posted by max on September 26, 2007 at 02:57:06 PM

hey folks,

I bet you've been wondering what I've been up to lately. I know I've been keeping pretty quiet, but I promise I've been extraordinarily busy. I've been trying to keep on top of people exploiting the system, I even added batch delete to the admin site. In the last week I deleted over 600 accounts, so you probably saw a lot of scores normalize.

The catch is that I haven't really been working on YTMND all that much. I've been working on a new website. Well, two actually. As a lot of you know, I never made YTMND expecting people to actually use it, beyond say 10-20 people. This time around, instead of taking six days to make an entire site and then spend the rest of my life fixing the various exploitable odds and ends and restructuring how everything works to make it scale, I'm actually designing as much as I can up front.

The first site is sort of generic, and probably won't be open to the public in any form that you'd want to use it. It's a scalable media store for websites like YTMND, or anything that requires hosting and organization of lots of small files. I hope to move YTMND over to use it once it's finished. For anyone interested in the technical aspects, it's a lot like MogileFS, Amazon's S3, and GoogleFS. It's a fairly large challenge on many levels.

Warning, this is where I get wordy:

The second site I'm waiting to announce until it's more developed. To get your brain churning, I've long held that most sites on the internet are more or less the same. Flickr, Youtube, YTMND, 4chan, Forums, "Blogs", etc. It's all the same media, but with different feature sets and organizations. Inherently, large communities form around these things which are usually obvious. Smaller sub-communities form as well, but are usually unnoticed or unknown.

Sites such as facebook aim to turn communities of people who know each other in person into an information sharing network. On the internet communities don't work like that, there are always people coming and going, alumni and "noobs". There will always be a larger number of people lurking than there will be participating. In most cases when you open up a system that allows anyone to participate, you end up getting more garbage and as a community gets larger, that becomes painfully more apparent.

I've always avoided "social-networking" as I feel like most of it's bullshit marketing drivel and when it comes down to it, the sites provide more useless garbage (SEND THIS FROG GIFT TO YOUR FRIEND FOR $1!!!) than they do actual usefulness. I don't care if you are posting this twitter(tm) message from your toilet. I don't want to know what you are listening to right this second. I don't want to read your profile. I don't want to browse your self-censored "wall". I want to sink my teeth into; something worth looking at.

This is why I'm not rich. I don't see the point of adding a facebook or myspace plugin even though it would bring millions of new people to YTMND, the kind of people that look at and click ads, as well as the kind that ruin communities.

I think YTMND ended up as an extension of how I feel in that aspect. YTMND users are what they make. Your profile page shows your sites, your comments, etc. It isn't the description of you that you wrote yourself, your avatar, your birth sign or your religious views, because I don't care about any of those things. If you want to show people who or what you are, do it using what's available.

This has caused a lot of people to create alts, and in most cases (where people aren't using them to upvote themselves) it's to separate styles and remove the associations with their main account. I find this sort of amazing, because outside of having knowledge through the admin system, I'd never match a lot of the people to their alts. It's almost like two completely different people. So how do you allow people to participate without the desire to split into multiple personalities? Or the burning need to create tons of accounts in order to prop their original account up to be seen by more people?

I feel like IRC is a perfect example of how real internet communities work. You have a plethora of people involved in multiple sub-communities at once, most of which have nothing to do with the name of their communities (or channels in this case) but grew into different groups of people that share the same space. How these communities start is less important than the fact that at a certain point, most smaller internet communities don't have an underlying theme beyond the people that make up the community itself.

So to summarize, I'm taking everything I've learned about the internet and more importantly managing (hah!) a large internet community and using it to create a new site where I'm going to avoid large communities like the plague. I want to create a site for people who want to see the internet as it really is and has been for the last decade: raw and uncut.

Do you remember when Intel was concerned with making better processors, not "mashups", back before a stupid phone caused an avalanche of contemptible, biased hype, like when paying 1.6 billion dollars for a business that will almost assuredly cost more to host than it will ever make was still a ludicrous idea, back when introverts ruled the internet?

Me too. This is who I want to cater to, this is who I've catered to on YTMND: myself.

So what does this mean for YTMND? Not much, yet. I'm still popping back and forth, but ultimately I think it means I'm going to give a lot more control over the site to mods, which I think is a good thing (assuming I pick good mods). Anyway, there will probably be some downtime this weekend as I will be in Chicago moving servers around, I may even pop in on lulzcon if I don't think it will cause me physical harm. Stay tuned for more updates semi-soon.