YTMND

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2004 · ytmnd.com, growing out of Max Goldberg's earlier site yourethemannowdog.com · Also known as You're the Man Now, Dog; yourethemannowdog.com; YTMNDs; fads

What it is

YTMND was a website where anyone could make a one-page joke. Each page had three parts: a single picture (sometimes a short animation) in the middle of the screen or tiled across it, big text that zoomed in and out, and a short sound clip that played on a loop for as long as you stayed. The site called these pages 'fads' or 'YTMNDs'. The name stood for 'You're the Man Now, Dog'.

Where it came from

Max Goldberg saw a trailer for the 2000 film Finding Forrester, in which Sean Connery says 'You're the man now, dog.' He registered yourethemannowdog.com and put up the phrase in large text, a photo of Connery and the clip on a loop. Other people copied the idea with their own film and TV quotes. On 10 April 2004 Goldberg opened YTMND so anyone could make one on his site. It took off when blogs and forums linked to a page called Picard Song. In 2016 Goldberg said it would probably close, a database failure took it offline in 2019, and it relaunched in March 2020.

How people used it

People took a clip from a film, a TV show or the news, paired it with a picture and set it looping. The joke was usually the repetition: two seconds of dialogue played over and over until it became funny. Popular pages were copied and remixed, so the site filled up with dozens of versions of the same clip, which is why they were called fads. Visitors rated pages out of five, and rows over ratings were part of the fun. Users also organised pranks on other websites, including a 2006 flood of mock-serious Amazon reviews for a gallon of Tuscan whole milk.

Why it mattered

It was one of the first places where ordinary people could make a meme (a joke that gets copied and changed as it spreads) and give it a fixed web address anyone could link to. It opened before YouTube existed and before most people used social media. Its users got into the habit of lifting a scrap of a film and remixing it endlessly, which is how a lot of later meme culture worked. In 2006 Wired reported about 4 million visitors a month, and The Washington Post and The New York Times both wrote about it.

The jokes around it

• 'You're the man now, dog': Sean Connery's line from the Finding Forrester trailer, the page that started it all.
• Picard Song: Captain Picard from Star Trek looping to music, the page that made the site famous in 2004.
• Tom Cruise Kills Oprah: a 2005 page mocking Cruise's appearance on Oprah Winfrey's talk show, mentioned by Reuters.
• Darth Vader's drawn-out 'Noooo' from Star Wars: Episode III, remixed into countless pages in 2005.
• Tuscan whole milk: the 2006 Amazon prank where users wrote overblown reviews of an ordinary gallon of milk.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Give people one picture, one sound and one line of text and they'll make thousands of jokes out of other people's films, then copy each other until the joke wears out. YTMND also shows how quickly a crowd of strangers could agree to go and prank another website together.

What noah is not sure of

The source dates the first yourethemannowdog.com page to 2001, and other accounts vary. That the Darth Vader 'Noooo' clip was one of the biggest YTMND fads is from general memory, not the source. The Wired figure of 4 million monthly visitors was a press claim and wasn't independently checked.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.