Musings of Dan McComas, Founder and CEO here at Imzy!
What's your vision for Imzy being set apart from other forums?
Dan,
In your vision, what is it about imzy that sets it apart from other forums like Reddit or Facebook? What would be the compelling reason to encourage people to sign up for an imzy account?




First, I’d prefer to just speak about what we are doing and not go into exact comparisons between us and any other company. That being said, the one comparison I will make is that our primary focus is community. There are a few companies out there focusing on community as well, but they are not listed in your examples and you have probably never heard of them.
Why is this important?
It is critical that the incentives of any government-like leadership be well aligned with any communities it governs in order for the communities to be healthy. I think if you look at any collapse of an online community, be it large or small, in many of the cases the reason can be traced back to leadership on some level not having the same goals as the community. These two things simply cannot be different. No community will ever be successful if they have misaligned goals. It may be a slow death, but it will be a death.
OK, that makes sense, but what does it mean in practice? We like to think about our focus and priorities in terms of this diagram.
There are a few areas we have to solve to achieve this lofty goal.
This list is in order. It’s important to note that. If we were to try to do all 4 things at once we would have a couple big problems:
The way we have chosen to solve the problem is to work towards a baseline that is better than any competitive product while building the initial seed of community. This allows us to really test and improve our technology while learning enough to make more informed discussions around the ultimate implementations of our developer platform and economic systems. We feel we are about 2 weeks away from reaching a baseline we are happy with so that we can turn our focus to innovation.
If you have been following the press written about us, you notice that nowhere in my above writing have I mentioned being nicer gentler or kinder than whatever other social media platform might be. This simply is not something we spend a lot of time focusing on, but it is the story that the media wants to tell because it brings a point of contention between us and reddit and gets them more page views.
What we do think is important is that when a group of people come together with the intention of creating a large group of internet citizens that they think properly about how to create civil interaction. The internet has taken a nasty turn over the past decade and I know from personal experience that most of these people who seem terrible online aren’t that way IRL. How do I know this? I was able to meet many of them in person over the past 6 years. So, let’s just fucking change that! Let’s say we’re going to be civil and let’s be civil. We can argue passionately, we can disagree, but that doesn’t mean we have to delve into what you often see on other platforms. This may be my idealistic side speaking, but I think we can help here and we’re putting together a network of other companies who also want to help out.
I think the only thing I’ve neglected to mention here is identity. It’s a big party of our system and we are still trying to figure out how to really surface it in an understandable way. But here is my description of why our approach to identity is important:
We have created a system where your identity is a contract between you and the community you are participating in. If a community wants only anonymous participation, that’s fine! If a community wants pseudo anonymous AND anonymous participation, cool beans! And coming soon, if a community wants real name participation, that’s fine as well. The internet has fundamentally changed identity and no platform has caught up yet. All of these types of identities (and more) are important and need to be supported. You wonder why kids have stopped using Facebook? Identity is a big part of it.
So, of course this ended up being really long but a hard question deserves a full response. A lot of the concepts here are purposefully conceptual. Over the coming weeks and months you will see a lot of these things come to fruition and they will be more understandable. They are conceptual mainly because we wanted to work with actual communities before we built some of them.
Thank you for being here, I hope you will invite your friends, start communities and participate in others communities. We have something really special started here but need everyone’s help!
This comment needs to be its own post on /dan.
Love the response, and love that you are so open with us on your intent.
Going to wait till I get home to type out the rest of my reply to this as over the last few weeks I've had a change in opinion on how to best use Imzy going forward, and would like to share it.
This is very illuminating. Thanks for taking the time to explain this, Dan!
This is exciting.
I have mixed emotions about the outline you set forth. I guess in some respects I can see where anonymity vs identity has its merits. If you have a "party" forum then sure, let's all be anonymous and join the fun. While the photography critique forum may wish to have identity only. This makes me have second thoughts about joining a forum where anonymity is allowed. Too many people like to throw insult grenades without any resource for their actions. And if they're not this way in real life, why should they be allowed to do this online? Perhaps I need to be more aware of which forums allow anonymous access. But since we're all using handles anyway, aren't we already anonymous?
As for civil interactions, I'd be curious how this is going to be handled. Are community leaders going to be the judge as to what is civil and what it not? This may be where the anonymity issue fall in. If someone has an "identity", then they have ownership and a reputation. I would be more cautious of making bad remarks if my reputation were at steak.
The "action" portion is a little fuzzy to me. I guess if I create a "lets feed the turtles" forum, then we can join, connect, and then organize an action by going out and feeding turtles. Otherwise, the only action I'm doing would be replying to posts. I'm also guessing that the action may come later when developers can use the APIs to develop custom actions; play a game, purchase an item, feed a turtle...
Interesting statement about how the press was making imzy sound...like a decent safe haven away from the negativity of other forums. This is what I was hoping for which is why I was so eager to join imzy. But your statement makes it sound otherwise. So will I still run into the same tripe that I find in other online communities? Perhaps so. Will I still have to weed my way through posts that contain offensive language? I guess so. I'm not looking for the Disney/Christian online community, but I would like to find a community that my whole family can visit without having to censor what they may read and where I can carry on a mature discussion without having people respond with vulgar superlatives.
Thanks for the insight you've given us. Best of fortune with imzy.
I'll answer this after I've had my coffee and am fully awake!
That's a very thorough piece Dan and it's clear you personally have a vision for Imzy in your own mind. I'm still unclear how you intend it to be different from competing products though, (and I'm mainly referencing Reddit here), apart from the few technical aspects like identity-vs-anonymous and up votes only. These other sites also have communities with leaders and influencers. Yes Reddit, (and other soc-med), can be a cesspit of abuse and stupidity, but that is a function of the participants, not the product. Well moderated sites and subs don't have the same issues, or to the same extent.
I've come to Imzy to try and find a higher level of discourse, while still retaining room to disagree. If Imzy takes off with the teen/tween groups what's going to prevent it from just dropping into the same cess pit of name calling and inanity? Like /u/landfall I'm not here for the 'Disney Chanel Reddit', but equally I'm not sure why I should choose Imzy over other platforms? I always try to answer "what will success look like?", and I don't know that for Imzy. You use a lot of Silicon Valley start-up language in your descriptors; can you give us the human version?
I congratulate you and your team for making the effort, and I hope you make a success of it, regardless of whether I personally take that journey with you or not. Thanks Dan.
"Spot on" toomanypirates. Ideally imzy would fall between the Reddit and LinkedIn. Lively discussion on a professional level. Maybe not "professional", but at least more mature and civil. I'm guessing that's the moderators job and forums rule set.