YTMND May Have Been Shut Down Accidentally

Earlier this Monday, multiple users confirmed that they are unable to access You’re the Man Now Dog site. Fans were sure that the site has been permanently shut down as it has been turned into a museum rather than a meme site. It was also convincing since the man behind the meme site has officially stopped handling the site 5 years ago.

It turns out that Max Goldberg did not even know that the site was down until media began to report it. It was a ‘catastrophic failure’ stemming from accidental data wiping, although it wasn’t clear how exactly that happened.

Goldberg was surprised and expressed it on his Discord channel, “I woke up and had like 25 emails and a bunch of texts talking about YTMND being down and I had no idea.”

YTMND started as a joke when Max Goldberg paired tiled pictures of Sean Connery and paired it with a looping line of his from “Finding Fosterer”. It was funny and quickly became viral. Three years later, Goldberg started his site, YTMND, where people share similar looping gifs.

However, Goldberg became tired of keeping orders in his site. While he has beautiful memories of it, Goldberg hated the cancerous content that occasionally pops up. He left the office for good 10 years later and the site has shrunk in popularity with platforms like Giphy and 9gag taking over.

The 8-year-old hardware that was supposed to store the site’s data was accidentally wiped out. And now, Goldberg is contemplating whether it’s worth resurrecting the platform or not. He’s also currently battling with health issues. Due to flagged content in YTMND back in 2012, the site is unable to be monetized from Google ads.

Because of that, Goldberg has been spending $200 every month to keep the site alive.

“Whether or not the site will ever be back is still undecided. I am actively working on data recovery, but who really knows what the future holds.”

Goldberg luckily backed up his data, so you can still view the content through Internet Archive or Way Back Machine.