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To be honest I think the 1-to-5 system is stupid. People want to give their own vote as much weight as possible, so the logical thing to do is "split voting" with 1's and 5's. Youtube, Reddit, and other popular sites realized this so they went from numerical ratings to binary vote +/- systems.

Of course, max doesn't exactly stay ahead of the curve. In fact, the downfall of YTMND can be attributed to max failing to stay ahead of the curve.

Back in early 2005, max could have realized that the advent of home broadband meant his dialup-friendly gif/mp3 host was about to be left in the dust. People were ready for a full-motion video host, and during that crucial moment, YTMND was the frontrunner for multimedia hosting. If you think about it, YTMND had already gotten over the biggest hill - people knew about it.

The time was right to upgrade. The phrase "Buy low; sell high" couldn't have applied more. The dot-com crash of the early 00's was like the video game crash of '83...the demand wasn't gone, but skittish short-sighted investors thought it was just a bubble that had popped until Nintendo swooped in '85 and took an unsuspecting market by storm. It was the exact same situation in '05: everyone thought the dot-com market had crashed, but casual internet users had more bandwidth than ever before, and they wanted a simple web-based video hosting service instead of dicey file-sharing networks.

YTMND would have been perfect, the recognition was there, max had arguably the biggest corner on the web multimedia market, his traffic was soaring and hardware prices were at an all time low. The opportunity was there; max sat on his rear end because of some pretentious artsy-fartsy desire to cling to the format of Image, Sound, Text. In 2006, then-little-known website "Youtube" sold for $1.6 billion.

A lot of us look back at opportunities we missed and laugh...max, do you cry?