It's a shame this has happened. I wonder to what extent this has been archived, I've taken a quick glance at it on archive.org, and it seems the main page has been well archived but I'd be sceptical if any of the "deeper" pages so speak were archived.
It makes me wonder what will happen with similar online communities as time drags on, and makes me sort of concerned for them too and the content that could be lost due to their disappearance.
With the web going forward, it seems as if similar memetic communities will primarily exist on platforms such as reddit, and possibly tumblr?
"YOU'RE THE ARCHIVE NOW, DOG: Archive Team took a full copy of You're The Man Now Dog (YTMND) last year - should be playable in Wayback Machine now or soonish."
It’s still weird and great, just not public and you’re not cool enough to get invited.
Greatest open secret of the last 5 internet years: Real social media happens in private chatrooms and group “texts”. People are tired of posting publicly.
I'm cool enough to be invited or at least grandfathered-in to some of them but it's not the same. You can't just go online and find a different weird community every evening like you used to 15 years ago.
Also, with the tightening of privacy, there's less and less recruitment going on which makes me pessimistic as to the long-term viability of these private groups and forums. They seem to be slowing down with fewer posts every month. Many smaller ones which made the transition from IRC to webforum to some modern software are a pale shade of their former selves even when the Internet around them has been booming.
A core part of the early weird internet was the fact that you could stumble into it entirely accidentally. Private communities can be great, but they're a very different thing.
I always saved the wav/mp3 and gif files of the ones I liked the most. I do this for all sites I like because inevitably, they vanish and rarely render correctly on archive.org.
My favorite was "amorningfilledwith400billionsuns" - or also known as "A Still More Glorious Dawn Awaits sagan" with the auto-tuned version of Carl Sagan singing about our possible future.
Hard to pick a single favorite actually. There were so many great ones.
I'm not sure to what extent YTMND itself would be archivable. The last I saw it it loaded frames with some Flash loader, which handled sync with the audio (as opposed to the very early YTMNDs which were just a gif/audio and text).
Places like tumblr and reddit are much more easily archivable as they're just text and image files, and now video files which with modern web standards can just be grabbed as is and put into archival systems with automatic transcoding as standards change.
I just hope whoever was running it at the end makes the archive publicly available.
Was it loading any Flash or it was a Flash app provided by the website that you could upload your content to?
I know of a certain adult website which hosts "webteases", which are basically interactive/choose your own adventure slideshows. The content was originally provided with Flash, but now they reworked it to use HTML5 and most of the content seems to work because it was using the website provided framework for the content.
IIRC, you would upload wav or mp3 to YTMND, and then it would play back in Flash. I think it worked like this for one or both of these reasons:
1. Syncing the audio and video. It is difficult to sync a gif with audio. They have to be started at the exact same time, be the exact same length, and never get out of sync due to lag/stutter. This wasn't important for early YTMNDs, but mattered later when people created what were disparagingly referred to as "___ short films".
2. Bandwidth. I think Max had said the Flash solution was more efficient than serving the raw audio and gif. Think of it as an early version of WebM.
I think the use of Flash could be controlled on a per-YTMND basis - the creator could disable the use of Flash. And/or maybe it was that Flash was only used for animated gifs?
It will only work for search result pages Archive.org saved, and only for the first page of results, but they archived a LOT of them, so most relatively common search terms should work.
The archived YTMND also has a comprehensive list of "fads", which is great for context and examples:
It makes me wonder what will happen with similar online communities as time drags on, and makes me sort of concerned for them too and the content that could be lost due to their disappearance.
With the web going forward, it seems as if similar memetic communities will primarily exist on platforms such as reddit, and possibly tumblr?