You’ll commonly hear the “YTPMV/otomad community” discussed or cited as a singular, meaningful entity. In the same way that someone would say “YTPMV is dying”, they may also put everyone who makes such videos under the same umbrella. I think this can often lead to inaccurate assumptions or expectations regarding what it is, and how to engage with it.
If we consider YTPMVs and Otomads to be an art form rather than a genre, talks about a “YTPMV community” make as much sense as talks about a “drawing community”: sure, you could put everyone who regularly touches a pencil in this broad category, but you’d get very little insights from that. Statements like “the drawing community thinks that XXX” would raise a red flag because we intuitively understand it to not be applicable as a whole. While there are certain accepted/frowned-upon behaviors, they’d be more easily mapped to common human virtues. The “drawing community” gets angry when someone traces over other works and monetizes them because it’s deceitful, not because of some other arbitrary rule endemic to it. Stances that actually ARE endemic to said community will be much less black and white, making assertions like “the drawing community hates using kneaded erasers” impossible.
I’m not implying that “there is no such thing as a drawing/YTPMV community” or anything like that. What I’m saying is instead that such a label is of little use other than to just designate “everyone who makes YTPMV”:
- The YTPMV community times and pitches samples to the beat of a song to remix it;
- The YTPMV community can use software like Vegas Pro, Reaper, FL Studio… for making audio;
But once you try to get more specific
- The YTPMV community
HATES fake samples(<- There are enough people who like them in the community for this statement to become an over-generalization).
As we can see, the term still has its uses, it lets you say stuff like “I first found out about the YTPMV community when…”, but I think it can also create a lot of wrong assumptions.
Let’s talk about YTPMV discord servers for example. There is a certain dynamic in which newcomers may at first join large public YTPMV servers, and over time, slowly move to more private spaces. There are a whole lot of those private servers, usually not exceeding 20 active members, and their existence is occasionally decried as a symptom of elitism in the community. It’s a pervasive feeling that people may have that “people from this little clique think they’re too god for public servers”, but from what I’ve experienced, raw skill was rarely the deciding factor for inviting someone, it was more often just a feeling of “this guy could be nice to talk to”.
A server that’s solely based off the idea of being a “YTPMV hub” should thus be treated as a town center. You shouldn’t expect too much warmth from a passerby, nor should you overshare with them (and you certainly wouldn’t leave copies of the keys to your collab server local hangout right on the sidewalk). YTPMV as an art form has a small community, but that’s still a lot of people, with a very wide diversity of opinions, you can’t expect to just click with everyone you walk past when doing groceries.
Alternatively, you should (hopefully) be able to walk past someone you don’t like on the street without immediately jumping them. The YTPMV community has a very rich and tumultuous history, so a public server is bound to, at some point, have people who just hate each others’ guts. Which is another reason to try to set the proper expectations for such a place. Discord and the internet make this harder because they distort interpersonal interactions, and with text being the primary form of communication, you’ll naturally “exist” more loudly than in real-life public spaces, even if someone blocks or mutes you, they’ll know when you talk, and they’ll see who responds to you.
I think that the small size of the community creates the false expectation that people in a YTPMV server should be a tight-knit group. I don’t think this is realistic though: there is very little to “bond over”, YTPMV has a lot of diversity in its styles/BGMs/sources and trends. So in a public YTPMV server, channels for sharing works may just turn into a video feed where most people don’t care about most of what’s posted (unless they’re the ones doing most of the posting). In these servers, you’ll find people very into video games, people who like moe anime, people exclusively into Gachi, etc… so you probably won’t have the easiest time finding people with similar interests (be it YTPMV related or not) by just being yourself.
And this is why these smaller private servers are a thing, they’re not here to create a sense of elitism, but are just natural bubbles that form within people that happened to click with (or are able to tolerate) each other. These are the kind of spaces were people are more comfortable being themselves, where they can discuss the things they have in common regarding ytpmv and other hobbies.
In my ideal world, there wouldn’t be a need to have public YTPMV servers in the first place. Being in-the-know about what happens would be addressed by having actually functional feeds and tagging systems provided by the content-hosting platforms. And a newcomer would be able to know everything they need to get started from the public-facing internet alone.
Thanks for reading through those unorganized ramblings of mine, I thought this was something worth writing about as I reflected on experiences I had and mistakes I made when moderating the Re:sample server. If you want a more concise tldr of what I think (as of writing this on Friday, November 8th, 2025):
- “The YTPMV Community”/“YTPMVers” are too generic for anything other than broad statements or labelling;
- Public YTPMV servers should be treated like the town center, don’t be too personal in those places;
- Even though Discord, by design, seems to encourage you to do so
- (as a side note) they’re a town center where everything is recorded, I can’t overstate how much better it is to not say much rather than to overshare;
- You won’t bond over just the concept of YTPMV, that would be like saying two people who draw are sure to get along.