Reminds me of https://floor796.com/
Though floor796 is way more rich and interesting, and still receiving additions every few days.
That's amazing.
Reminds me of those early 2000s Russian ones.
Is this is what a Boeing factory looks like?
This is the visualization of my employer's Kubernetes deployment.
How did they got access to it? Concerning..
> How did they got access to it? Concerning..
Someone bound system:anonymous to ClusterReader "just for now, for testing, I'll delete it right after".
Went down a rabbithole of old ytmnds I used to keep in the background. It's nuts how ones I thought were super popular at the time had less than 100k total views to this day. Mid-00s internet was still such a small place.
Had an impact on popular culture that still persists
https://momspaghetti.ytmnd.com/
One of the greatest contributions to humanity was the conversion of ytmnd from flash to html5
I think I remember seeing calls for pieces of this on the SomethingAwful forums back in the day, it was a collaborative art piece. There was a template with specific frames where the ball enters and leaves each square and it was up to forum members to fill in the rest and then it was all stitched together.
Yeah, this was a project of the SomethingAwful forums. There are more pieces than in the linked YTMND. My contribution had the balls teleporting Star Trek -style, but I'm not sure I kept a copy anywhere.
The only one that matters. The original that started it all:
https://yourethemannowdog.ytmnd.com/
And my favorite, which was probably the most popular one of all time:
This started out on the Something Awful forums back in the early 2000s. They made a few more after this one was such a hit. I joined in one year, probably at about age 18, using a bootleg copy of Photoshop that I got at a LAN party. My contribution is floating around somewhere.
Oh wow there are 14 of these
Does this ytmnd predate the movie 'safety not guaranteed'?
Yes, it does. There's also audio of Don LaFontaine reading the ad in his signature movie trailer style [1] - I'm a little unclear on whether the YTMNDer requested it from him or if he came up with the idea himself, but it also predates the actual movie by a fair number of years.
Yes, by a lot
The movie is based on that old classified ad. It was a dank boomer meme.
I believe it was actually an space filling joke ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine
Variation on a theme: https://hardsafety.ytmnd.com/
Congrats people we did it https://ytmnd.com/sites/top_viewed/today
Volume warning...
There exists an old game called "The Incredible Machine" where you create these.
I was responsible for drawing 1/25th of this gif back in the day. There was actually way more tiles created but this is one version that went viral. Crazy to see it still pop up like this every couple of years.
The hardware it was running on was... Basic at best and the database that backed the whole thing was torched at some point. The sole guy behind it however did manage to get some of it back up and working and launched a patreon to fund it.
The whole story is over here: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21202658/ytmnd-return-shut...
Thank you! I am so glad it’s back, it’s an absolute treasure trove
Like watching myself in the mirror.
YTMND was the TikTok of its time.
Check out ROY4L's sites: https://ytmnd.com/users/ROY4L/sites
My favorite creator on YTMND
YTMND, instant upvote
URLs you can hear...
I thought it was goin to be this: https://youtu.be/orBH_Qnw3eY
I had no idea ytmnd still existed
Another point for old web longevity
Part of me likes all the insanity with the internet back then, with mixed feelings.
I probably got computer skills wasting time on YTMND for one reason or another.
I 100% attribute 4chan's b for inspiring me to program. Their raids inspired me to learn programming when I was a teenager.
But... I see that the alt-right came out of 4chan and the previously funny memes were no longer funny memes but serious accusations.
Maybe its basic phenomenology, but I wish I could see these websites as I once did, funny and edgy. Today I feel like there was something a bit darker that corrupted many users.
I think you give too much agency to 4chan. It's just a imageboard - an internet forum - that happened to have some subforums related to alt-right. Maybe it had (has) a bad influence on people, but it's hundred times smaller than Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch.
FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later Reddit, Twitter, Instagram; and web sites such as Thought Catalog, later Jezebel, xoJane, Rookie Mag, and the Daily Dot, then everydayfeminism.com, Salon, Vox.
I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social media and even mainstream media, they originated on Tumblr and 4chan, respectively. I wonder whether one could quantify/measure it somehow.
> I wonder whether one could quantify/measure [where ideas originated and entered the mainstream] somehow.
You could probably use something like genetic tracing, if you could come up with a way of fingerprinting free text semi-reliably.
My expectation is there are probably "tell words" (i.e. not used elsewhere or for that purpose) in novel ideas, and you could likely observe these spreading over time, as the ideas carrying them did.
One of the first things groups tend to do is specialize and redefine language / create jargon.
A complication is that some of this jargon gets mangled over time. "Based and redpilled" is definite jargon associated with certain subcultures, but you won't see it in mainstream media other than articles about that exact phrase.
I would posit that the proportion of "originated from 4chan" notes on knowyourmeme.com are an indicator of its outsized influence.
a mirror of the uncyclopedia page https://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/Onime
the livejournal stuff is also still up https://ru-onime.livejournal.com/71601.html
(2005)
Thanks for your reply and examples, very informative. I agree it's an awful metric but seemed it might hold water when I first typed it. Full disclosure, I have never actually visited 4chan despite ample opportunity.
"Underwater basket-weaving" was a derogatory term for impractical university classes back in the 70s (?)
and Mongolian is a stand-in for mongoloid, which fell off the euphemism treadmill as a descriptor for people with Downs syndrome.
So "Mongolian basket-weaving forum" means "place for r*, useless people"
4chan is the America of the internet, the only reason it has outsized influence is because ideas were allowed to incubate.
Most memes and ideas went no where but some had a chance to multiply without getting stamped out by the censors.
As someone who was exposed to 4chan at far too young of an age, I don't buy this. There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been. Granted, I avoided that board like the plague, but cursory glances never showed me any novel ideas being formulated. Even if there is real conversation of various political ideologies, it's drowned out by a sea of kids who think it's cool to say the N word online.
4chan is unique because of its combination of scale, relative lack of moderation, and relatively high anonymity. By nature, it's a place where political radicals would be able to shitpost freely en masse. 4chan was absolutely a vehicle for platforming radical politics, but the word "shitpost" is key - the average discourse on 4chan isn't at a level where ideological formulation can happen at a meaningful scale.
Memes are the only exception. 4chan memes have, on multiple occasions, turned into widely-known (and sometimes widely-misunderstood) political imagery. That imagery routinely has no clear symbolism whatsoever, and is assigned all kinds of wacky meanings depending on you ask... which is what you'd expect from 4chan, I guess.
> There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been.
Agreed, but to be fair, /pol/ was created with the officially stated goal of acting as a containment board. And tbh, that’s exactly what it still is to this day.
4chan is the infinite racists on infinite typewriters analogy; that said, some ideas converge and crystallize and escape out of the shitposts. Greentext screenshots and images that are distributed outside of the cesspool and get mainstream appeal though e.g. Reddit.
Survivorship bias, evolutionary somethings, and curation help the shit escape 4chan's confines. I can probably word that more eloquently when my brain isn't fried.
That was Twitter. Twitter was just 4chan For Everyone. But it was a company with investors and content with political ramifications, so they changed things to suit advertisers and politicians. They changed the timeline algo. And the reply algo. And the Trending algo. And they added "Verified" accounts. And then Musk bought it.
It can be made again. But whoever does it has to learn from past mistakes.
There is no voting system by which to gauge one's popularity. There is no profile or personal brand to be crafted. There is no follower count to build. Post ranking is most-recent-reply first, and nothing more.
This model attracts all manner of idiocy and hatred, and it's much too easy for one provocateur to hijack the system. The result is that the site requires several containment zones like /b/ and /pol/.
However, the upshot of 4chan (or any imageboard, really) is the total lack of narcissistic incentive. If you stick to blue boards, consciously avoid the containment zones, and you ignore the provocateurs (big IFs, I know), 4chan hosts some remarkably eclectic discussion of the arts, science, and entertainment. It's really good at elevating things that are thought-provoking or avant garde, if only within the bounds of a polarizing and inaccessible platform.
It's the very fact that it's unmoderated that it can be unfiltered.
If you happen to get footage of a "happening" and post it on 4chan, people will notice (and call you various slurs).
If you post it anywhere else it's liable to be deleted, or worse, ignored.
Very little in human history has had the reach of those websites you're talking about, and on those users tend to be in their own bubbles. On 4chan, with its millions of users over the past couple of decades, attention is centered around a few boards.
I think you are underestimating the reach of TV before the internet.
On the downside, it does away with ethical and quality standards, in trying to maximize viewership while minimizing cost, which in turn tends to make the content objectionable anyway.
I remember TV from my childhood being just people shooting each other and screaming at each other. Advertisers didn't have any problem with that, or with monsters tearing people apart or with gangster rap.
Counterpoint, the owners and showrunners of those TV channels decide what is aired and how, so a lot of TV channels have become propaganda outlets for one side or another. Most infamous in the English speaking countries is News Corp / Rupert Murdoch, who has pushed a right-wing, anti-lgbt narrative for a long time now.
I just thought of television as something much more fragmented and localised compared to the billion and more poepie flowing through the same Facebook funnel. I'll grant you that some things in the past did transcend boundaries and gain global reach but those I counted amongst the referenced "few things."
Producers vs Consumers.
Very little?
Let me introduce you to: newspapers, radio, television, books.
Which newspaper had a similar subscriber number to Facebook?
It’s more likely that it was just one of the places that movement coalesced. Others include Reddit before they ban hammered a lot of that stuff, Twitter, and Telegram.
As for the origin of the movement I remember saying exactly this way back in 2008 after the bank bailouts:
(Paraphrasing a bit)
“People don’t realize how much trust has been lost. People want pitchforks. I don’t think they care whether the far left or the far right is handing them out.”
The far left did hand out a few, but they tended to sublimate all their anger into race and minority grievances. Their pitchforks didn’t have enough mass appeal, especially to the white working class killing themselves with opiates.
The right handed out more classical pitchforks with more mass appeal. They went for the old timey scapegoats of immigrant and minority hate and good old fashioned antisemitism (thinly veiled).
They were also the only ones who started talking about “elites.” I remember reading an actual quote on Reddit back then that stuck with me: “if we can’t destroy the financial industry from the left we’ll do it from the right.”
Americans have a short memory. We’ve already forgotten the Bush administration and how it burned a century of goodwill toward our country and a trillion dollars or two in Iraq. We’ve already forgotten how banks that imploded were rescued in such a way as to give the executives leading them a bonus and a promotion for imploding them. (The blame for that goes to both Bush and Obama for doing nothing to intervene.)
So now people are like “where did all this populist rage come from?” They blame crap like gamergate and 4chan when those were just small lightning rods for niche communities. The USA around the turn of that decade was a pile of oily rags waiting for a source of ignition.
The alt right and Trump just saw an opportunity. They didn’t create it, nor did 4chan.
I've tried to square the racial-justice-amorality of the "someone fck sht up, I don't care who" crowd with the racist sources of many of their grievances (as someone who can't afford such extravagant feelings). The roots of so many of our issues with abuse of the downtrodden, the impunity of the elite, the distrust of populist-minded institutions, the misplaced trust in monsters who whisper sweet words, etc., come from our history of racialized classism.
I don't know how you convey to such people how these problems don't get solved without rectifying the racist underpinnings - that "that's not okay" only gets teeth when "that's okay because it only happens to 'those' people" is no longer accepted. Only then do you see a substantial decrease in face-eating leopards.
Another issue is that class-based inter-racial cooperation was actively persecuted and propgagandized against by the government. Fred Hampton was an American activist who was building a coalition across racial divides. The FBI launched an entire political campaign to sow dissent against him specifically and, when that wasn't working, the police shot him in his bed.
Yep, and I think that's why so many folks jumped from Bernie to Trump during/after the primaries. They couldn't be given a fair chance for peaceful change so they went for the other change option.
The MLK quote is "a riot is the language of the unheard", and the full context is rich:
> And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
The last point in particular has proven quite prescient to our current moment.
> In some ways America’s short memory is a strength. It keeps us from getting caught up in stupid ancient conflicts like the Middle East. America tends to at least mostly move on. But it also means we walk around in this perpetual fugue state not understanding why anything is happening.
I recently heard that depressed people are unable to habituate to things. I think I might be very depressed because I was never able to accept the increasing inequality, pointless wars against "terror" (how do you ever win a war against an emotion/concept?), surveillance/ad-driven capitalism, and environmental degradation. I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills.
I mean from looking back as a non participant in either (way too young to even care), it seems like occupy Wallstreet and the alt right pretty much pretty much had a similar message, some people have used money and power to make the US far more unbalanced and it's grinding people down. So 2008 seems a good benchmark
Before BLM, OWS was hamstrung by the introduction of the Progressive Stack, ensuring that they could not effectively organize or even remain coherent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack
> To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch.
I disagree. Anonymous was an substantial movement.
4chan has long existed before the concept of facebook and to compare 4chan to the new trends of the likes such as facebook or reddit when 4chan is it's own, you can't.
Reddit and Facebook have all been designed to cater to the masses; 4chan not so.
To rule out that 4chan has never been influential is incorrect.
4chan was founded about 5 months before Facebook and about 2 years before reddit. 2ch and Something Awful are quite a bit older, but it's debatable how much of the cultural DNA of each transferred over.
4chan is definitely old internet, it reminds me of IRC, completely unmonetizable.
No, there was a concerted effort to radicalize the site.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...
My serious but unsubstantiated suspicion is that this was part of a neoconservative campaign, which included the likes of GamerGate, all in the interests of defanging and commodifying observant, critically-minded, tech-savvy young people (mostly men, mostly white) who otherwise would have found themselves on the progressive end of the political spectrum (as per their class affinity).
If you ask many of them, they will tell you that they were "red-pilled" after Occupy Wall Street so spooked the establishment that "wokism" was deployed to split the bottom 3 wealth quintiles and pit them against each other. My take is that the premise is correct (OWS did indeed push the elite to take class solidarity as a serious threat in a way that they hadn't previously), but that the conclusion is wrong. Rather, "red-pilling" was the intended remedy, and "meme magic" was the vector.
Case-in-point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905726 and parent.
Stormfront targeted 4chan because the "not your personal army" crew could be easily turned into whatever the white supremacists wanted.
All you had to do was say "this will offend people" and 4chan rushed off to do exactly that, over and over.
4chan was originally just a contest to show how much something doesn't bother them, because they were still competing with each other like a clique of schoolkids, and any feelings were viewed as weakness.
Also, 4chan spawned QAnon. That was absolutely "starting a movement".
> To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch.
As far as the alt-right goes, this is true, but they're definitely responsible for Pizzagate and QAnon. One might consider those the genesis of a "post alt-right" movement but it might also be too soon to tell.
You have it backwards. The alt-right didn't come out of 4chan. It came in and displaced the existing culture. The term 'election tourist' (referring to the 2016 US Presidential elections) is still a common pejorative.
You got a lot of great responses to your observations around 4chan, partly debating whether it should be to blame for the growth of the alt-right. I think it boils down to one simple thing: 4chan was unfettered. Anyone could go there and do anything - learn to code, coordinate a LOIC attack, draft an Anonymous army, or brew an ultra-conservative movement. Those things will happen in places where there aren’t guards in place. The fewer of those places there are, the slower things on the fringe will develop. If an open forum is shut down, these things find new places to grow. But they won’t stop.
Dale Beran's It Came From Something Awful is a good history of the evolution of the scene from edgelords to alt right.
I agree, actually most of my memories of that time are of pretty horrible sights online too. Shock gore sites, snuff films, etc. way more often than today
It's hard to take anyone who uses the term "alt-right" seriously and without irony as a legitimate label in 2024.
2016 called—they want their guilt-by-association blanket branding for any and all thought outside of what the established media corporations and entrenched political class consider to be acceptable political thought back.
The term "alt-right" contains the more or less the same legitimacy and valence as the term "libtard"—except, you see pundits use it in headlines in mainstream publications, so you think it's more acceptable and less of a nonsense blanket term designed to conveniently silo anything that exists outside of a general sphere of acceptable thought together so as to encourage political tribalism and prevent critical thinking.
The term "alternative right" was coined by its own members to describe themselves, starting with Richard Spencer's "The Alternative Right".
Is everyone—or even most of everyone—tarred by the "alt-right" label a Richard Spencer follower/supporter/endorser? If not, then would they self-describe at "alt-right", still, in 2024? If not, then why would the term apply to them?
Whatever the intent of the phrase "I see that the alt-right came out of 4chan" was—whether it was intended to mean "the alt-right, which is still a prevailing thing thing that exists today, came out of 4chan", or "the alt-right, which is a now-defunct term/ideology/movement, came out of 4chan"—it's incorrect either way.
And I'm well aware that "you" (plural) have all sorts of new blanket terms to tar disconnected groups of people and their thoughts with, so as to lump them together, so as to subdue any kind of thinking that exists outside of that prescribed by corporate media and the entrenched political class, by equating any dissident thought or position with that of the most vulgar individuals within the meta-group "you" (plural) created, by associating disparate individuals and small groups of people together using an emotionally-loaded label—regardless of whether or not its constituents agree with said labeling, which they don't have any say in, of course, because "you" (plural) have the in-group consensus of the general public on your side, which is informed top-down by the corporate media and entrenched political class.
But it's nevertheless interesting and amusing both that the "stickiest" one is—still to this day—one that was coined by an ultimately exceedingly minor and uninfluential figure, nearly a decade ago now, and that it's still wielded to this day by conformists with exceedingly simple-minded worldviews who see no problem boiling things down to "people who uncritically accept the social consensus" ("good people") and "people who are willing to entertain any sort of thought outside of the social consensus" ("bad people"—"alt-right", or whatever new terms "you" (plural) have concocted).
At least it's kind of nice to see that you tacitly admit to pursuing such a goal, in continuing to invent new terms for the same tired purpose.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Mine will always be https://picard.ytmnd.com/
Same vein: https://rikerlean.ytmnd.com
This variation on the Vader meme still makes me laugh
https://vaderfortune.ytmnd.com
My favourite: https://krullraves.ytmnd.com/
Still know the URL by heart.
Might be worth chasing up a decent quality version of Simon Pegg | Edgar Wright's Spaced S01E06 Epiphanies club scene - it's only for UK hard core ravers.
Didn't find a lot of connection between my link and that, but it was a great watch nevertheless.
https://lukecompany.ytmnd.com/
Edit: Two more personal favorites from back in the day:
https://vaderholidayspecial.ytmnd.com/
https://bondfreaksout.ytmnd.com/
Free cow was excellent
I love that after I don't even know how many years I can still find excellent ytmnds that I didn't know about
For those as confused as I was, turn the volume up.
Thank you!
https://catchthatdruid.ytmnd.com