kwgardner

I think this is all great stuff.

On Imzy, we've removed karma, removed downvotes, and turned upvotes just into more generic likes kind of like they are on FB, Twitter, or IG, that do not roll up or affect your account in any way, because everywhere we saw that had that, it tended to turn into purely something to game and didn't actually contribute to higher quality discussions. I think there is some value though to being able to sort by which comments might have more merit in a post, or which posts have more merit in a community, which is why we left likes in, just disconnected from anything besides that post/comment, and it's more just as a way of giving users positive reinforcement for posting good stuff than doing any kind of real moderating.

We also have then have leaders who create their communities who hopefully are benevolent in their dictatorships, and we've also given them lots of tools to be able to manage their communities well and also be really transparent about what's happening so that all users can learn and be a part of that process.

The other thing you mentioned is that it tends to be better in forums that are built around specific interests or communities. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what we're doing on Imzy, relative to that. We've noticed the same thing, and also that anywhere where there tends to be a "default" community or "front page" or something like that, is where there tends to be the lowest quality discussion, because you get too many people all dumped into the same place who didn't actually actively choose to be there, and lowest common denominator stuff tends to appeal. So what we've tried to do is preserve the quality of individual forums but the convenience of something like Facebook or Reddit where you get everything from all different sources in one place. When you join, we ask you what you're interested in, and then based on that, we show you a bunch of communities you might want to join. Then you specifically opt into those communities, so that hopefully only people who really care about those topics end up there, and they stay a little bit smaller but much higher quality for everyone across all interests.

Curious to hear your thoughts on this model and how well you think it'll work!

Thanks for the suggestion! That's a good one. The other word I'm thinking about is "limitless" to suggest the flexibility and the open developer platform.

Our business model will definitely have tipping and probably attract more creative people, but we'll slowly be adding more and more financial features to allow people to use money however they typically need to in a community structure, whether that's buying items, crowdfunding, paying for entry to an event, donating to people, putting rewards out for information, selling merchandise, and a whole bunch of other things. Hopefully as we do that, it'll start appealing to an even wider base as they'll be able to do all the things they want to on Imzy rather than using a combination of forums, Facebook, Slack, Paypal, Meetup, IndieGoGo, etc.

We'll probably leave invitation-only status and open things up a little later in the summer, but we want to make sure we establish a good tone for engagement and get our technology and features good enough before we do that.

You're right. We're learning that we need to probably revisit some of how we present ourselves. To be fair, though, we did do some extensive user testing through several different methods. And interestingly, people generally always liked our site and us better, thought we were more trustworthy, and were more likely to try it when there were lots of friendly dinos and colors on the page than when it was a more traditional "professional" site. Of course, not everyone did, and the HN demographic probably falls into that not everyone, but we can't appeal to everyone no matter what we do, so we went with what made us happy and what our research said had the largest reach. There are still lots of areas for us to improve (this is the first people have really been seeing our site with no context, and the first press we have gotten, so we're learning), but that's why we went the way we did.

We've actually never used the words "safe space" to describe ourselves, fwiw. It's an extremely polarizing term that has evolved to mean very different things to people, and the image it triggers in most people's minds of SJWs and crazy trigger warnings all over the place and no dissension allowed ever is not what we're trying to build. Those were the author's words.

Yes, agreed. It's impossible to be totally comprehensive. That was meant as an example of the types of things you should not persecute people for.

Oh, interesting. I'll pass this along to our developers. Thanks for letting me know, and sorry about that!

I'm curious, what do you think could make this better/possible?

An obvious first step is removing downvotes so you can't completely obliterate someone who crosses sides to try to have a conversation, but after that, what else would help?

In my mind, some kind of code of conduct would help further those conversations, because it doesn't prevent people from expressing their opinions, it just makes them express them civilly. And if they express an opposing view without being overly antagonistic, then hopefully the other side wouldn't start insult slinging, and if they do, then that's what the COC would be there for.

I think there's a difference between having a "wrong" or "offensive" opinion, and expressing it in an offensive way. Do you think there's a way to achieve that balance, so that people can feel comfortable to express their opinions on either side, regardless of right or wrong, without it devolving into mudslinging and pure animosity on both sides? How do we accomplish that?

This is actually what we're doing on Imzy! We ask people their interests and then show them what communities they may want to join based on that. Then they choose which ones they want to join. Hopefully by doing that, we'll decrease the circlejerking and increase the quality of conversations, since people only get there if they actually care about that topic and want to talk about that thing.

This is probably WAY more than you want to know, but this is a very nuanced issue that can't be addressed briefly to do it any kind of justice, as made obvious by the headline of the article we're commenting on describing us as a "warm, fuzzy, safe space." I'll copy paste this from a post we made on our site that elaborates on our community policy where a lot of this is also located, then summarize some more:

> You are welcome to express your opinions, even if they are offensive to some users. We want honest and open discussion to happen on Imzy from all sides. However, these opinions cross the line into malicious speech when they specifically incite violence or hatred, or make people fear you will act against them in a violent manner.

> Don't encourage violence or hatred on the basis of things like race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation.

> Don’t harass others. Harassment is defined as "a course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such person and serves no legitimate purpose" or "words, gestures, and actions which tend to annoy, alarm and abuse (verbally) another person". Do not engage in or provide a platform for harassment of users or communities. Harassment will not be tolerated.

Paraphrasing the rest of our post so this doesn't get too long:

Things like "I think all [race/religion/gender/other demographic] are [rude opinion]" or "You’re a [rude comment here]" is okay, but "All [race/religion/gender] should [have something terrible done to them]" or "I’m going to [specific threat against an individual]" is not. And even in the "okay" examples, if you continually and repeatedly engage in these actions against an individual and follow them throughout Imzy to do so, this crosses the line into harassment.

Beyond that, there's a big gray area. We know there are things that will come up that we won't quite fit anywhere in the policies we've written, and we'll have to make some things up as we go and refine our policies and understanding as the community evolves. And yeah, we're human, and we'll probably make mistakes sometimes. But we're working hard to set a tone of transparency and fairness so that our users will always know why we're doing things and be able to give feedback on how they want Imzy to function.

Yes, absolutely. Everyone can get too entrenched, and it's really easy for anyone to divide it into an "us" and a "them," and once you do that, it's too easy to really villainize the other side. Once you decide that the other side has absolutely nothing positive to contribute, then communication breaks down and it turns into snowball throwing that can escalate into grenade throwing.

It doesn't matter if it's GG or anything else. People tend to have valid complaints on both sides, regardless of how small, and both tend to have some guilt. People on both sides oversimplify the arguments of the other side and overgeneralize their actions as all black people this, or all white people this, or all men this, or all women this, or all... etc. And when that happens, it's bad regardless of who the group is and which side they're on, because it's guaranteed to be inaccurate about a vast number of people who are being unfairly characterized as something they're not.

There's a reason the term "social justice warrior" has come into existence, and it's because the people on what might generally be seen as the "good" or "right" side of the issue can also become way to militant, and when you become militant, you stop trying to work together to fix things, get people to see your way, and bring the sides together and start just trying to kill off the other side in order to win. (Now, I do think that term gets thrown around WAY too loosely for anyone who does anything you don't like and is often not accurate, but that goes back to the above paragraph.) Social justice is good. Social justice warriors are not.

Sorry for lots of rambling. It's hard to talk about such a complex issue concisely.

Thanks for all the input! We're pretty young and still figuring out how to talk about ourselves and present ourselves to the world, and we'll be refining things as we go.

We'll probably take the "positive" part out. But if people want to come here looking for help, that's totally fine! We already have some support groups started.

Got it. Thank you for the response! It's always helpful to be able to learn more from all other platforms. We do require community leaders to enter a reason whenever they remove a post or comment, ban someone, etc., and the OP is always notified of the reason (and soon we'll be adding it so that it's visible if you have a link to the removed post/comment as well).

That's really interesting about the decision to be able to moderate or post but not both. One thing we're doing in order to be able to help with moderating the moderator is that soon there will be a public leader log that shows what actions leaders have taken in their community and why they did it, so that people can see how their leaders are behaving. Hopefully as we grow we'll be able to add more tools that help leaders manage their communities and help the communities manage their leaders. :)

No worries! Thanks for the kind words. I do think the dinos set a happier tone, which probably helps people to converse in a more civil way, but we definitely don't want to infantilize people. We just like dinos ourselves. :)

Also, just as a note, "safe space" was the author's words, not ours. We're taking a stronger stance on harassment, sure, but there's still plenty of room for negativity and disagreement. You can read more in my other comments if you care to hear more about our philosophy.

Thanks for taking the time to respond to me!

Thanks!

It sounds like there's definitely some stuff we could be doing to improve our branding--we're new and we're learning, and the word "positive" seems to have been misconstrued by everyone from what we meant it to be to who we are as a company.

One thing, just as a note, is that we're not trying to be a "safe space" community, and we're not trying to censor disagreement, remove negativity, or even get rid of all hate and mean comments. Those all have a purpose, and without them it becomes an empty echo chamber and there's no point in actually talking.

Also, the fact that we're trying to take a stronger stance on harassment is just a tiny, tiny bit of what we're doing differently. We're not trying to be a safer Reddit, or even trying to be a direct Reddit competitor.

What we've built is in response to issues we've seen in all different platforms--Reddit, sure, but also Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, and more. 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, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.

Thank you! We have an amazing designer. You can check out her stuff here: https://dribbble.com/jaleh

We actually thought the same thing about downvotes, which is why we removed them in Imzy.

One of the things we've tried to do to decrease the groupthink/echochamber is get rid of any kind of "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conversations and groupthink. Instead, you only join communities you specifically opt into, and hopefully that way each community only has people who are actually passionate about those topics and discussions become more in depth and informed.

I'm curious, because I came around to Slashdot after its peak had passed--what parts of their system did you think worked best, so I can make sure we try to do the best we can on our platform?

Thanks! :)

We're trying really hard to purposely grow things slowly to keep them at a scale we can manage both on the community and technology side. Dumping a whole bunch of people into one place all at once turns into a free-for-all, and we want to make sure we're able to moderate communities to have the kind of quality interactions we want rather than a bunch of circlejerking, and that our technology is able to evolve at the same rate our userbase grows.

Right now the only way to get in is if you get invited by another person who's already a member (there are usually people on Twitter sharing their invites if you search for them), or requesting to join a specific community, and then the leader of that community can let you in. Otherwise, we'll be slowly letting people into Imzy in the order they signed up in, and unfortunately that may take a while if you just signed up, since the list is pretty long right now. :/ We really want to do this right rather than explode quickly and die a week later.

Yeah, I think it is an unfair characterization, because it's extremely narrow and oversimplified. And yeah, we're learning today that maybe we do need to rethink our presentation, and especially the use of the word "positive" on our home page. (Fwiw, we've never used the wording "safe space" or tried to claim to be that--those were the author's words.)

I'm going to do a little bit of copy/pasting from some of my other comments on this thread to help respond to this one, so I hope you'll forgive me, but here's why I don't really agree with that description.

Why I think it's oversimplified and not really representative:

Our goal, and what we meant by using the word "positive" is that Imzy, and the communities on it, enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there. Maybe we messed up using that word, and we'll need to change it. We're young, and we're learning how to describe and talk about who we are and what we're trying to do. What that does mean is that extreme or sustained harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. Communities that exist solely for hate aren't cool. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. Saying mean things to people is okay, unless that's all you do all day following around a user or something. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others, especially when they are different from our own. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.

Why I think it's extremely narrow and offbase:

This is the tiniest bit of what we're actually doing. We've focused on creating really diverse tools so that communities can exist and share however makes most sense for them and do the things that they need to do all in one place. We've built in a payments system. We've tried to give leaders AWESOME tools for making their communities exactly what they want and managing them the way that makes sense for them. We've tried to make things a lot more user and mobile friendly, as the places you referenced can be intimidating and not intuitive to a lot of people. Those are the things I'm most excited about--all the things we're adding to community functionality, not what we're taking away.

No, definitely not, and we're not trying to remove that. Our goal, and what we meant by using the word "positive" is that Imzy, and the communities on it, enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there. Maybe we messed up using that word, and we'll need to change it. We're young, and we're learning how to describe and talk about who we are and what we're trying to do.

What that does mean is that extreme or sustained harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. Communities that exist solely for hate aren't cool. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. Saying mean things to people is okay, unless that's all you do all day following around a user or something. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others, especially when they are different from our own. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.

We're also okay with Imzy not being a platform for everyone—nothing is! And if HN and Reddit work for you, great. We're not trying to replace them.

What we are trying trying to do is build something for people for whom those aren't working. And most of the things we're doing different don't actually have anything to do with harassment or positivity. We've focused on creating really diverse tools so that communities can exist and share however makes most sense for them and do the things that they need to do all in one place. We've built in a payments system. We've tried to make things a lot more user and mobile friendly, as the places you referenced can be intimidating and not intuitive to a lot of people. Those are the things I'm most excited about--all the things we're adding to community functionality, not what we're taking away.

Hi!

A few things.

1. We're not trying to be "warmer and fuzzier"--those are the author's words.

2. We're not trying to be a children's site--we just wanted to make something that made us (and hopefully others) happy, and that included cute dinosaurs.

3. We're not based on Reddit, nor are we trying to replace them.

(As a note, the author of this article didn't talk to us, and they haven't actually seen any more of our site than you have.)

Here's what we ARE doing. We're building a community site based on issues we've seen in all different platforms--Reddit, sure, but also Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, and more. 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, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.

Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.

I'm copy/pasting this response that I shared with someone else; I hope that's okay, but I wanted to explain what we meant. I completely agree that negative content has a place and is valuable. Not being able to disagree or only being able to say nice things defeats the purpose of conversation.

Our goal, and what we meant by using the word "positive" is that Imzy, and the communities on it, enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there.

What that means is that extreme or sustained harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. Communities that exist solely for hate aren't cool. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. Even saying mean things to people is okay, unless that's all you do all day following around a user or something. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others, especially when they are different from our own. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.

Maybe "positive" wasn't the right word for us to use.

Let me explain what we meant, because it's not that at all. I completely agree that negative content has a place and is valuable. Not being able to disagree or only being able to say nice things defeats the purpose of conversation.

Our goal, and what we meant by using the word "positive" is that Imzy, and the communities on it, enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there.

What that means is that extreme or sustained harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. Communities that exist solely for hate aren't cool. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. Even saying mean things to people is okay, unless that's all you do all day following around a user or something. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others, especially when they are different from our own. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.

As an aside, this article also makes a big deal out of the "warmer, fuzzier" part of Imzy, and they're also the ones who used the words "safe place," not us. Are we trying to make things a little less toxic than we've seen some other places? Yeah, absolutely. But that's honestly a really small part of why we built Imzy and what makes us different from other platforms.

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, with a developer platform to make sure that's possible. We've built in a payments system. We've designed it to be more user and mobile friendly instead of an outdated forum style. Those are honestly the things that I care most about, and the possibilities they open are what I think will have the biggest impact on hopefully making Imzy a really viable community platform that I want to work on, not the things that we're trying to prevent.

Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.

That's something we're making a huge priority--to give our community leaders a really awesome experience to be able to do everything they need or want to. We've built the whole platform to be as flexible as possible so that communities can exist and have the function the way they need to (or build it using our developer platform if it's not there), and a big part of having healthy communities is allowing the leaders to manage their communities well.

There are definitely private communities! We also allow you to have different usernames in the different communities you participate in to partition your identity if you need to be anonymous, or post anonymously when you need to, all from one account, so you don't have to have throwaways and create different accounts just to be able to manage your privacy and online identity.

Awesome! Shoot me an email here and let's talk: kaela@imzy.com

(Also, sorry it took me so long to reply--apparently I was commenting too fast because I just created my account. Whoops.)

We made something that makes us happy. Will it appeal to every single human being? No, of course not, nor should it. And that's okay! Nothing on the internet has that power. Not even cats.

We chose to go in this direction because it made all of us happy to go to work every day, and whenever we showed people different versions of our site, whether it was family and friends or in more formal user testing, people tended to like it more with the dinosaurs than without. It's okay if you don't like it, or even if a lot of different people don't like it.

Though, fwiw, once you got off that page it looks more like a regular site and there aren't as many dinos.

We have a report flag on every post and comment to allow items to be escalated and reviewed. Users are required to explain why they are reporting something so that it's hopefully not just used as a downvote. (And, tbh, downvotes don't really help with catching spam since most of the time they're just to show disagreement or make sure comments that aren't worth being seen don't get seen as much.)

We have the nascent stages of algorithms that will help us with tracking spam and such, but those take time and data to become better, and we're pretty small right now. They will grow as we do. That's one of the reasons we're invite-only right now. Dumping a whole bunch of people into one place all at once turns into a free-for-all, and we want to make sure we're able to moderate communities to have the kind of quality interactions we want rather than a bunch of circlejerking, and that our technology is able to evolve at the same rate our userbase grows.

Agreed. I'm learning that the use of the word "positive" on our homepage may not be conveying quite what we had envisioned, and maybe we'll need to change it. (Hey, everyone learns.)

We absolutely don't think Imzy should be a place where people can only say nice things and anything negative gets removed. That defeats the point of talking at all.

Our vision is that communities enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there.

What that means is that harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.

Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.

We've actually done a few things to try to deal with those issues. We don't have any "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conversations and groupthink. Instead, you only join communities you specifically opt into, and hopefully that way each community only has people who are actually passionate about those topics and discussions become more in depth and informed.

(Cofounder here, btw, happy to answer any of your questions.)

Edit: I just converted over from being a lurker and created my account to respond here, and apparently I'm commenting too fast. I'll respond to other comments when I can, sorry. :/ Feel free to email me at kaela@imzy.com if you want to talk more though!

Imzy actually has removed karma for users, precisely for that reason. It's usually something that ends up only being there for people to game and creates more negative consequences than the good it's intended for. You can like/upvote comments and posts, but there aren't downvotes, and how well a post does doesn't reflect on the users in any way.