it was. I still never felt like I really understood it.

You're the past now, dog?

Here's my YTMND story.

My freshman year of college, 06/07, my roommate spent a boatload of time on his laptop at his desk; he'd sleep in, skip class, and stay up late, spending all his time on his laptop. I peeked over his shoulder a few times, and he was just browsing YTMND constantly.

Anyways, at the end of the year in the start of finals week, somebody started knocking on our door at like 7am or something, some time that's ungodly early for a college student. As soon as I stumble over and open up the door, somebody says, "This is the FBI, we have a warrant to search your room" while naming my roommate.

Turns out it wasn't a prank, the actual FBI was raiding my dorm room to find my roommate. They took me into a lounge "to ask some questions" and I was too young to have fully developed my "don't talk to the cops" senses, so I went along with it. They asked me a bunch of questions about my roommate (what classes is he taking, what's his major, what are his hobbies, how does he spend his time) and when they asked about his hobbies I had to say "well, he mostly spends a lot of time browsing You The Man Now Dog online".

The fbi, of course, asks for clarification. I don't know if you've ever had to explain the idea behind YTMND to the FBI when you're a 19 year old college student at 730 am on a wednesday during finals week, but let me tell you: it's not fun.

"It's a website where people make other websites that feature a tiled image background, a looping sound clip, and some kind of word art over everything."

They look at each other, shrug, and continue with the questions until we get to "Have you ever seen your roommate do anything inappropriate near a child", which is probably the closest i've gotten to an actual record-scratch moment in real life. I explain that i've never seen my roommate outside of our dorm room, let alone off the college campus, and there just aren't that many kids around. After that, they conclude the questioning and let me know that they believe there's evidence of federal crimes on my roommate's laptop.

So we go back to the room, the other agents have finished confiscating his laptop, it's around 745am, and my roommate rolls over and goes back to sleep. So I'm like, "dude, do you want to explain to me why the fbi felt the need to come to our room at 7 in the morning and take away your laptop?"

He says, "Oh, I was posting links to child pornography on YTMND and so now they think there's child porn on my laptop."

I say, "Did it ever occur to you that that was a really fucking stupid idea?"

He goes, "yeah well I know that NOW", in the most incredulous tone of voice, like he couldn't believe the FBI agents didn't understand that he was doing this as a joke and not out of an earnest love for CP.

Later that day he called his parents and left without packing up his stuff, and I never heard from him again; he did not continue to matriculate and I have no idea how his whole saga wrapped up.

But now it's impossible for me to think of YTMND without a) wondering what the fuck my roommate was thinking and b) remembering the time I had to explain the idea of stupid internet memes to federal agents.

Can you believe it you've already finished C, think you can do Matlab?

You'll Always Be The Man Forever Dog

(Refresh to sync)

I only checked out again ytmnd a couple of days ago and left after I saw that all pages required flash. (Was that always the case? I thought it only required basic HTML)

PTKFGS too?

We are all prisoners of time

Very sad. It's impossible to explain to someone what YTMND was like in 2004 if they didn't experience it themselves.

At least leekspin.com continues!

Us old school WoW WSG veterans will miss catchthatdruid.ytmnd.com :/

Well, there goes my tiny bit of internet fame. (hint: 22/7)

I wonder did they try to hand it all off to archive.org first

You will be missed, old friend.

you were the man then, dog

ZaZaZaZaZaZaZaZaZaZaZaZaZA

Noooooooo.jpg

R.I.P

It's as if millions of memes suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

Don't see why you would need a whole site to do what you can run off an instagram account