YTMND (fictional)/Tropes


 * AstroTurf: Often used as a means of trolling; for example, Canadian YTMNDers managed to get “#PedoConvoy”, “#HumanTraffickingConvoy”, and “#ControlledOpposition” trending on Twitter around the time of the “Freedom Convoy” anti-vaxx protest. Both the left and the right are targeted.
 * Colbert Bump: SiIvaGunner experienced a massive boom in popularity after that channel’s internal in-jokes and memes started spreading to YTMND. To the point where the YouTube commenters on Siiva’s channel got annoyed with the Newbie Boom and the various “Like if you came here from YTMND” comments.
 * Flanderization: With the revival of the site from near-dormancy after the mobile apps were released in the early New Tens, several people started making new YTMNDs, and seized on existing fads like Moon Man. In this process, Moon Man was Flanderized from a racist asshole whose motivations are based on outdated views towards minorities, to an asshole in general who does mean things just to piss people off. Though some users think that this is actually an improvement. The original racist version of Moon Man is still used on sites like VidLii and BitChute, in a series of parody music videos.
 * Follow the Leader: A lot of sites have popped up that imitate YTMND’s elements (looping videos or GIF/audio combos and a 5-star rating system with comments), especially since the code behind the original site, “libytmnd”, was released as open-source in 2013.
 * Friendly Fandoms:
 * YTMNDers and Vinesauce fans get along well. It helps that YTMND has embraced a lot of the Vinesauce fandom’s memes. The minor “Rootspread” meme within the Vinesauce fandom originated as part of the “PTKFGS” fad on YTMND.
 * YTMNDers also get along well with SiIvaGunner fans; that fandom has a lot of overlap with Vinesauce itself, especially the “Grand Dad 7” meme/fad.
 * YTMND and Niconico share a lot of users and memes/fads.
 * Germans Love David Hasselhoff: In the period from 2007-11 between the “Golden Age” and “Silver Age”, in the first few years of Argosy ownership (known as the “Dark Age” due to YouTube becoming popular as a meme site, coinciding with the “spadinner” era of YouTube Poop, therefore siphoning users from YTMND), most of the site’s traffic came from Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Memes from Nico Nico Douga often became popular “fads” on YTMND during that period, and vice-versa. It helps that most of the updates made to the site during this “Dark Age” pertained to the addition of support for non-English languages and Unicode character sets. The site is still popular in these countries, even after the Newbie Boom of Western users in 2011.
 * Newbie Boom: One of these has been ongoing since the mobile apps were released in 2011, often known as the “Silver Age of YTMND”.
 * No Plot? No Problem!: Most YTMNDs are simple meme sites that have no plot. But this is sometimes inverted, for example with “LORETMND” sites.
 * Spiritual Successor: The culture of YTMND more recently is quite similar to that of 4chan before /pol/ was a thing. “Operation ClosedSea” (the OpenSea DDOS attack of January 2022) is quite similar to “Operation Chanology” and various other /b/ “operations”, being a massive Internet Counterattack on an unpopular platform.