A community for leaders on the Imzy platform.
Just wondering, how will imzy differ from reddit?
I understand voat.co was created because reddit toned down or eliminated on the hate communities and voat is supposed to be all about free speach. But what about imzy? I joined because it's supposed to be all about a nice community but if/when it gets popular over time I feel that we will get the same quality of comments of reddit, which is a hit or miss with anything that involves anonymous users. The best communities I've seen and use is probably quora and medium, and somehow they've been able to have really high quality answers and comments from their userbase.




Hey! Welcome to Imzy! Sorry for the REALLY long post below:
In response to your question about how we'll keep things civil as we scale:
The most important thing we're doing is setting the right tone from the very beginning to make sure Imzy is welcoming and diverse. We have a focus on creating really healthy communities, and oddly enough, there actually aren't any platforms out there that were really built with community in mind, first and foremost. Most sites and apps are built more for one-to-one interactions, or to just share content. And community has evolved more accidentally through those platforms, and often not in the way that actually makes the most sense for the members. So we're thinking about everything we're doing from a different direction.
By purposely cultivating communities who bring different perspectives and backgrounds with them, we’re building an environment where anyone can feel and speak their opinions from all sides of the discussion with civility. Imzy has built in strong community policies from day one, and by clearly stating what is and isn’t okay, it’s then possible to create a standard of behavior and consistently enforce that from the very beginning.
This may sound pretty simplistic, but it's really the most important part of what we're doing. Obviously, these policies and standards are supported by a LOT of features we’ve built to empower you guys and community leaders to manage your own privacy and safety, get help whenever you need it, and for us to mange problems as they arise and before they become truly problematic. And we still have a lot more that we're planning on adding as we scale. But without that standard to lay the foundation, most tools don't matter. The people make up the community and determine its success, and that's much more about what they choose to DO to create a better Internet than about any of the ways we can prevent or stop the things we don't want people to do.
When you create a standard from day 1, you're able to enforce it so that no issue is able to grow into something insurmountable that can take over or destroy your platform, and when you make your goals known, people who want to help achieve that vision will flock to and support it.
So, really, the biggest way that we'll keep this is simply by focusing on it from the very beginning. That may sound boring, but that's honestly the most important part. All the tools we build are just dressing and little pieces that strengthen those standards we've created from the beginning.
To answer the other part of your question, about how we're different from Reddit:
Imzy came about based on a lot of collective observations and experiences many of us have had at Reddit, Twitter, and just through using and being a part of the many other platforms out there. We built this because there are so many platforms that all only do a small piece of community in terms of either the functionality or the topic. There are Facebook groups, Meetup, Eventbrite, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, Shopify, really specific community sites like Goodreads and Ravelry, and thousands more web forums on every other topic.
The problem is, most of those places only do one or two things really well, and often don't do the other things at all. You shouldn’t have to use six different platforms to be a functional community or visit a dozen different sites to talk about the things you’re interested in. Everything should just be able to happen in one place, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
So we've tried to build a really broad, flexible platform that makes it so communities can do all the things they want to in one place. There are several things we've done that make us different from other platforms. In addition to the flexibility and tools we've already built, we have a developer platform that will be launching soon so that others can build even more features for Imzy.
We have a payments platform so that people will be able to exchange money in whatever ways make the most sense for them. Right now that's through tipping posts, comments, and community leaders, but we have TONS more to come—paid content, community subscriptions, crowdfunding, paying to RSVP to events, and even community storefronts will all get added—plus whatever ways developers who add new features decide to incorporate payments as well using the developer and payments platforms combined.
We also have a clean, easy-to-understand UI that's fully functional and easy to use on mobile web, with iOS and Android apps in the testing phase right now.
So from a product standpoint, we're actually very different, which will become more and more apparent as we continue to move forward and add more and more features from our to-do list.
Thank you for the in depth response!
RE: too many platforms, I'm reminded of an XKCD comic. https://xkcd.com/927/
Hahaha. Too true. But hopefully at one point it will all boil down to just ONE STANDARD TO RULE THEM ALL. MWAHAHAHAHA.
I mean, capitalism and competing companies are totally good. Haha.
In reality, yeah, we're not going to get rid of the need for all platforms. No platform is able to perfectly do everything, and there are completely different use cases for various scenarios. Snapchat is SUPER different from what we're doing, and we're certainly not going to be replacing them anytime soon. But what we have seen time and again is people using Reddit or Facebook groups or some other forum, and then having to also combine that with Eventbrite/Meetup and Paypal/Venmo and Indiegogo/Gofundme, etc. And this way you can collapse all of those needs into one place. Or at the least, easily integrate all of them into your community at once using our developer platform, so that if you do use Indiegogo and have an Imzy community, you might be able to donate to someone's campaign directly from Imzy, for example, without having to actually leave the site.
And there are some really fantastic community sites out there for specific interests, like Allrecipes, Goodreads, Ravelry, etc. We're probably not going to replace those either, because they've developed such a robust feature set for their really specific needs, but imagine ALL THE OTHER topics in the world out there that don't have a community platform that can do all the perfect little things they need to do to work beyond just typical posting and commenting. Ideally the next time someone says "I wish our community could do X," they'll be able to add or build that on Imzy rather than having to start from scratch with an entirely new platform. :)
That is very cool.
I wish I had a time machine so I could go back several years and build my website on Imzy.
I hope a lot of future communities build on Imzy.
I hope so too! :D
Fingers crossed!
I know you're busy because no Game of Thrones comments this week. :)
Wow, thanks @Marukka for the tip!! 😍
YW!
There should be a symbol to show that you were tipped. Not the amount or by whom though.
A lot of thought has clearly been put into this, but I'm not entirely convinced that Imzy's content policy as it currently stands really is significantly different from other major sites, including Reddit.
I couldn't recall the community policies off the top of my head, so I took another look at them. The "civility" clause seems unlikely to be enfored for the same reason that Reddit's "remember the human" and "adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life" guidelines are not enforceable. Reddit infamously depends on its harassment policy to get rid of its worst communities, which seems likely to be the case here as well (leading to the game that malicious communities play of pushing the boundaries of civility as far as possible without outright harassing users). The "Malicious Speech" policy is interesting, since it's nice to have some official declaration that hate speech is banned. However, the policy that "we encourage you to dismantle negative speech through discussion rather than censorship" is again very similar to the language used to defend coded hate speech in Reddit communities.
Dismantling negative spech through discussion rather than censorship is laudable. However, bigotry is not easily dismantled through speech, particularly on the internet. I'm sure this is not news to you, but trying to hold meaningful conversations in hostile online communities sucks and is probably the most unrewarding and unproductive thing you can do with your time. Hatred crowds out discussion.
Imzy's current content policy depends on security through obscurity, or to be more accurate, it depends on civility through demographics. The tone set by Imzy and the deliberate effort to cultivate diverse groups does make a difference, but Imzy's diversity has to be considered in the context of its (relatively) tiny number of users and closed invite access.
Maybe Imzy HQ is hiding some secret community management strategies, but from my perspective the only things keeping Imzy "kinder and gentler" are its branding, the closed invite system, and a lack of downvotes. None of these things will prevent toxicity if Imzy scales to include a broader (less self-selectingly progressive) pool of users.
I'll let others less connected to both companies answer the nitty gritty here, but what I will say is that the picture the press likes to paint is one where we are competing with reddit. It's understandable given our backgrounds.
The truth is that what we want to be focused on is COMMUNITY. I don't believe that reddit, nor quora or medium are focused on community. These are all media companies that rely on users to create their media. This has the nice side effect of having some communities try to exist on their platforms.
The downside is that the companies are not focused on communities, they are focused on media and monetizing the media, so always, the communities to try to exist on the platforms suffer.
Our who existence is based on the idea of communities, and while what we have right now may resemble some other sites, in the long run what we provide will be much, much different.
I think the best way to see these differences is in our attention to detail for community leaders. We spend a lot of time on the tools to start and manage your community. We try to release new tools every 7 to 10 days.
BTW, thanks for being here!
Thanks for this, I really hope it takes off :)
I imagine having strong communities established to keep things civil is the start - and requiring you opt in to being part of those communities keeps things controllable, because even when commenting anonymous, it's still technically attached to an account right? That would be my assumption.