Slashdot Mirror
Imzy, the Kinder and Gentler Reddit By Ex Employee, Is Shutting Down (imzy.com)
Imzy, a social media site led by ex-Reddit employee Dan McComas, announced on Wednesday that it will be closing its doors next month. The site was launched last year with much fanfare. Imzy sought to offer a community that didn't have trolls, one of the reasons that led McComas to leave Reddit two years ago. Ever since its launch, Imzy struggled to gain traction. According to web analytics firm SimilarWeb, the website was visited less than 400,000 times last month. McComas didn't elaborate why his service was shutting down, though he wrote: Some of you have been here since our launch into beta and some are brand new. We've loved getting to know all of you and seeing you build communities and make new friends. Unfortunately, we were not able to find our place in the market. We still feel that the internet deserves better and hope that we see more teams take on this challenge in the future.
A community without trolls is like a city without crime.
Bad analogy, because crime (in the usual meaning of the term) is just wrong, regardless of whether there are laws/rules against it. Trolling, on contrast, may be useful, informative, and entertaining.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
As much as one could make this a free speech issue, the sad fact is that trolling is roughly the level of discourse we have sunk to. Every conversation and argument, every argument a fight. We don't want discussion, we want our blood boiling as we curse our foes, our enemies before us and our allies at our back. I'm as guilty as anyone else.
As a long time internet vagabond I tried Imzy but just couldn't do it.
The software itself wasn't bad. I could see it gaining traction for a lot of stuff that doesn't quite fit Reddit or forum discussion structure. The 'Choose a profile for this community" as well as "Post Anonymously" functions were great. I'm glad to see that some other website tried the AnonymousCoward idea.
The problem was it was the mirror universe of the Voat community where after two "Don't do that. That language shouldn't be used here" messages from mods I decided Fuck That Shit I didn't want to go online and feel like I was walking on eggshells around people that couldn't handle 'outside'.
One particular argument was that they took issue with the word "Coward" when I brought up how Slashdot used "Anonymous Coward". They didn't like the 'connotation' that it bore and calling someone a "coward" for wanting to post anonymously was answered with some logic I didn't quite follow.
I've said it before but Slashdot's founders seemingly put some forethought into how to design a forum. It's not perfect but it works. "Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.".
Non-nesting forums only work until you hit a critical mass. Trying to have any discussion on Facebook was futile, even within private groups of educated people because of the non-nesting commenting. Then they added it but only made it 1 comment deep. Once Fark comment threads hit a certain number of people commenting it fell apart. However in domain specific areas 'old school forums' still are best. You can find a niche of a niche of a niche forum out there to discuss why your Singer XTNEH2398 sewing machine has this weird issue and there's a half chance that it'll get seen by someone that knows how to fix it. There are multiple car specific forums out there that are infinitely better than Reddit or just a generic car site.
For large sites I take issue with Reddit's "everyone gets to vote", because it leads to bandwagoning. At least Slashdot's bandwagoning is limited to -1:+5. So while stuff can swing either way it's pointless to continue to pile on more moderation. The random, distributed nature of the moderation also seems to put a low pass filter on the moderation.
For those that think it's now Overrun with racists and what not I invite you to spend a week on Voat, 4Chan or Stormfront and come back to Slashdot.
It's telling that these SJW companies looking to offer a "safe space" on the internet can't find traction.
That is not entirely true. Quora.com has a "be nice, be respectful" policy, and is doing well. They don't censor viewpoints, but they do ban bad attitudes and obnoxious behavior.
People say they want nicer, but look around - people come to the internet to argue.
No they don't.
#DeleteChrome
Well there's also "Voat.co" which is I guess is where the "anti-social-justice" warriors go to hang out. It's also running into funding issues and might shut down.
I've never even heard of this site and I have been looking for a reddit alternative that isn't Voat. I've been around /. for a long-long-long time and nothing will likely ever replace its format adequately and I'm fine with that. Reddit has a much broader scope in usage and I really liked that about the site from the mid 2000s to about 2012. But its appeal to that broader scope is what truly made the site absolute trash. It wasn't even necessarily the mass-appeal that reddit finally achieved. It was the realization from marketing companies that it had reached a mass-appeal and started using the site as a new marketing platform for everything from hawking new movies and products to attempting to sway public opinion on certain topics with paid political astroturfers.
I used to spend entire days on reddit reading often insightful comments and learning things from people who do things you aren't always exposed to. It was a wonderful platform for that. Once they sold out, I can't even stand to be on the site more than an hour before I'm offensively bored.
As for imzy, the front page isn't very welcoming. If I didn't know what I had just stumbled onto, I might just move on to another website. Seriously guys, I can't even tell what the hell the site is supposed to be from the front page. Theres a scrolling ticker that keep iterating new items that appeal to the concept of "community". What if I don't want to belong to a "community" and just want to read shit other people post? Too bad I guess. Forcing people to sign up to view the content is a pretty antiquated style for a forum that is supposed to sponsor discussion. Also, that video doesn't even need to exist. It says nothing about what the site is about. Hell, I might be more inclined to think I'm watching some trailer for a terribly disjointed game or something. Its no shock these folks are closing shop. They decided "community" meant walled off from the trolls and forgot that they still needed to exist outside of that wall if they wanted to grow.
If you want to beat reddit, make a website that looks exactly like reddit and use a scoring and modding system like slashdot. Then, don't sell out like a bitch.
Why do web based forums still suck so much after all these years?
Any web forum community I go to seems to suffer from the same problems.
Too many subforums that don't see any traffic, more or less forcing users into "general" forum that drowns in traffic. "Sticky" posts which are unedited glop, pages long.
Software that doesn't allow fetching more than a couple of screens worth of messages at a time, made worse by message headers that are way too big and relentless warlording by users with giant footers filled with pictures, dumb quotes, and other bullshit.
"Mega-threads" -- sometimes hundreds of pages long with almost no navigation or threading capability, and totally edited for content. A near total absence of sane threading capability. Search functions that don't return any useful information.
It makes me miss USENET.
The good news is, there's a site with no trolls. The bad news is, it doesn't have any users either.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Imzy can absolutely suck it. They are a bunch of hypocritical jagoffs.
I was on Imzy for the exact purpose it was created- to be a bit nicer. So tired of the Twitter and Reddit trolls. Imzy is nice, great!
I posted for a while and had fun. Then someone with the username of 'FuckGringos' commented on a few of my posts. Okay, this is supposedly not welcome here, so I emailed the admins. "Hey, umm...the user with the name 'FuckGringos' violates your terms of service".
That was elevated to 'Jessica' (Dan's SO I believe) who said, "We do not consider that username to be offensive, because it calls out the group who holds the power and therefore is not racist."
Oh...it's one of those.
So I figured, "Okay, evidently Imzy is not the place for me, so I will delete my account. Not a big deal..." I go through the stupid-complicated account deletion process- which is basically you posting to their admin board explaining why you want to delete your account. It's public, but that was their process. One of the questions is basically, "Please explain in detail why you want to leave." Well, it's because FuckGringos is not considered offensive, but 'FuckXXXX' (any other group) is offensive.
That caused a shit-storm because evidently I was 'calling out another user' blah blah blah. As far as Imzy was concerned, me complaining about 'Fuck Gringos' was offensive, but the username wasn't.
Essentially Imzy was a frigging hypocritical circle-jerk of 'progressive' people against hate...unless you happen to be white. Evidently I was supposed to allow my white guilt to over-ride all of their terms of service or something and embrace the idea that I was bad and should accept the shame that comes with being white.
I've been waiting for a while to hear this news about them shutting down, and I'm happy. Because they (Thanks Jessica) were absolute liars when they told everyone, "This is a nice place."
No- it's not. It's a place where the new rules where white/CIS/men are all bad things, and everyone else is good.
Personally, I have no problem with any people based on their demographics, but I really hate the people who are full of shit and misrepresent what they do as good...when they are as bad as it gets.
Good riddance. I hope they wasted a lot of their own money. And yeah, now I'm 'not being nice' on Slashdot...because rather than make the Internet a better place, they made it worse.
Does anyone know of anything good to come out of Imzy?
No reason to lie.
The whole story is actually a troll in this case. The implication is that the site failed because of censorship, but actually Voat, the hard core free speech Reddit rip-off isn't doing so great either.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/...
Must be fun working in marketing and trying to explain to advertisers why "watchpeopledie", "fatpeoplehate" and "pizzagate" at the top three search terms that bring people to your site.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Verbally slapping someone around is, sometimes, the only way to get them to pay attention, dipshit.
No, actually, I don't believe I've ever seen that technique work. Not on the internet, and for that matter, not outside the internet. Not even once.
In popular culture, ages ago, there used to be a stereotyped scene where a guy gets slapped in the face and he straightens up and says "thanks, I needed that." (Was that a scene in a movie, or something? I don't even know where that one originated). I don't think that ever happened, either.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"For two hundred years, the best thing you could be was a white guy with a few bucks in the bank. I come along, PFFT! Fuck you, party's over."
—Richard Jeni
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This whole thread, complete with the ambiguity of whether anyone was actually "whoooshed" or not, is a perfect example of an internet argument
Actually, it's mostly an allusion/homage to a great Monty Python sketch.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Reddit is already being killed by the spread of this "social justice" variant of political correctness. These Imzy people actually thought the solution was more social justice? That's hilarious. I hope they drained a lot of money out of the pockets of like-thinking VCs on their way down.