User:Atrahasis
Atrahasis was a controversial YTMND user. He first arrived at YTMND in January 2006 and registered in April 2006. He became known for his criticism of the way YTMND is run, such as a lack of social communication, increasing elitism, the dominance of fads, and front page socialism. He advocated the abolishment of ratings, featured users, and competition in the front page.
In late December 2007, he deleted his own account in disgust. He has since moved on to better things, which include coming back to edit his YTMND Wiki page.
Atrahasis's crazy theories
Sometime back in January 2006, I discovered a fascinating idea: a form of expression that takes an image, puts it to repeating sound, and puts zooming text on top of it. For the next several months I sought to know and understand this entity, and watch it go down the toilet. These are my conclusions.
Why is YTMND going to hell? Because its dialogue is broken.
YTMND is a broken community that is incapable of communicating with itself as a whole due to a lack of forums so it must use a dysfunctional front page based on senseless competition as a means of dialogue.
When a large community wants to be social on the internet, they usually use forums. But YTMND doesn't have usable forums, so the masses must find another way to be known and to socialize on YTMND, the front page. The front page has become the forums of YTMND; Sites have become topics, comment sections have become threads. It should be obvious what a disaster that is. This is why there is so much fad garbage being posted. I think the reason a lot of crap (such as fad compilations, epic manuever, etc.) is created is because the creators want to feel like they are participating. If YTMND was based on forums, becoming a part of the community would mean becoming one of the main posters. But YTMND is based on the front page, so to feel recognized, or to get your point across, you have to make a site. This is the reason there are so many screenshot sites, if we had forums, a user would just make a topic with a url to whatever he found. But since that can't be done, the user must create a shitty screenshot site to show what he found. Now a little competition is healthy (very small amounts, like an occasional contest), but when you reach levels of competition such as that on the front page, things break down. Basically, the Recently Created/U&C system is like sperm trying to fertilize an egg. Many will go for it, few will make it, and the rest will die. And when your goal in this life and death struggle is to become recognized (u&c), it begs the question: Why the fuck would you submit an original and decent site that has a 30-40% chance of making u&c, when you could submit an epic maneuver with a 70-80% chance of making it?
YTMND has jumped the shark
Why has YTMND become less and less funny every day? This is why YTMND needs to ask itself, "where does it end?". Why must we continually produce mass amounts of garbage? Why can't we be happy with what we have? 90% of YTMND is sites that no one has ever seen and users that no one has ever heard of.
When I first came to YTMND in January, I never looked at the front page. What I did is I would search for topics that interested me (things that I liked, or liked to see made fun of), to see what the people here have done with it. I found a lot of good stuff that way. Now, almost every time I get a good laugh from YTMND, it's from searching the archives. There is so much rotting away in the abyss that it's sad to see all these users sit around on the front page complaining that YTMND isn't funny anymore.
What do we do about this? Creating forums would help, but it won't solve everything. These forums have to be HUGE, to support a community of tens of thousands. That won't be enough, because everyone is used to the front page. That's why the front page SHOULD BE DESTROYED. End site creation, tear down the entire front page, and replace it with a giant search engine. This is necessary for the transition to the forums, it is only temporary. After a short time, the front page can be restored, however the new front page should not contain anything except Sponsored, Recently Created, and Random. No Top Viewed, no Most Voted, and absolutely no Up & Coming. I think if new people came here and found an inactive, non-competitive front page whose main feature is the search feature, and very active forums associated with it, they'd rather post on the forums than make sites. That would leave the front page to users that make sites just for the hell of it, instead of for a feeling of participation.
