Got the business book done, time to move onto the people of our lovely community!
This book is going to guide the reader through where to find yoyos, and all the different ways there are to “be” a yoyoer.
I’m looking for all kinds of stories an anecdotes, but particularily I’m looking for why you choose the YYE forum for your yoyo interaction needs.
Please take a minute to have a look at this form and consider sharing. https://forms.gle/G2epx2xVqrjrnyF17
Well I am super biased, but the TL; DR is I wanted access to the full history (2010 onward) and longer form thoughtful discussion made of paragraphs and organized into distinct topics … rather than the little tiny jumbled together thought snippets you tend to see on Reddit and Facebook.
I’m so incredibly sad that I can’t go back to TheYo. People there helped me get through some tough times without even realizing it.
And whenever possible I bought from TheYo over other places because Mike was the best. I didn’t interact with him much but I cried when he passed because I knew he was responsible for cultivating a place that meant so much to so many people.
If you haven’t already I’d love if you could elaborate on that and enter it in the form. It sounds like there is a story there. Even if it’s 4 or 5 more sentences of detail.
Share the same feelings Durfee. It was a special place and Mike’s presence made it so. His family never understood that when they took on running the site. They thought he just had an online store with a forum to drive business there and he just sat back and collected the money.
I never met him in person, but he was a special guy. Enjoyed talking with him on the phone. My daughter and her husband went to Maui and connected with him. He and taurbaby showed them a good time while they were there. I appreciate that immensely.
I am on YYE for similar reasons. Andre is a great guy and knows his stuff. The people here are good and many of them came here from the forums that were previously popular but no longer exist. Sadly many have moved on. Miss them.
I’ll ask you to figure my ignorance, I don’t know who Mike is. I started yoyoing in 2009 and missed out on TheYo (Although I’ve heard a lot about it). Anyone willing to fill me in?
Mike Attanasio, otherwise known as YoMike was the owner of TheYoStore.com and TheYo.com forum (both now defunct). He died in 2010. The store/forum was started around 2001 or 2002. Mike was very active on the forum interacting regularly with members both online and via telephone. There were a relatively large number of active members early on, like the other competing stores/forums. There were a lot of close relationships developed on the forum with some very active discussions well into the nite. The forum categories were very similar to what we have currently on YYE. Pretty much the same across all of the forums at the time. Customization and custom paint jobs were popular topics, at least on TheYo. In the later years participation started to drop off across all of the forums at the time. After Mike died Theyo limped along for a few more years. As I noted above, his family made an attempt to keep it all going after he died but failed miserably. They had no clue that his involvement was a significant part of the equation. The store and forum were shut down in December 2017.
Thank you so much! Would you mind terribly putting that into the form somewhere? I’ll lose track of it here and I want to make sure it’s included in the book.
