You're the Man Now Dog might actually not be dead. Site creator Max Goldberg says his old-school online meme generator was somehow accidentally deleted.

"YTMND has suffered a catastrophic failure," reads a post on the site. "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 didn't elaborate on what caused the failure. But he told Motherboard the hardware supporting the website's database was about eight years old and mistakenly got wiped.

Goldberg himself wasn't even aware the site was offline until Wednesday when the media began reporting on it. "I woke up and had like 25 emails and a bunch of texts talking about YTMND being down and I had no idea," he said on a Discord channel he's established to speak with the site's fans.

Goldberg originally started YTMND as part of an online joke. In 2001, he paired a looping sound clip of actor Sean Connery uttering the line "You're the man now, dog!" over images of the Hollywood star on a webpage. In 2004, he started YTMND.com, which let anyone pair audio clips with images for hilarious results.

The site helped pave the way for a whole collection of early internet memes. At its height, YTMND was attracting millions of visitors per month. But according to Goldberg, the site has been largely dead now for almost a decade. He's now debating whether it's worth resurrecting the platform.

"The problem is I don't want to do the amount of work to 'reboot' YTMND, because monetizing it is virtually impossible," he said on Discord. According to Motherboard, Google no longer allows Goldberg to serve the search giant's online ads over the site due to some offensive content that was flagged on YTMND back in 2012.

As a result, for the past five years, Goldberg has paid about $200 a month out of his own pocket to keep the site up. Although he's still weighing YTMND's fate, Goldberg has indicated that his meme-generating platform might live on as an archive. "Maybe I can rebuild the site as a read-only memorial which uses archive.org for hosting," he said on Discord.

In the meantime, fans of the site can view YTMND's content over saved pages on the Internet Archive and through its Wayback Machine.

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