wise up

A lot has happened since I started YTMND over 3 years ago. I've seen a group that started with barely ten people form into a massive community of hundreds of thousands. Watching this site has altered my stance on life and my values significantly.

When I originally decided to make the site, I had no plans for any sort of moderation, rules, or limits on anything. Ever since my encounter with Dustin Diamond, I've valued free speech as a vital piece of a functioning society. I think very rarely do the "limits" on free speech get truly tested and as a 21-year-old having a problem with authority it was pretty easy to naïvely think that speech should be truly free and there was never a need to censor anything. Censorship is just one of the love/hate relationships YTMND has required me to have. Advertising is another.



Recently there was a big uproar about the YFLY corner image which was somewhat expected but overall disappointing. If you feel that after running this site for three years I have yet to acquire the business acumen to know when YTMND staying alive for another month is worth a small sacrifice, then you should just head out now. I'm not doing this to pay for gas for my Ferrari. I'm doing it to keep the site alive. As long as you don't believe that, you are only hurting the community by complaining that the free service you get isn't free enough.

I felt compelled to write a synopsis of YTMND's struggle to stay alive over the last few years. It's long, but I think it should clear up a lot for people who care in the least.

History


YTMND opened its doors in April of 2004. After about three months of running the site and some brief fame, it was pretty clear there was no way I could keep running the site as a hobby and paying for it out of my own pocket. Due to the fact that Ridin Spinnas was one of the most highlighted pieces of content at the time, putting up advertising was pretty much out of the question. So what did I do? I turned the site off and went back to my life.

When I first made YTMND, I didn't even envision a community. I never thought YTMND would become a "portal"; I figured people would come here, make a YTMND and then send it to their friends or post it on forums. I didn't think people to actually visit YTMND to see new content. I never expected it to be a destination, only the host of some creations people would see in passing. Obviously that assumption, like many I made during the creation of the site, was pretty far off target.

A few months later, I get a message from an acquaintance who owned a hosting company called Reflected. He told me he missed the site and would be willing to host it pro-bono if I thought I could manage to become a paying customer some day. I thought it was a long shot, a really long shot. How would I, someone who has never made a commercial website or product that turned a profit, manage to turn YTMND into a revenue-generating business?

I figured "what the hell?" and accepted his offer. I started to contact various ad networks and signed up for Google Adsense. I obviously couldn't put ads on the actual sites due to the content being so varied, and I knew advertisers wouldn't want their ads on Ridin Spinnas. I controlled the content on all of the www pages except for the site titles and comments, so I figured ads on those pages would be fine.

I have always designed the site for myself. I occasionally cater to requests from users, but for the most part, the features I work on are things I think I will use often or will be pleased by what they result in. I'm a typical web user. No one likes pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-overs, interstitials, forced viewing of ads etc; it's annoying and in most cases greedy. I try and avoid a site if they have pop-ups, even if they are blocked., I don't visit sites with intrusive ads, and if I'm making a site, I'm going to make it pleasurable enough to use that I'd visit even if I hadn't made it. So I had to figure out a way to put ads on the site without being too intrusive or causing me to feel horrible guilt.

I've strived to keep the actual sub-domains of YTMND as clutter free as possible. I want people to focus on the content when they view a YTMND, not the navigation or the advertising. The only reason I even switched from the # ! system to the corner image was because I got a higher resolution monitor and the exclamation point was starting to get hard to click. Granted, it wasn't bad for brand recognition either. I got the idea after I saw a corner ad with the same dimensions on the right side of an article on the Wired website.

So I started up with Google as they were the only ones who didn't immediately deny my application. In a short period of time I started getting a lot of email about policy violations. Google law says you may not have content that breaks their terms of service anywhere on your domain.

This is about the time I came up with what I call:

The "Ridin Spinnas Rule":


The first principle is to avoid doing anything that would hinder the creation of the next "Ridin Spinnas." But how? How do I manage to make YTMND profitable enough to pay for its own hosting while continuing to allow the freedom of expression at a level that anyone could make sites like Ridin Spinnas without advertisers being disgusted enough to want nothing to do with us? How could I continue to allow people to make sites covering any topic with any degree of vulgar or offensive material and manage to run a "business"?

After reading the terms of service and various agreements for each of the ad networks it was clear I had to make some fairly large structural changes. This was the birth of ytmnsfw.com. I thought, "I know! We just move anything offensive to a different domain! No one will have a problem discerning between something offensive and something which would be fine for a general audience, so I'll just let the users deal with it!" I even made a whole new version of the site with a different color scheme to highlight the offensive content! What a great idea!

It was around this time I realized the community I had envisioned where free speech was embraced and valued had not turned out as I planned. I was beginning to notice an alarming trend of young users posting extremely racist and purposefully offensive material. People going out of their way to post animated gifs of kittens having their heads crushed with high heels, piles of bodies in concentration camps, pictures of aborted fetuses and people eating feces. Humor not only in poor taste but obvious and simple, requiring no intelligence or tact.

It was disappointing to say the least. To a certain extent this site and the content it contains, how the community portrays itself represents me (and the actual business who at the time was paying to host me for free). I had the choice of sticking to free speech and having to look at horrifying, and in my opinion inartistic garbage, or I start to truly moderate and filter out really distasteful content.

Needless to say moderating is mind-numbingly horrible. We created a really simple moderation system, picked up moderators by making a forum post that said "anyone who posts in this thread gets to be a moderator" and that was that. We started with a queue of 150,000 unmoderated sites and by the time we got to 50,000 under our belts anyone who still had their sanity left was so disillusioned with YTMND and the queue had risen to over 250,000. The task quickly began to seem futile. If you think that the majority of YTMNDs are bad, try looking at every YTMND made sequentially, hundreds even thousands per day. You'll realize Inkdrinker may have been on to something.

Content is a joke


A quick look at the top viewed of all time will show you that a lot of YTMNDs most viewed content by outsiders originates not from YTMND but from other sites. It's easy to see the irony of users attacking sites that steal content when four out of the top five most viewed YTMNDs were created with the sole focus on content that wasn't even made by the user who made the YTMND.

If I've come to any sort of realization, it's clear that a huge percentage of the YTMND population is virtually useless for coming up with original content that's worth looking at. A sad realization, but I think many will agree that it's accurate. This is always going to be an issue on any site where the focus is user-created content. It just comes down to simple numbers; most people aren't going to be very good at being funny or creative.

YTMND's ease-of-use has partially encouraged many users to focus on quantity over quality. In the fast moving pace of the front page, people just throw every idea out there in hopes one of them will stick. There is no garbage collection, so over time the entire site just gets filled up with pure crap.

I've struggled with coming up to methods of lowering the amount of pure garbage that shows up on the site. I don't feel like it's possible to create a mathematical way to discern between a page having no value and a page being marvelous content-wise. I tried to come up with methods to have users do this, but users in general are selfish and unstrustworthy.

The boys club (no girls allowed!)


The only method I think truly has a chance to work is filtering who gets to be a part of the community before they can even join. This isn't another Web 2.0 cliché of beta version invite-only junk, it's a way to keep out people the community agrees will be more hurtful to the site than helpful.

Making YTMND invite-only would be a big move. I've always felt that part of the site's charm is that you can sign up and make something in less than 5 minutes and have it be available to all. In a perfect world this wouldn't pose a problem. However, the internet is far from a perfect world. Someone recently sent me an article by Clay Shirky (who some of you may remember wrote about YTMND in an article on "Mega-Niches") titled "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy". It's a long read but it's pretty amazing how many similarities between the YTMND community and the examples he uses in his article. It's well worth the read if you have any interest in the social aspect of large communities over time.

In one area it explains that in any community there will be a group of members that care about the future of the community and will take action to ensure the community continues to exist. It also goes on to explain that these users need to be given the power to "garden" the rest of the community; otherwise they will more or less give up on improving the community. These users need to be given more control over the direction of the site than the average user or those who wish to be hurtful towards the community.

Figuring out who these "gardeners" are is pretty much up to me (and as I find them, they help me find more). From searching for new moderators there have been many people I have felt could rise to the occasion but fall short due to sheer selfishness. People who have refused to abide by the simple rules of YTMND simply to get more time in the spotlight.

I'm straying off topic, but the point is, the users are what make YTMND. Crappy users make the site crappy, and rather than trying to delete crappy content, it would be far easier to just keep users who create crappy content off YTMND. The hard part is figuring out who to let in and who will add value to the community and the site as a whole.

I've spent the last few weeks trying to decide how an invitation system would work. Ideally I'd like to keep the ability to allow newcomers with no ties to the site to join, as well as allowing current users to invite a select few of their friends. Don't get me wrong, I don't want a pseudo invite system like Gmail where anyone who really wants in can get in and over time everyone will become a member anyway. This isn't to draw more people in; it's to filter out the bad apples (and there are a lot of them).

It goes without saying, an invitation system would almost completely remove the problem of alt accounts, gimmick users, etc. For this reason alone it may be worth doing. Expect this to be a major topic of discussion in the near future.


Monetizing a joke


Time moves on. Traffic increases. Long before advertisers come knocking at your door, salesmen do. I've had so many people try to sell me hosting I can't count the number of companies on fingers and toes. Out of all the sales pitches I've received, it's surprising that I haven't found a better deal than what I've had since the start. As of yet, not a single hosting company has been able to match the price Reflected was giving me. This has pretty much cleared up any doubt I had about Reflected offering me hosting at "cost", so if you wonder why I'm always telling you how great my hosting company is, it's because they really are.

Pretty soon I had enough money to stop leasing a server from my hosting company and buy my own server for YTMND, boy was that exciting. I was actually making enough money from AdSense to buy my own server. So I bought the beefiest server I could find that fit in my price budget. Two months later we hit capacity; I had to buy another server. I split the site up into a web server and a database server. This held up for another few months but it was obvious I had to start planning for some serious expansion for the future. We had hit the point where YTMND could no longer use 100mbit and we had to move to gigabit. I came up with specifications for a content server that would scale to massive proportions.

Spending $12,000 for a server was hard to justify, I've never spent that much money on anything in my entire life and I've owned cars, but I ignored the fact and purchased it anyway. This was the point when my bank's fraud department started calling me asking me about my purchases. Finally I had transferred the 800 precious megabytes that made up all of YTMND over to the new server and it was at that point I realized how much HTML I was transferring. Over a megabyte a second. Of HTML. Of text. One megabyte of text is a lot. Find a one megabyte text file and you will quickly realize that sending out 1.5MB/s of text is some serious shit.

Since then I've purchased a lot of servers. I own enough hardware to host thousands of dinky websites. The original few hundred megabytes I transferred over to the content server is now 600 gigabytes. YTMND is basically the biggest sound clip repository on the internet outside of usenet. It quickly became obvious I needed to put up more ads if I wanted to continue running the site in the black.

I read all sorts of documentation and studies describing the best placing and methods for advertising. I would be at work and having to go outside to take calls about advertising. My employer was understandably starting to get angry at me. It got to the point where I had to start taking unpaid time off work to deal with the backlog of things I needed to get done for YTMND. In a short amount of time the business aspects of YTMND were consuming so much of my time, it was almost a full-time job.

Working for the man (now dog)


It was at this time (almost a year ago at the time of my writing this) that I left my salary job to start working on YTMND "full-time". Little did I know how this would ruin my relationships with everyone I knew as I began working on YTMND more and more each day. 8 hour days turned into 12 hour days turned into 16 hour days turned into 20 hour days etc. Working on YTMND was consuming my entire life. I still work that way. I spend a lot of time on features that never see the day of light, but will hopefully soon. (Hey what's that lists tab on the user profile?!??)

So YTMND starts paying for my rent and my groceries, thereby removing any margin of profit from the equation. I would have to make some sacrifices (I've only bought one bottle of Grey Goose in the last 4 months!), but I was able to manage it. I was taking a big risk, because advertising earnings are pretty random from month to month for no apparent reason.

One of the reasons I've managed to maintain my motivation to keep working on the site is that as it grows, the technical challenge grows exponentially. Rolling out new features on such a limited amount of hardware that virtually millions of people will use gets harder and harder as the number of sites and users and votes increases. It gets to the point where you can't rely on the standard set of tools to get things done anymore. Luckily this is well documented by Slashdot and Livejournal, both of whom saw a huge amount of growth with the internet boom. At some point I'd like to write a document that describes the growth of YTMND from a more technical standpoint but I'll spare you for now. At any rate, the experience and knowledge I get from working on YTMND is better than that of any job I've ever had, which makes up for the horrible salary.

It's pretty hard to visualize YTMND as a business, especially seeing that it's the first "business" I've run. Pulling a large profit was never really a concern until recently and even now, it's less a priority than most of you would think. I've grown pretty accustomed to the standard of living of someone who works at McDonald's would. There came a time when I needed to make a serious decision about my plans for the future. Either I had to get serious about making YTMND into a business or I give up and close down the site. There wasn't really a middle ground here.

I figured implementing site sponsorship would take some of the load off the hosting costs of the site. In the 18 months since the sponsorship system launched, YTMND has received almost $30,000 in donations. That's a pretty amazing figure considering the average age of the user base. Sadly this is only enough after fees to pay for a few months of hosting at most.

Paid Membership


People say "Why not get rid of the ads and do paid memebership?! It worked for SomethingAwful!" However, the logic behind this question is flawed. The main problem with comparing Something Awful to YTMND in terms of monetization is that they are two completely different models commercially. SA's cost comes from the hardware and bandwidth costs of a forum that is used almost solely by its members. When a passerby comes to SA, it isn't a huge cost in terms of the necessary hardware and bandwidth used to fulfill the request. The only time the two sites have a similar cost is probably when SA gets linked to on Digg or the like, where they have tons of unregistered users looking at their pages.

YTMND's main cost is from bandwidth. YTMND was made with the idea that people would link to YTMNDs from off site, look at the page and then leave. Obviously this is a horrible "business model." YTMND doesn't need to profit off its members, but it needs to profit off the people who view it in passing, as that is where all its cost comes from. Assuming registered users don't use AdBlock (that's an entirely separate issue), browsing the pages on www and viewing the ads pretty much pays for itself. The cost comes from the people who never visit www, and only visit a YTMND en masse. Imposing paid membership would be taxing the wrong group of users.

Let's say out of the nearly 200,000 registered users, 5,000 are willing to pay a one time fee of $15 or so. That's pretty generous, considering that only 1,000 users have donated for site sponsorship. That's a quick and easy $75,000, and assuming out of the current growth of 200 users a day 5 sign up as paid members (which is pretty unlikely), that's an extra $2,300 a month. While this would be great for covering the hosting costs for the first 9 months or so (assuming I continued running a few ads to pay for my rent), after a year we'd be SOL. It isn't a sustainable amount of income to come close to paying for costs, and it puts the burden on the users who are actually already making the site money.

Paid membership also means people feel entitled to a level of service which I can't ensure at this point in time. Being the only real employee means that I have to do everything on the site: coding, system administration, support, legal issues, dealing with advertising, etc. Having a few thousand people that don't feel like they are getting their money's worth is one more thing I don't want to deal with. Plus it's nice to be able to tell people to F off when they feel resentment over a service I'm providing free of charge.

Goals for the future


The amount of money I owe my hosting company shows that the way YTMND is running now is less than ideal. Ideally I would like to be able to pay them off in full, and maybe even make a salary similar to what I would make if I were employed by a real company. I can say that I'd like to one day see YTMND having an office and a few full-time employees, but it's obviously far off at this point.
It's not humanly possible for me as one person can put into YTMND to get all of the things I want to accomplish done in a timely manner. It just isn't plausible especially when you look at the very partial to-do list I update from time to time. The only way to allow for continued growth and enhancement of YTMND is to bring on more people. The only way to bring on more people is to bring in more money. You get the idea.

Outside of that, YTMND needs to maintain a level of income where we can continue to provide a free service to the entire internet as well as have some liquid cash to do things like pay for the big upfront cost of printing t-shirts, buy new hardware and pay consultants to help out with things. YTMND is not currently achieving this, and therefore, I am forced to spend an unavoidable amount of time dealing with advertising. I in no way want to be involved with so much advertising work, but it's a necessary evil at this point.

Due to my complete lack of advertising know-how has resulted into the slow growth of ads all over the site. Until recently our advertising strategy was completely quantity as opposed to quality. By putting more ads on a page, YTMND nets more income, it's as simple as that. Now that more of our ad space is being represented by Federated Media, the tide is turning and it means I can start focusing less on finding new places to put ads and start focusing on places where I can remove them.

In the long run, the future of the site depends on you, the users. I personally don't run Adblock; this entire ordeal has taught me that free sites depend on advertising revenue to operate. It's easy to think that by running ad block you aren't really hurting anyone, just keeping the rich from getting richer. I wish that were true, but in a lot of cases it isn't. YTMND isn't a million dollar corporation. I'm not getting rich. When 10% or more of a site's regular users are running software to ensure that the site has no way of turning a profit off their usage, those users are potentially hurting the site significantly.

I would rather close the site than try to force the rest of the legitimate users who are viewing ads to support the site with even more ads. If you continue to expect to get a free service, while having us take a monetary hit and pay for your usage out of pocket, you are going to kill the site. You have as much power to kill YTMND as you do to make it bloom into something really great.

I'm not going to go into a big spiel about pirating music and movies and try to compare that to stealing or tell you that viewing YTMND without ads is akin to stealing. I just want to make it clear that using adblock is not inconsequential, and if you care at all about YTMND's future I'd advise against it. That being said I don't expect many (or really any) of you to change your ways. It isn't something a one time donation is going to solve, and it's yet another issue I have to deal with instead of working on new features.

I want to make it clear to you that I could easily be profiting off YTMND at this point and I choose not to, because I value the site. YTMND profits don't go to YTMND "shareholders", or the YTMND CEO's monthly bonus, they go back into YTMND. If I ran pop-unders (even after the majority of them have been blocked by blockers) YTMND would gross an extra $100,000 a year. Chew on that for a little bit the next time you want to compare me to a certain someone who is getting rich off other people's content. I understand motivation to ad block. Every time one of my pages loads slowly due to waiting for ad servers I die a little. I'm working on getting ads into separate iframes so they don't stop a page from loading. But in the meantime, it bugs me just as much as it bugs you.

Obviously five-figure ad deals don't come along often for us, but I'm hoping that will change. The reality is that we aren't a YouTube, MySpace or Facebook. I don't have investment capital to go buy a new server or hire someone to share the workload. In fact, if I were with another hosting company that required I pay the bill in full every month, YTMND would have closed down years ago.

To boil it down, in order for YTMND to survive the sub-domains are going to have to take a hit and have some real advertising on them. This will most likely end up in the form of ads being built into the preloader, meaning people won't be able to adblock them. Meaning that a YTMND will have a minimum loading time of 8 to 10 seconds. I have yet to hash out the actual implementation of this, but I'm hoping to make it as unobtrusive as possible.

Do I think I deserve to personally make money from YTMND? Yeah, it's consumed the last three years of my life. I could be making more money working a full-time job than I currently am from YTMND. Whoever said hard work pays off was full of shit. So, you can see why the last year has been a bit depressing. You can also see how disappointing it is when users declare it's time for a civil war because the site is bowing to the basic rules of capitalism.

Look back over the history of YTMND. I have never screwed the users over. I have tried to keep shady ads off the site, when I see ads with sound or flashing junk I try to remove them as soon as possible. I don't sell your user info. I don't require much of anything from you. I'm going to do what needs to be done in order to keep the site viable and fun to work on. If I can't get enough cooperation, there will no longer be any reason to keep YTMND going. People who want to continue to act out in a childish manner every time YTMND lands an advertising deal are welcome to leave and start/host their own website to see how well it works out. If you are so sure the earth is flat, prove it.





Also, cocks.

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<< 1 2 >>
April 30th, 2007
1st
(682)
I've disabled comments on this post for the time being because it's unlikely the majority of you have much to say besides "lol, 3rd". If you want to discuss this further, use the forums. ALSO HAPPY BIRTHDAY SYNCAN!
May 16th, 2007
2nd
(15)
also comments enabled.
May 16th, 2007
4th
(17)
thanks dave
May 16th, 2007
14th
(1)
glad the comments are back
May 16th, 2007
19th
(-26)
[ comment is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-26)
hi
May 17th, 2007
42nd
(-23)
[ comment is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-23)
f*ggot
May 17th, 2007
54th
(0)
[ comment is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(0)
hi..... and sorry
May 19th, 2007
93rd
(-2)
[ comment is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-2)
COOKIE 4 U ^_^
May 19th, 2007
94th
(5)
keep up the good work max. dont close down ytmnd and become a recluse for a year, only to return with a bunch of cheap immigrant oompa-lumpas that can make ytmnds better than us, and then have a competition to find your successor with golden tickets inside ytmnds.
May 20th, 2007
102nd
(0)
[ comment is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(0)
This may be an unpopular opinion, but if YTMND is costing so much that it can't be sustainable, then maybe it is time to pull the plug. For every site there is that unexpectedly makes it big, there are an innumerable amount of site owners that would kill to receive even 1% of the traffic you receive. If YTMND became successful for its own good, then so be it. While I will miss YTMND, there are other things to do on the Internet.
May 20th, 2007
108th
(2)
comments are like balls. you dont want them rubbed in your face
May 21st, 2007
118th
(6)
^ Speak for yourself
May 22nd, 2007
124th
(4)
Thanks for creating YTMN;D
May 23rd, 2007
144th
(3)
never forget 2007-04-30 22:54:49
May 25th, 2007
184th
(2)
Ultimately, there isn't a lot Max can do about the state of ytmnd on his own. Users are still submitting crap which other users are voting on. The reason most people are saying that the site is sh*t is because they aren't impressed with simple sites, like the ones created around 2003-2005. This is understandable as the style of ytmnds being created has evolved to this point where instead of just being a small image + audio loop, people are creating elaborate sites with audio sync and 3mb gifs.
May 25th, 2007
186th
(0)
The only way ytmnd can be made good is if the content being submitted is good. I don't really know what will happen in the future, people will always submit stupid in-jokes about 'Josh is a f*g' or whatever so perhaps ytmnd has just burned out. I don't see what new features Max could implement around the image+sound+text format. Thats not to say there aren't any good sites being made, there's still a few users with a lot of creativity experimenting with new ideas...
May 25th, 2007
187th
(0)
...not just pasting Cosby's head onto yesterdays top viewed gif to get 8000 views.
May 26th, 2007
209th
(0)
2007-04-30 23:14:13 1st max +666 [reply] [+|-] OMG 666 O.O
May 30th, 2007
260th
(0)
post nudes
June 12th, 2007
301st
(0)
Any particular reason why theres no news number 68?
September 9th, 2007
305th
(0)
lol, 3rd
May 16th, 2007
3rd
(-45)
[ comment (and 3 replies) is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-45)
2nd
May 16th, 2007
5th
(-15)
[ comment is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-15)
dammit i should have said "lol, 3rd" it would have been so funny and unexpected
May 16th, 2007
6th
(-3)
[ comment (and 2 replies) is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-3)
Maybe the least voted on could have some more variation, maybe 0-10 votes? (Although I assume eventually it will stop being all 0 votes, but I don't know)
May 16th, 2007
9th
(5)
What made you think waiting a while would stop such comments appearing? Oh well. New news post please, I want to hear how the upcoming features are coming along, as well as any other important stuff...
May 22nd, 2007
127th
(0)
i think the fact that he waited to enable the comments made the people actually read the issue at hand before they commented with pointless crap... you know the users. well that is what i think the reason i would have done it would have been.
May 16th, 2007
10th
(5)
I support the invite system. YTMND became the trash can of the internet, mainly due to the 12-year-old f*ggots that infected this site.
May 16th, 2007
11th
(5)
and bans to the gay downvoters
May 17th, 2007
32nd
(1)
Why is it that only 12 year olds can be bad users?
May 23rd, 2007
145th
(5)
Because he's 13 and doesn't want to make fun of his age group
May 16th, 2007
12th
(2)
well cool comments back
May 16th, 2007
13th
(2)
yeah, you're the best Max. Keep the site going and thx for the hardwork to keep the comunoty going!
May 16th, 2007
15th
(-2)
dr. ama I presume?
May 16th, 2007
16th
(-1)
Max seems to need a hell of a lot of help... why doesn't he put people in a contest of sorts to see who can make the best of whatever ytmnd needs...
May 16th, 2007
17th
(2)
I used to be a huge fan of this site till all the idiotic 12 year olds came in. Plus the fact that the community seems to think it's funnier to recycle old jokes than to actually create new ones. Not that I am exactly inocent of putting up some garbage YTMND now and then but it is something that needs to be stopped. I think YTMND should be invite only. Or at least be able to prove you have a basic understanding of comedy before you make a freaken site. 90% of ytmnds just aren't funny anymore
May 16th, 2007
18th
(0)
Max, you are a god among men.
May 16th, 2007
20th
(-23)
[ comment (and 1 replies) is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-23)
lol, 3rd
May 16th, 2007
21st
(-23)
[ comment is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-23)
lol, 3rd
May 16th, 2007
22nd
(3)
My advice, no disrespect: spin YTMND off into a nonprofit charity not unlike the Wikimedia foundation. Get a board of directors, start running pledge drives, make it so I can write off donations to YTMND on my taxes, and open the source code. People will come. Running YTMND for as long as you have is about as good of a resume-padder as you can get. YTMND has lost vitality, but it's not too late. Place YTMND into the public trust, ensure its legacy, and get some sleep.
May 17th, 2007
57th
(2)
Do you honestly think a nonprofit charity organization would support a site with kittens being crushed by high heels and gay men have open sex? It sounds nice, but remember that this is YTMND and the freedom of speech here isn't quite something charities like to be associated with...
May 18th, 2007
62nd
(3)
SO LONG DENNAL PLAN...........I mean Freedom Of Speech
June 4th, 2007
297th
(0)
dhaos, you're mistaken. A nonprofit provides a service and doesn't profit from providing the service. Wikimedia Foundation, again, is a strong supporter of free speech. The gov doesn't care, so long as you're providing a service and your board doesn't make any money through the actions of your org. YTMND is a new kind of art form, and evidence exists in the public record to support this. It could be done.
May 16th, 2007
23rd
(-1)
Jack Bauer was here.
May 16th, 2007
24th
(0)
Keep up the fight, man. We're behind you. P.S. rofl, 27th
May 16th, 2007
25th
(2)
It was a vary interesting read. Funny how sometimes side project end up being more to our destiny then a hobby. Though I would point out the vison of a thing shouldent have to proclude its form. Free speech is a human beings natural right wiether he is killed or not for doing it is just the way the world turns. Though comparing the site as a form of freedom of exspression I would say it falls sincerely short yet the idea of great exspression is thru restriction. Great Adspace is rare though... Sell it
May 17th, 2007
29th
(-3)
Eigo dekiru kai?
May 17th, 2007
26th
(3)
Is it just me, or is YTMND not even close to as good as it was last year?
May 17th, 2007
27th
(3)
Could be just that I've been going here too much and it's getting boring for me.
May 17th, 2007
33rd
(2)
Well maybe you could make a new site... Yeah I know it's a stretch.
May 17th, 2007
47th
(2)
Activity is way down...this time last year a site in the Top Viewed box could get 20k or 30k+ views easily for that day.
May 17th, 2007
48th
(2)
before, top viewed dominated the main page. You couldn't browse YTMND without even accidentally clicking on a link in the Top 15. Now the Top Viewed is scrunched up down in the corner, making it seem unimportant and causing less than half of the views sites used to receive.
May 17th, 2007
49th
(2)
True. Also, look at the turnover in Recently Created. Much slower these days. Also, before when I opened up Spy the votes scrolled so fast it was hard to read sometimes. Not so much now.
May 17th, 2007
53rd
(2)
"Could be just that I've been going here too much and it's getting boring for me." I travel a lot so I usually can't come her for a few days a week. It is good to get away. I missed the whole outrageous fad.
May 21st, 2007
120th
(0)
Have faith, people.
May 17th, 2007
28th
(2)
Whose machines?
May 17th, 2007
31st
(0)
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(0)
Max's machines
May 26th, 2007
213th
(0)
Rage Against Max's Machines.
May 17th, 2007
30th
(0)
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(0)
All my friends say YTMND is garbage. :(
May 17th, 2007
34th
(3)
I enjoy to visit this site to see what artwork people here have created!I hope this site last a looong time.
May 17th, 2007
36th
(0)
You have a Ferrari?
May 17th, 2007
38th
(-18)
[ comment is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-18)
. @ @@@@@@@@@@ @ . @@@@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@ @ . @ @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ . .@ @@@@ @@@@@@@@@.@@..@@@@.@@@@@@@@@@ @ . @.....@ @@@@@@@@ @.......@@@...@@@@@@@@@@ @.............o. @ . .o.@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@..........@.....@@@@@@@@@ @o.............. @ . .o... @@@@@@@@.@@@@...........@.....@@@@@ @@@@ ....o.o....o.o. @ . @.ooo. @@@@@@@@@.@..@............@.....@@@ @@@@@ @ ............... @ . ..@.o.@.@ @@@@@@..@@.@@@..@@...........@......@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@ ............... @ . @....@.... @ @@@@@@@.@@.@@@...@@............@.....@ @@ @@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ . .oooo.oo.o.oo. @@@@@..@@@@@@@...@@.............@.....@@@@@@ @@@@@@...@@@ @ . @ ..ooo@@.@o oo @@@@.@@..@@@@@@.....@.............@........@..@@@..@@.....@@ @ . ooo.ooo@@. o.o.. @@@@..@..@@.@@.@.....@@.............@................@@.....@ @ . @@@@...@..@..@@.@......@.............@.................@.....@@@ @ . @@@@....@..@..@@........@..........................o..........@@@ @ . @@@@@...@..@...@..........@.............@........o...oo...@.....@@ @ . @@@@.....@..@...@........................@.......ooooo.oo..@.....@@@
May 17th, 2007
39th
(0)
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(0)
Disabled Adblock for ytmnd.com too after reading this. Even started to click some ads.
May 17th, 2007
40th
(0)
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(0)
Can i please redesign the front page?
May 17th, 2007
43rd
(-2)
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(-2)
I THOUGHT YOU JEWS WERE GOOD AT FINANCE
May 17th, 2007
44th
(4)
1) Put Most Voted and Top Rated back on the default front page, for more incentive to create. 2) Get that mod system finished - help us help you.
May 17th, 2007
45th
(1)
seconded
May 18th, 2007
59th
(1)
Really, without these two factors influencing the front page, we've noticed the junk more, making some users question the state of YTMND. It's not worse, it just looks worse. As a result, less quality sites will come in, with users seeing little oppurtunity for their creations to succeed on the current structure of the front page.
May 24th, 2007
148th
(0)
I couldn't agree more. I'm studying for the MCAT and I find myself having less time to visit, and I feel as if I'm just....waiting for ytmnd to do something. I think we'll all help you out SO much when the mod system comes in, and layout changes to get the best sites appreciated by the most viewers without having pure sh*t stay on the front page for WEEKS are needed. We know you're working on the mod system, and our comments wont make it happen faster. Just letting you know that I think that once it get
May 24th, 2007
149th
(0)
s here, things are going to change alot, and for the better! Bring on the vote algorithms, bring on the creatively coded content boxes! I'm really excited for the future of YTMND.
May 17th, 2007
46th
(1)
Interesting gimmick account: http://ytmnd.com/users/undecided/
May 24th, 2007
150th
(0)
also electriceye.
May 17th, 2007
55th
(0)
This comment obeys the laws and regulations enforced by YTMND. I endorse it.
May 18th, 2007
58th
(0)
Aye, YTMND has really gone down the crapper in terms of new sites... I support an invite system, even if it would prevent ME from making sites.
May 18th, 2007
60th
(0)
Preview images for YTMNDs currently unavailable.
May 18th, 2007
64th
(0)
Also Least Voted bugs.
May 18th, 2007
61st
(0)
It all makes sense. OH MY GOD WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!??????????????!!!!!!!!!
May 18th, 2007
65th
(0)
Enough talk start doing it
May 18th, 2007
66th
(0)
also never used adblock in the first place
May 18th, 2007
67th
(0)
I think the yfly corner image just gave some new inspiration to the community for ripping on something. (that's what it's abot eh?) If everything would be perfect, there would be nothing left to rip on. :)
May 18th, 2007
69th
(-2)
lol, 3rd
May 18th, 2007
70th
(0)
I have some simple suggestions for filtering out crap: 1. any site that has less than 100 views in a week get deleted automaticly.If some of the user's friends didn't see it in the first week, they're gonna have to repost it. 2. Any site with a ranking of less than 1.5 stars gets deleted after a month. If some of the user's friends didn't see it in the first month, they're gonna have to repost it. 3. Anyone with no sites created after a month will have the account deleted. This will help keep alts down.
May 18th, 2007
71st
(0)
4. Any site with no views or votes after 24 hrs will be deleted. just some humble suggestions. BTW I don't mind the ads. Do what you need to.
May 18th, 2007
72nd
(0)
I finally realized the reason I can't vote on sites marked NSFW is because of ZoneAlarm. It's privacy settings is blocking that ability and I don't know how to change it. It used to automatically log me out when I clicked on a NSFW site, but I fixed it.
May 18th, 2007
73rd
(0)
Wow. That made me feel really badly for not coming here in a long time. :( Sorry Max. I still love you.
May 18th, 2007
74th
(-1)
post nudes
May 18th, 2007
75th
(0)
i was born in 77 today is my birthday too (i'm a 30 year old paedo) so hopefully max will deliver nudes this time...
May 18th, 2007
76th
(0)
I found two of Coolgamer's alts. I'm sure he has more because no one in their right mind would give anyone of his sites more than a three. http://www.ytmnd.com/users/vega42 http://www.ytmnd.com/users/nightninjamaster
May 19th, 2007
97th
(0)
I apologized to CoolGamer, but these are his siblings, not his alts.
May 18th, 2007
79th
(0)
THE FLOOD GATES HAVE BEEN OPENED!
May 18th, 2007
80th
(0)
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(0)
Can we ban the furries? Please? Let's ban the fur f*gs max!
May 19th, 2007
81st
(2)
Enforce the rules of Edit Or GTFO. YTMND can not become just another generic media site ( aka internet thieve) Post a 4chan image. BAN, Post a forum post BAN, Post a picture of your friends BAN
May 19th, 2007
83rd
(0)
I hope this really makes people realize the effort into running this site. I've been lurking here for a long time (I think either Picard or the damned tra-la-la was the first one I ever saw ) and I've watched this site evolve. The amount of time and effort you put into this is amazing -- don't let the whiny kids who don't understand how the real world works hinder you. Keeping YTMND free is not only great, but the ads really aren't anywhere as bad as people have been making it out to be. Thanks! :)
May 19th, 2007
84th
(0)
Rick Roll
May 19th, 2007
85th
(0)
i have to reply this
May 19th, 2007
89th
(0)
Duck Roll
May 19th, 2007
90th
(0)
davec*ckrum.ytmnd.com - WE BROKE THE COMMENTS
May 19th, 2007
91st
(0)
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 89 bytes) in /www/htdocs/ytmnd.com/includes/mysqli.result.php on line 69
May 19th, 2007
101st
(0)
hey its fixed :)
May 19th, 2007
92nd
(0)
lol, un-negation
May 19th, 2007
98th
(1)
LOL YTMND WAS DOWN IM SO OBSERVENT LOLS! CAN I GET MOD PLZ?>!!
May 19th, 2007
99th
(0)
it's refreshing to get an informative post, not only on current things, but past things to bring it all full circle.
May 19th, 2007
100th
(0)
ypu forgot poland
May 20th, 2007
103rd
(0)
Sell T-shirts already. Start a free CafePress store, then elevate to a proper one when you make enough profit. Also, offer us something for donating. Currently donations benefit OTHER people. Give us an icon next our names, or something.
May 20th, 2007
104th
(0)
ooo comments
May 20th, 2007
105th
(0)
Surely you cant filter out what is funny and what isn't because humor is fairly subjective. Just because one person doesn't find something funny, doesn't mean it isn't funny to anyone. Like you said already in the piece, invite systems don't work anyway. I think you do some great work and I appreciate that it is very time consuming, but if you run such a high traffic website and cant makemoney from that, maybe it's time to sell the site to someone who can
May 20th, 2007
106th
(0)
Oh great, now the Scientologists are f*cking things up over on my side of the pond.
May 22nd, 2007
125th
(0)
Heh Slayer. Get the Chelsea Headhunters to f*cking weed them out. Or the Bushwackers. Too bad the Subway Army isin't around anymore. :(
May 22nd, 2007
130th
(0)
Hahahaha. You really are a White Supremacist aren't you...
May 28th, 2007
234th
(0)
Not really. I just want the craziest mother f*ckers to wipe out the other crazy f*ckers.
May 20th, 2007
109th
(0)
Interesting read! My tip for advertising is to have an ad pop over each subdomain, so that the whole screen is covered by the ad for, let's say 5 seconds, and then disappear while the real site is loading in the background (just have the popup ad disappear with javascript, not a full new page). Those 5-10 seconds would otherwise be spent waiting for the actual YTMND to load in most cases and it would definitely generate a whole lot of very clear ads without bothering people too much. GL HF with YTMND.
May 20th, 2007
114th
(0)
my tips is that you STFU
May 20th, 2007
110th
(0)
oh and to minimise HTML transfer you could add some ajax stuff to the site... like JSON loading for most of the www.-part, it sure could cut away a lot of it. stuff like having the main page update the items every 3 minutes would significantly decrease the number of page reloads.
May 20th, 2007
111th
(0)
Music you should listen to while reading : 1st: De-Phazz - The Mambo Craze
May 20th, 2007
112th
(-1)
I just want to say thanks for all the sacrifices you've made, whatever happens happens. Long live YTMND.com
May 20th, 2007
113th
(-1)
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(-1)
Maybe if you quit using the money as a source of income....
May 21st, 2007
115th
(0)
just go back to having a real job and put the brakes on this. and start deleting sites to make stuff easier and cheaper. the more you obsess over lighthearted satire sites like this, the less fun it'll be to run.
May 21st, 2007
116th
(0)
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(0)
Max I appreciate your work Keep on truckin'
May 21st, 2007
117th
(0)
new article, please
May 21st, 2007
119th
(-1)
Also, skcocs.
May 21st, 2007
121st
(2)
holding in a poo right now
May 22nd, 2007
122nd
(-1)
also, wise up ;D
May 22nd, 2007
123rd
(-1)
Pancakes. ;D
May 22nd, 2007
126th
(0)
Drop a cluster bomb.
May 22nd, 2007
128th
(1)
i know out of the many people saying this you probably will over look my comment but keep up the work bro. sorry i didn't sponsor any sites i myself am not the richest of folks either. but i am all for the ads if it keeps this thing running. good or sad to say but this site is your child and i know you care about it. parasites and all. even if it is covered in fleas you still love it and sometimes you must use the radio station free-bees to keep it clothed. hope all works out. and yes you deserve more
May 22nd, 2007
129th
(0)
Well put, Dr-L337's less successful little brother. As someone who has donated in the past, even in light of that, I still welcome the ads. If they're needed, then they're needed, and people just have to suck it up and accept it. I think that the great amount of entertainment, laughter, information, and everything else this website has provided over the years is more than worth any mild discomfort an advertisement may cause. Thank you, Max.
May 22nd, 2007
131st
(0)
Well, judging by the first couple of comments, and a few of the ones I can't see. There aren't any numbers anymore. I geuss taking away a child's play toy really does get them to settle down
May 22nd, 2007
132nd
(0)
Hell, screw $15 one time fee, make a $2 a month if people want no ads, and $12 a year (half price) for a yearly subscription. Some of us live on YTMND and want to get rid of the trash (I'm one of the over 18 girls here that wouldn't mind weeding out some of the porn and "goatse" pics). I dn't think that's too much money for people to whine about. It's an optional thing anyways. Don't want adds? Pay $2 a month or $12 a year, end. I'm willing to. I'm a student and I can afford that! ;)
May 23rd, 2007
143rd
(0)
Even though I would pay that, max did say that would be taxing the wrong people. It's outside links that drain ytmnd's bandwidth
May 22nd, 2007
133rd
(-2)
Also Max, enforce that *ssh*les like RazorGator, as funny as they are, pay for advertising. That's no fair that they are making money while putting you in debt. F*cking leaches (even if I do want a Razor Gator!)
May 23rd, 2007
136th
(0)
hasnt RazorGator allways sponsored their own submited sites, which raises cash for ytmnd. but they should do it through the proper channels. what we need is a few more products and small companies willing to advertise here. But crucially not make ytmnd become the bitch of the advertising industry. This is a fine balance but one that max seems capable of doing, well apart from the getting advertisers bit.
May 23rd, 2007
134th
(0)
Max, as a fellow webmaster, I have to give you absolute respect. Do what you have to do, and don't get dissalusioned by what the complaints. Cheers, and good luck with making this place something that can afford you a decent standard of living.
May 23rd, 2007
135th
(0)
I went to Albany for a few days. They have a bottled water named Poland Spring
May 30th, 2007
250th
(0)
That's good stuff. Only bottled water I've ever liked a lot.
May 23rd, 2007
137th
(-1)
fyhk
May 23rd, 2007
138th
(0)
Fukken agreed.
May 23rd, 2007
139th
(-3)
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(-3)
Max, just pull the plug. Host the more entertaining YTMNDs here, and destroy everything else. Get yourself some Grey Goose, and try to get another job. YTMND is drowning in its own stupidity.
May 23rd, 2007
142nd
(0)
thanks for everything its appreciated and good
May 23rd, 2007
146th
(0)
i want a n*gg* hidding in a bowl of rice....
May 24th, 2007
151st
(0)
At fisrt I hated "Least voted on ever" but then I realised its purpose. In order to have a good database purge, and all sites with less than a certain average should be deleted. Least votted on ever allows people to rate the sites that were missed earlier. Thus allowing for a more streamlined and accurate approach.
May 24th, 2007
152nd
(0)
Kind of a second chance for some YTMNDs, huh?
May 25th, 2007
200th
(1)
Yeah.
May 24th, 2007
153rd
(0)
This man deserves hugs.
May 24th, 2007
154th
(0)
Very nicely written max, I come back to YTMND from not visiting the sites for 2 months, and see this greatly written post. Thanks for everything youve done for YTMND in the past, present and future.
May 24th, 2007
156th
(0)
Clear as dirt
May 24th, 2007
157th
(0)
would you like some cheese with your whine lolol
May 24th, 2007
159th
(0)
ahhh... they're slowing being taking over by LARGE LETTERS
May 24th, 2007
160th
(0)
If you want it to end max..do it. Sucks if you do =/
May 24th, 2007
161st
(0)
Why is it blue?
May 25th, 2007
199th
(0)
Its the way of distinguishing recent posts, (read some of the past news things, its in one of them...).
May 24th, 2007
162nd
(0)
dont do it..DONT DO ITTTT
May 24th, 2007
163rd
(0)
Its the end of YTMND as we know it.
May 24th, 2007
164th
(2)
front page is best front page since zimmerc*ck. leave it like this plz
May 24th, 2007
165th
(0)
I know none of this anger is directed at ME, my sites rule :)
May 24th, 2007
166th
(3)
Max, a simple message. VIEW YOUR OWN DAMN SITE. If you are supposedly spending all day every day coding. That time could be innumerably better spent deleting, even if one at a time, the horrible sh*t on newly created. There are many honest people who spend often amounts of time viewing Ytmnd. I'd like to think that I am one of them. If you can't spend the time to screen for content, write a parameter that will delete every site under 2 stars in the database.
May 24th, 2007
168th
(-2)
Also, if you give up and pull the plug on Ytmnd. I will find out where you live and rape your entire family. I'll do it.
May 24th, 2007
171st
(2)
I think the problem is that content that is highly rated is not necessarily good- ie half of all the sh*t on U&C
May 25th, 2007
189th
(0)
Well, a huge flaw I can think of in that department would be users that makes good sites, but who just happen to be huge *ssh*les and get downvoted a lot by emos who ran out of razor blades with nothing better to do. lol, e-venge.
May 24th, 2007
167th
(0)
I'm scared, Max. Hold me.
May 24th, 2007
169th
(-4)
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(-4)
I'm gonna go whack to gay furry porn till this all blows over. Cheers and good tidings, Take it easy now.
May 24th, 2007
170th
(0)
I'm with Aeroplano on this one. Never back down, never surrender.
May 24th, 2007
172nd
(0)
i leave for a couple of days and you guys ruin the place, make better ytmnd's
May 24th, 2007
173rd
(0)
were all a little drunk tonight
May 25th, 2007
174th
(0)
Also, if you make the newly created bigger, it will give good sites more of a chance.
May 25th, 2007
175th
(-12)
[ comment is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(-12)
Max, you're a f*ggot. You think you're unique, but sadly, you aren't. You're a douchebag, a felching gay male, and a cum swallower. NO, you're a cum dodger, that's what a bad f*ggot you are. Kill yourself, plz. THANKS
May 25th, 2007
176th
(-1)
max is PISSED
May 25th, 2007
177th
(0)
I'm loving the front page.
May 25th, 2007
178th
(0)
ok so he's not just talking smack about my YTMND's?
May 25th, 2007
179th
(0)
I'd still use YTMND if it had popunders and all that jazz.
May 25th, 2007
190th
(0)
I agree. Do the pop-unders, Max! Make some money for all your effort. All these whiners will complain, but maybe it'll get the worthless comment-flamers and crap-ytmnd-makers to quit, and solve all our problems.
May 25th, 2007
180th
(1)
Top 15 is godly, as of tonight anyway.
May 25th, 2007
183rd
(0)
Hey Max, If I had a Million, I'd slip ya some to cover your fees. If I ever get a few Million, I'll make a Massive donation. When I can afford to, I'll put in what I can. :) Also 5'd ;P
May 25th, 2007
185th
(0)
The only way ytmnd can be made good is if the content being submitted is good. I don't really know what will happen in the future, people will always submit stupid in-jokes about 'Josh is a f*g' or whatever so perhaps ytmnd has just burned out. I don't see what new features Max could implement around the image+sound+text format. Thats not to say there aren't any good sites being made, there's still a few users with a lot of creativity experimenting with new ideas...
May 25th, 2007
188th
(0)
What you wrote about simple, tactless, and unoriginal humor is right on the money. Sadly, online moderating has become a mixed job of babysitting and trash collecting. Every community has people who like to crap in the nest. While people who are online enough to be nitpicky might complain, outsiders like me only see that you're doing a good job. Alternate accounts and gimmick accounts are a huge pain, and I hope you get that stuff sorted out somehow. Sometimes you gotta do what's necessary...
May 25th, 2007
203rd
(0)
I agree totally. People run rampant online because they know that they can't truly be held accountable for anything (nobody will ever see their face, etc...). All anyone ever has is their account information, usually falsefied info at that. Thay feel free to crap in the nest, and they do, and its almost always hard on the nest owner/operator. You have my full support max, whatever you choose to do.
May 25th, 2007
191st
(1)
hey max *** SRS COMMENT ALERT*** how about having a "special" ytmnd section with a few hundred great sites (you & the mods hand pick them) & plonk adverts on them i mean you'd have control of what goes on there & advertisers could be assured of the content (disable editing them once they're there) maybe do a NSFW version (for meatspin etc) & have porn advertisers there & all the other other crap on the WS site just leave this place as a "brainstorming" site (also disable hotlinking for f*ck sake)
May 25th, 2007
194th
(0)
few hundred? ytmnd is lucky to have a handful of great sites
May 25th, 2007
207th
(0)
or whatever - i'm sure they could find enough to get advertising spaces (plus there are MANY good sites that fly under the radar because they don't have NEDM or some other sh*t fad attached & they could all be found eventually given a good team of fair mods)
May 28th, 2007
231st
(0)
"few hundred? ytmnd is lucky to have a handful of great sites" your wrong ytmnd has thousands of great sites. Its just being able to find them is harder than diamond mining with toothpicks. The wiki, a better search, and a more interconnected navigation system should improve this.
May 30th, 2007
249th
(0)
thank you :-D i believe there's a LOT of good comedy here overshadowed by the constant flow of sh*t i mean i myself try to avoid fads but they get upvoted & they're often my worst YTMNDs i mean my "original" sites are often crap but 1 or 2 are okay & they get lower scores than some SHOE ON HEAD f*cking bullsh*t okay post nudes people oops i mean post original content itt for srs opinions GOGOGO :woowoo:
May 25th, 2007
192nd
(0)
1st post
May 25th, 2007
193rd
(0)
The Homestarrunner guys live off of merchandizing and merchandizing alone, why can't this site?
May 25th, 2007
201st
(1)
Most of what makes it funny is also copyrighted by other people. So unless we convince people to allow us to make goods, we can't do it. About the only thing that YTMND could market freely would be items with the YTMND logo on them, since max has rights to it.
May 25th, 2007
205th
(0)
Couldn't NEDM be considered ours?
May 28th, 2007
227th
(0)
Well there's still no problem with that, I think there's still globs of people who would rish to just get "YTMND" branded junk, and there's more they could do, like an "upvated" short or hat with five orange stars on it, or a "downvoted" one with one partial star.
May 25th, 2007
195th
(0)
You've got the right one baby, uh-huh!
May 25th, 2007
196th
(1)
WHY WONT YOU LET ME HOLD YOUR HAND IN PUBLIC ANYMORE?
May 25th, 2007
202nd
(6)
Can you make it so that if a gif has already been posted, it cannot be used again? That would eliminate high rated crap like this gopherr.ytmnd.com. I know that one simple edit can fix that, but most people who steal from other sites are too stupid to realize they can do that.
May 25th, 2007
204th
(0)
It would require people to at least EDIT THE FILE a little. I say yes.
May 25th, 2007
206th
(0)
blocking dublicate content would probably eliminate 25% of the sites made daily.
May 27th, 2007
221st
(0)
Amen
May 30th, 2007
251st
(0)
This is a fantastic idea
May 26th, 2007
208th
(0)
Max, I agree that ads may be a necessary evil. Do whatever you feel is necessary to ensure this sites survival. To reduce worthless sites, why not delete all those which have had very few (if any) views during a period of x months and/or all sites with a rating of less than 1.5 (they never get viewed anyway)
May 26th, 2007
210th
(-2)
uh....hi?
May 26th, 2007
211th
(1)
hey it's Sylvester, back from a vacation. The site's still not better, so you should probably go on another one.
May 26th, 2007
212th
(0)
unless of course you're planning to make another site (I doubt you are, since most people who make good sites are being discouraged by the lack of most voted)
May 26th, 2007
214th
(1)
And Top Rated, for that matter.
May 27th, 2007
217th
(0)
ya i've gotten incredibly lazy so i'm not making any sites, atleast not any time soon. also i've discovered this thing called "outside" thats quite interesting so i may check that out a bit.
May 27th, 2007
224th
(2)
You'll be back in the winter.
May 27th, 2007
225th
(3)
You see, that's where being British comes in. Always sh*tty outside.
May 26th, 2007
215th
(0)
tl;dr
May 26th, 2007
216th
(0)
No, just kidding, but I read most of it.
May 27th, 2007
218th
(0)
Also, cliff notes... wait no.
May 27th, 2007
219th
(0)
[ comment (and 1 replies) is below rating threshold and has been hidden ]
(0)
Oh the misconception that disabling adblock will do f*ck all for a website. I've seen it a thousand times. Most advertisers pay based on clicks, so if you were never going to click them anyway, why not block em? Why, I think I will, Trebek! Also the ones that would pay for views have a habit of dropping sites that get way more views than clicks (and I mean an exceedingly unbalanced ratio; naturally views would be higher normally). Therefore keep adblock on if you won't click anyway, or disable and click ads
May 27th, 2007
220th
(1)
just rename this site www.lazytown.com and be done with it
May 27th, 2007
223rd
(0)
Why don you do this: when a new user makes an account, if his first couple sites unanimously sucked or were in poor taste, kick his *ss out. No doubt itd be hard monitoring this, but all people who are willing to help max in doing this, comment under meh. That's my suggestion anyway. kthxbai
May 28th, 2007
229th
(3)
yourself included?
May 29th, 2007
244th
(1)
Everyone's early sites suck. The talented people gain skills as they progress. The untalented, well they still make screenshotmnds.
May 28th, 2007
226th
(1)
it's a bizarre thing you are doing, max. please don't stop!
May 28th, 2007
228th
(0)
this is a great site. retards destroy its I.E: anditsf*ckincoldoutside.ytmnd.com thanks max
May 28th, 2007
230th
(0)
Good post! Do whatever you can to make money. Increased loading times might even deter some of the more garbageish sites. YTMND is a great concept. Maybe do something like a donation program? I didn't realize that sponsoring sites went to you as a donation. I would rather just donate some dollars to you and the site instead of sponsoring some random YTMND. Take care!
May 28th, 2007
232nd
(0)
anyone serious about donating money to ytmnd must consider that using paypal incurs fees; currently the total is $1,758.82. if people posted max a check it would increase the amount going to ytmnd rather than paypal making a small cut from donations. also if you dont want to sponsor some random site i know a certain scientist who would like one of his sites sponsored. :-)
May 28th, 2007
233rd
(1)
http://ytmnd.com/users/fastfoodgoneslow/ - in case you didn't notice yet.
May 29th, 2007
237th
(1)
That guy still around?
May 30th, 2007
252nd
(1)
Yeah, now he's genstar2 making sites about genstar being added to the deletion queue
May 29th, 2007
235th
(1)
picard.ytmnd.com
May 29th, 2007
236th
(0)
YTMND JUST GOT JUICED?! Literally, like 30 seconds ago. Check it out.
May 29th, 2007
245th
(0)
I run a very small server business at the lowest prices I have ever seen. I lose money monthly but its fun, I'd rather spend my money that way. 2007-05-25 09:10:53 205th siburke939 his comment sounds good, as do many others.
May 30th, 2007
258th
(0)
cheers dude! obviously it was just a "type as you think" comment but i think it could be a start of a great idea (for someone with more brains/care than me to take further)
May 29th, 2007
246th
(0)
http://ytmnd.com/users/SUPASEXAY/comments - an old one - resurfaced recently.
May 29th, 2007
247th
(0)
please ban: http://ytmnd.com/users/prairiedogeric10/comments
May 30th, 2007
248th
(0)
I've got 1150 PMs I could never be bothered to trash, and now I can't because the list of PMs is so long it covers the option to trash it. Help?
May 30th, 2007
265th
(0)
Ah, cheers.
May 30th, 2007
253rd
(-1)
Question- how do you change your account password?
May 30th, 2007
257th
(0)
click the options link in the top right and then click change your password
May 30th, 2007
254th
(-2)
Why not delete any user who has never commented on a site or maybe delete any user who does not respond to a PM/e-mail within 30 days? I don't remember if signing up required e-mail verification...
May 30th, 2007
255th
(0)
state-of-mind
May 30th, 2007
256th
(0)
in other words: bad idea
May 30th, 2007
261st
(-1)
http://wonderful300.ytmnd.com/
May 30th, 2007
262nd
(2)
you're a gay
May 30th, 2007
264th
(-1)
Uruguay
May 30th, 2007
263rd
(0)
I am the 15th person to figure out ads.ytmnd.com, do I get a cookie?
May 31st, 2007
266th
(0)
You bring up plenty of good points.. Something to really think about.
May 31st, 2007
267th
(0)
an idea: make people "audition" before allowing them to join YTMND. if someone wants to join, they could make a YTMND, then any moderator could view it and if they approve the person is admitted as a user. it probably isn't a very practical idea, but it's all I could contribute... thanks for going through all this trouble for us max
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