Trivia / YTMND

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• Acclaimed Flop: For a certain definition of "flop" - YTMND got lots of traffic in its heyday, but the fact that it had an "anything goes" mentality regarding content (up to and including the out-and-out use of hardcore porn on some of the sites, with only downright illegal content being removed) made attracting advertisers a perpetual challenge. As such, in spite of the fact that it was, at one point, a major internet subculture hub, it made a lot less money than its popularity would imply.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The site "World of Warcraft is Serious Business" misreports it as a recording from a World of Warcraft ventrilo - Anyone who's played the game can tell you there's almost no way for someone to steal their "Cloudsong", nor is there a "Mordred" server in the game. That's because the drama was actually around Dark Age of Camelot and not World of Warcraft.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Max has gone on the record as, in some ways, not being particularly fond of the website he created, even finding the name to be "so fucking clunky" and saying that he sometimes hated the site.
  • As noted under Misaimed Fandom on the YMMV page, many of the users who created and popularized the Moon Man fad, which portrayed McDonald's' Mac Tonight mascot as a bigoted Memetic Psychopath, distanced themselves from it, since it went from an ironic joke about a racist character to a hate symbol used by actual racists.
• Defictionalization: The Safety Not Guaranteed YTMND shows a picture of a classified ad (created in 1997) which had a user who claimed that he was a time-traveler and needed someone to go with him (and had Don LaFontaine reading off the lines, as he was paid to do so by the creator of the YTMND). In 2012, the movie Safety Not Guaranteed was released, though without the silly meme.
• Reclusive Artist: Even at the height of YTMND's popularity, its creator, Max Goldberg, kept a very low profile, revealing few details about himself and his personal life and generally keeping himself behind the scenes. Even years after the website had lost almost all of its traffic and cultural relevance, it took a Gizmodo reporter seven months worth of e-mails to convince Max to give an over-the-phone interview, with Goldberg commenting that he was "wary about meeting people from the internet, especially about YTMND."
• Technology Marches On: The reason for the site's ultimate downfall and fade into obscurity boiled down to the rise of YouTube and other sites where videos and images could be shared, making YTMND redundant.

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