In the 2000 film Finding Forester, Sean Connery exclaims, “You’re the man now, dog!” as Jamal Wallace writes on a typewriter. “Punch the keys, for god’s sake!”

Max Goldberg, a 19-year-old programmer, found this funny and created something transformative. Looping audio, a tiled background, and five words of text done up in what looks like Word Art launched a career and a format. Ytmnd.com became a clearing house of funny, bizarre, fascinating, and frequently offensive content. From a single joke in 2001 came two decades of memes, lore, and (low brow) culture.


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The site, however, went into a decline around 2016, and Goldberg contemplated shutting it down. Preserving the wonderful weirdness YTMND was made a priority of the Internet Archive, which endeavored to save the entire site as it existed in 2018, which was fortunate given a brief outage in 2019 before a relaunch in 2020, just in time for the pandemic to hit and trap a bunch of people inside with their computers and boredom.

YTMND

YTMND

Of course, saving an entire site comes with a few hiccups.

The resurrected site loads faster but updates less frequently than in its heyday. Still, it serves as a fascinating time capsule of the internet at its strangest.


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GeoCities / Yahoo Answers

Do you Yahoo? Probably not. Once one of the leading search engines on the internet, Yahoo had only a 1.47% market share when it came to global searches as of February 2021. Bing did that research.