Give feedback about Imzy! Let us know what you love and what you want to see made better. Also bug reports & questions.
Recommendation sent to my notifications?

Why am I being sent a recommendation through a notification? I don't mind the ones placed in the main feed, but, this type seems intrusive to me.




I also think that certain communities may not want their community pushed that way.
Agreed!
It's a new feature. We're looking into adding a specific preference for this notification type.
Thanks for this feedback!
Can I ask what the recommendation is based on? I got one for functional programming, and I'm not even sure what that is, haha.
We randomly select a large handful of your current communities and look at where the members of those communities also belong. The most popular community based on those members wins.
So, if you're in /FluffyDogs and tons of fellow /FluffyDogs members are also in /Bedrunken, which you haven't joined, we might recommend that
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We're looking to give people more options, which is why we're adding a preference for the notification type.
Oh, cool! Thanks for the insight
I suggest that you just show the algorithm, as it were. Show me that people in my communities are heading in X, Y, Z directions. Don't just drop a plug in my stream.
Personally, I avoid popular spots. Popularity is a negative in my books. I decided against joining the Let's Have Coffee bunch for that very reason. Popular places are much harder to sort seed from chaff.
So if you want to send me recommendations, look at individual posts I've liked, and tell me something I don't know about the aggregate.
@Backfeeder, regarding the why part, the reason this got added is that on average users are only joining like 6 communities. Our numbers show that people have a far better experience and are far more likely to stick around if they're members of more communities.
So we're experimenting with different sorts of ways to improve things, and this is one of those experiments. I totally get the criticisms though, and appreciate folks telling us their opinions. We legit will take this stuff into consideration.
The main feed gets overwhelming the more communities you join. It makes sense to not join many.
How many do you find overwhelming? That isn't an issue the vast majority of users have yet experienced, so I'm interested to know about how many you joined.
Different person here, but I've dropped a couple comms that made my feed faster than I wanted.
I've joined 20 comms and I find it hard to keep up, and most of those are so dead that they only see a post every few weeks.
Our numbers show that people have a far better experience and are far more likely to stick around if they're members of more communities.
I'm wondering if you aren't mixing up cause and effect.
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Fair point, Anon :)
Yeah I totally agree. This was only set to run like once every 5 days I think, but is currently turned off. We'll be discussing it in the office on Monday.
Most of the current recommendations for communities give me a reaction somewhere between second hand embarrassment and minor annoyance.
Getting unasked for community recs in my main feed is slightly annoying because the feed is already slow. It's like being subjected to internal ads.
Getting unasked for community recs in a notification is several steps worse. Seeing the red notification signal makes me think that there's something I need to prioritize and respond to (maybe somebody has @ -ed me, or maybe one of my communities has an issue) and it artificially forces me to check it. It's like connecting my telephone ringer to the building's fire alarm to be sure I notice it.
Signed, smallbrownfrog
Agreed, got one of these today. One of the things I like about imzy is that the notifications are actually things I care about. This, I do not care about. I hope there is/will be an opt-out function.
Agreed. I am not fond of it. I was amused rather than annoyed at Imzy telling me to check out Healthy Sexuality, but it does read a bit weird.
I just got my first rec notification, and you can count me as another Do Not Want. Recs feel really out of place in the notifications, and the experience of "Oh! Someone's replied to something I said! ...no, it's just an automated ad for a comm I'm not interested in" was unpleasant.
While we're on the subject, I'd like to also add my voice in support of the idea that all comm recommendations, in whatever part of the site, should give each user an option to stop receiving them.
Yes, they do feel like "automated ads." It's weird because Imzy is technically add-free, but it feels like ads are everywhere.
Yeah personally I'm not a fan of it, but it also doesn't bother me.
I agree with OP, I've just had a notification about joining the Polls community. Don't know why I was selected for that plug, and am thinking thoughts about secret profiling.
This is what I said earlier:
Yeah, saw that, and have replied to it down thread. Thanks for the re-post here though.