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Ex-Reddit exec launches 'Imzy,' a warmer, fuzzier Reddit

• gallonofmilk 11y ago
  How did an ex-exec create a competing platform? did reddit not have him sign a non-compete or does it just not matter in CA?
• JBReefer 11y ago
  I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible? I really love how self-enforcing the community is here towards snark and lazy comments, which have absolutely destroyed Reddit. Edginess is much easier than proper discussion.
  • lolidaisuki 11y ago
    > with an hn-level of moderation But HN is one of the worst moderated places on the net.
  • keypusher 11y ago
    Some subreddits are heavily moderated, AskHistorians for instance. If you feel there is demand for a heavily moderated subreddit about bikes or your local news, you could create it and be the moderator.
    • JBReefer 11y ago
      But the prevailing zeitgeist is anti-moderation, and I'd be in competition with the other biking subreddits. I do wholeheartedly agree with you about the quality of AskHistorians, but that's a good example _because_ it stands out in a see of crappy, snarky, shallow communities (like r/NYC or r/politics)
      • tamana 11y ago
        But you don't need the prevailing zeitgeist. The low quality content can live in /r/bikes with all the crap tha t a front-page sub endures, and the high quality content can be happily moderated in /r/pedalpower
      • hippich 11y ago
        Make your own subreddit about bikes, and crosspost good pieces from unmoderated ones.
  • minimaxir 11y ago
    The quality of the subreddit is directly proportional to the moderation. The Ask subreddits (/r/AskHistory, /r/AskScience) are consistently cited for having high quality due to actual, transparent enforcement of the rules. That said, moderation works as long as it doesn't modify the sentiment of content. Moderation for positive content only leads to groupthink which helps no one. (case in point, Product Hunt, where commenters get upvoted just for saying "cool!" with no additional insight)
    • anjc 11y ago
      Imo AskHistory can be boring as hell because of the heavy-handed moderation. I get the effect that they're going for, and it works, but it's frustrating to go into an interesting topic to see every comment deleted and a mod warning at the top.
      • smitherfield 11y ago
        And they take their rules to the point of absurdity. I've seen many occasions where a commenter had direct personal experience with the event being asked about, and provided proof they were whom they said they were, but their comment was still deleted because "no personal anecdotes."
        • daveid 11y ago
          It's AskHistory, not AskForPersonalAnecdotes. History has the advantage of multiple personal anecdotes being cross-checked and compiled into a more or less reliable account. A personal anecdote may be interesting but not representative of anything.
    • ben_jones 11y ago
      Heavy moderation also creates a meritocracy where reputable users who post a lot will have their content passed through the filter seamlessly and new contributors will be walled off completely in order to support the status quo. Let's not forget reddit has a deep history of moderator abuse.
  • gkya 11y ago
    HN is incredibly focused compared to Reddit. That's what keeps HN clean. My idea is that if the user karma was removed, and upvotes on links were used to merely weigh and sort links, and downvotes on comments were removed, Reddit, and also HN, would improve. Many attention seekers spam many subreddits, and also HN, merely for the karma. Instead, give users some lives, as in games, and each time the user is seen spamming/harassing, take away a life, and when he runs out of lives, ban him. Though I have no factual experience to back my thoughts, but mailing lists and bulletin boards are mostly run similarly to what I describe.
    • rayalez 11y ago
      That's a recipe for making users scared of expressing alternative/controversial opinions, also replacing positive feedback loop with a negative one.
      • travoc 11y ago
        It sounds like that's what he wants. A "clean" site.
      • logicrook 11y ago
        Really? It seems to me that downvotes are used very negatively, as they are put a strong incentive (for most people) not to express unpopular opinions, even if they are good comments. If they were used only to discourage low quality posts, it wouldn't change a lot, since the most upvoted comments would still be to the top. He suggests to remove lives for spam/harassment, not for shitposting. So basically, positive loop+ draconian enforcement of essential rules, and no negative loop.
        • gkya 11y ago
          I don't like downvotes because people mostly downvote what they disagree, not spam and whatnot. Having some ideas and habits contrary to what's popular, I experience this first-hand here on HN. And probably this is a reflex, most often when one sees someone disagree him, he feels a spontaneous whim and thinks that his argument is not reasonable. And only after a bunch of seconds does he understand that the other one actually poses a sound argument, criticism, etc. The HN's upvote-downvote sytem lacks undo, so unfortunately when you regret a downvote, there's nothing to do.
  • tensor 11y ago
    While I definitely enjoy more nuanced and interesting discourse, I don't actually think that reddit has any problem. There is a self declared "elite" group of users on reddit who are always echoing exactly your sentiments to the point that it's almost a chant: groupthink, low quality comments, uniformed discourse! Of course, recognizing that there is a need and desire by some for a place to have more detailed and nuanced discussions is not bad in of itself. Arguably its' a very good thing. Where it turns bad is in their approach to a solution. Instead of "hey, people want a place where they can have more interesting discussions, let's go create one, promote, and moderate it!", they think "hm, these people with their memes and images, that's a problem. They shouldn't do that. We need to stop them and show them the right way to run a subreddit!" This latter thinking is incredibly intolerant, arrogant, and dangerous. It's the same type of thing that leads to laws being passed based on a particular religion or other philosophy that tries to ban thoughts different to theirs. This is why I say that reddit doesn't have a "problem" with low quality content. That's what a lot of people enjoy and they should have a place they can do that. If you want to change peoples minds, use words, not force. All that being said, I recognize that you didn't actually advocate that reddit be changed. More to your point, as others have said, one of the great things about reddit is that people are free to start their own subreddit and make it into whatever they wish. There are a lot of smaller more heavily moderated subreddits that have great discussion. People who are upset with the bigger subs should look for these or even create their own.
    • dogma1138 11y ago
      My problem with Reddit is not not that COC and heavy moderation enabled group think and promotes censorship (both regular and self kind) is that it's conflict resolution model promotes segregation of ideas rather than discourse. Reddit is the place that instead of having /r/redvsblue you get /r/red and /r/blue 2 gated communities that simply live in their own little world happy with the perfect echo chamber they've created and that anyone who strays to post in the other camp's subreddit is automatically classified as a troll.
      • jsprogrammer 11y ago
        It's not a perfect echo chamber as you can browser /r/all and see and contribute content from/to both communities.
  • ben_jones 11y ago
    I don't get why people think hacker news is this little utopia of internet discussion. Yes, it benefits from being smaller and well-moderated, but it suffers from the same group-think, the same "circle-jerks" (har har Golang/Django/Theranos), etc. There are plenty of snarky and lazy comments, we just up-vote them because we agree with them. It's amazing that a former executive of reddit thinks a) it's easy to build a large online community b) it'll be easy to monetize (the hardest part) community and c) it'll be easy to moderate (hey people will do that for free, right?).
    • galistoca 11y ago
      I think it's because HN has a single theme. Like you said there are many annoying cases on HN too. Let's say your chance of coming across one is 1%. On Reddit you have many of these communities, so the chance of coming across annoying posts become N% (depending on how many subreddits you read)
      • dang 11y ago
        HN doesn't have a single theme, and if people think it does, we're doing something wrong. On the front page right now are posts about elephant brains, Nazi propaganda, and aphantasia, for example. That seems like thematic pluralism to me.
        • galistoca 11y ago
          It's interesting comment coming from the moderator. I know what you mean, but it is "Hacker News" after all. That's why when sometimes people see irrelevant posts they say "why the hell is this on the front page of HN?". The reason I said "Theme" instead of "Topic" is exactly for the same reason. I think the theme of this site is something that would interest people with curiosity (which comes from the "Hacker" theme).
          • dang 11y ago
            Ok, if intellectual curiosity counts as a theme, then I agree. This goes back to the beginning of the site btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
  • dustingetz 11y ago
    i think the problem is link-focused discussions over two hours rather than people- and comment-focused discussions over time (same as hn). The true experts aren't writing blogs, they are busy building. A four sentence HN comment from a recognized expert is more valuable than a hundred blogs from a hundred nobodies. We need to figure out how to extract content from those experts. Give visibility into the identities of the participants. Identify the experts and give visibility and longevity to their content. Moderate the shitposts over to a peanut gallery below the fold.
  • doctorpangloss 11y ago
    > I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think the problem is that anything good on Reddit gets copied elsewhere, has advertising added and makes money. Reddit is BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed-esque sites' biggest subsidy. This site isn't going to do anything about that.
  • sdegutis 11y ago
    > I don't think reddit's problem is harassment, I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. HN isn't immune to these. It suffers just as badly as Reddit. It's just that the cultures are so different. HN is elitist and thinks technology will improve our lives, Reddit is racist and thinks pictures of cute kittens and in-jokes will improve our lives. Both are filled with ignoramuses who get upvoted to the top of a page for catering to that website's niche the most (HN = most elitist comment, Reddit = funniest comment). Anyone else barely sees the light of day, and get downvoted to smithereens. As long as there's an upvote button, I don't think any website can truly solve this. HN tried to fix it by using more algorithms on top of upvotes, but it just doesn't work.
    • forgetsusername 11y ago
      >Anyone else barely sees the light of day, and get downvoted to smithereens. Hey look, you're down-voted. I agree. Look at some of the "top-posters" on the HN scoreboard. Much of their commentary is tepid oatmeal that panders to the "easy" things that HN likes. >HN = most elitist comment I'm not sure I agree with "elitist", but there's definitely a thing, which is well defined by things like "Shit HN says".
      • Karunamon 11y ago
        Shit HN says? You mean that twitter account[1] that posts one-off comments, devoid of any and all context, and then attributes it to the entire site as if it were one person? Or representative of the site's users in any way? Nothing positive, or useful, or interesting has ever come out of a "Shit (community) says" group. Those types of (what's the word here.. articles? groups? Whatever, things) are always crass, point-and-laugh-derisively-at-the-stupid-people-ha-ha-look-how-stupid-they-are affairs. Reddit's instance of this cancer (and I don't believe I've chosen the wrong term for something this awful) even functions as a more or less sanctioned voting brigade. [1]: https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says
  • return0 11y ago
    The real problem of reddit is the people who think it has a problem.
    • forgetsusername 11y ago
      There's something to this: reddit is a place where you can write things about things. Why does it need to be controlled, moderated, or anything really? The argument against this mindset is usually along the lines of, "Well, we don't want the KKK organizing rallies on our boards!" Which, is true; you don't want that. But banning them from reddit moves them from a public forum to their own, more private, areas of the internet. You can't censor shit.
      • GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
        I'm ok with forcing the KKK underground.
        • nailer 11y ago
          Sure, but a lot of reddit think anyone right of Mao is the KKK.
      • pink_dinner 11y ago
        The problem is thay it's not even as extreme as the kkk, if your opinions don't mesh with the current progressive groupthink, you will be downvoted, ignored, and bullied. The same happens to a lesser extent on HN, but without the bullying. The end result is content that leans in only one direction because everyone else has been silenced, they don't bother posting, or they left. The irony is that this behavior is exactly what progressives have claimed to be fighting (discrimination and online bullying) Edit: haha, the ironic downvoting happened fast.
      • warlox 11y ago
        Their private areas of the internet, namely Stormfront, predate Reddit. Before Reddit allowed racists and moot created /pol/, they didn't have a real platform to spread their propaganda, so you had to look pretty hard for sites like that. If they only had private forums, events like the Charleston shooting wouldn't have happened.
  • SixSigma 11y ago
    SRS is cancer
    • arrrg 11y ago
      SRS is awesome and exactly what’s needed.
      • kelukelugames 11y ago
        There is awful behavior on reddit, but I don't know if SRS is the answer. Actually at this point, no one knows what SRS is anymore. Edit: okay I found this. https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/o0pdv/meta_srs_faq/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitRedditSays/comments/o0pdv/meta_...
        • SixSigma 11y ago
          Fighting opinions we don't like with opinions you don't like. Fucking for virginity
  • wslh 11y ago
    This depends on the subreddit, if you look at the security groups (e.g. netsec, reverseengineering) they evolve to deep discussions.
  • emblem21 11y ago
    Comparing Reddit, a community where specialists can setup a little fiefdoms and generalists can cheery pick from whatever fiefdom they can find, with HackerNews, a singular monoculture that just happens to attract people with a huge diversity of interests, is a challenge unto itself. Both deploy a wide variety of strategies to enforce quality content: crowd-vote mechanism and individual ignoring. These two mechanisms should be more than sufficient for even the most obsessively compulsive and curiously unaccountable of curators. The question isn't comparing communities based on content or upon curator strategies. One should question should take aim at the unspoken epistemological assumptions every single curator engages in. Suppose Poster 1 puts topic A into Community A. There are many overlapping relationships between topic A and community A. Now lets suppose Poster 2 puts topic B into Community A. There are few overlapping relationships between topic B and community A. "Overlapping relationships" is a very complex topic. Users might find topic B to be on-topic in an esoteric or meta way, and the moderators will find it off-topic. Users might find topic A to be off-topic because the topic is to frequently discussed, and the moderators remove it. However the dice roll, the concept of "overlapping relationships" between topic and community is not a guarantee of topic survival. The selection mechanism of topic survivability is divided between the collective hands of the crowd-vote mechanism, individual ignoring, or moderation termination. And notice I say "divided" , and not "sequentially evaluated". Agents of topic survival operate in parallel. This means that posters have to appeal to not only just three different selection criteria in order to survive, but eight different scenarios that have different highly targeted payoffs. Two rules of the topic lifecycle: * The topic must pass/fail three moderation phases. * The topic always has influence on the hardcore communtiy consumers (HCC), the average community consumers (ACC), and the moderators. (M) How topic lifecycles can still influence a community even via multi-phase curation: Case | CrowdVote? | Mass ignore | Deletion? | Outcome 1 | Pass | | | HCC get skeptical of ACC and M 2 | | Pass | | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M 3 | | | Pass | HCC and ACC think M is lazy 4 | Pass | Pass | | HCC and ACC think M is aggressive 5 | | Pass | Pass | HCC hostile to ACC and M, may fracture community 6 | Pass | | Pass | ACC get skeptical of HCC and M 7 | Pass | Pass | Pass | No effect 8 | | | | M gets skeptical of HCC and ACC The point is that having topics curated epistemologically only appears to work because it fails the slowest. No outcome of topic enforcement actually bolsters or adds to community value over time because all topic consumption is a destructive process (destruction of time). Thus, entropy always wins.
  • kwgardner 11y ago
    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!
    • keithwhor 11y ago
      Hey! I'm the author of Nodal [1] and I think this could be a really neat platform for open source communities. Gitter / Slack tend to be the default for live, realtime chat and GitHub is central for issues and contributions, but I'm looking for something fun to direct developers towards where we can organize community events and the like. I'm a startup founder myself and would love to connect with the founding team, is there an ideal way to reach out? [1] http://github.com/keithwhor/nodal http://github.com/keithwhor/nodal
      • kwgardner 11y ago
        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.)
    • kelukelugames 11y ago
      The art on your site is sooooo cute! Who did it?
      • kwgardner 11y ago
        Thank you! We have an amazing designer. You can check out her stuff here: https://dribbble.com/jaleh https://dribbble.com/jaleh
  • forgetsusername 11y ago
    >I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation What evidence is there that HN is any better? Everything looks good when you're on the right side of the groupthink. There are certain subjects here that have atrociously one-sided discourse. Personally, I think Reddit is just as informative as this place (besides the point that there is no monolithic "reddit")
  • eva1984 11y ago
    HN can(which is in question) maintain a relative high quality discussion towards a focused and limited subset of topics (tech, science and certain social issue like surveillance) is because it is a niche forum by default. It is HACKER NEWS, rather than popular news. Reddit is just too board. However, certain subs are still pretty interesting and informational, until....it becomes popular. So yes. Popular means low quality. It is sad, but inevitable..
  • threatofrain 11y ago
    If you consider Reddit as a whole, with millions of users, I don't think there's any behavioral change you can institute that will lead to high quality, informed discourse. High quality discussions take hard work, not just in the discussion process, but in all the things that come before it. Also, the information gathered by hard work is often gated. If you are looking for high-signal discussion, then most people in or out of Reddit don't have anything good to say on most subjects. Reddit is the wrong place to look for that kind of talk. Reddit is the right place to listen for community temperature about a narrow range of subjects which communities would be good for, such as user reviews or product discovery. Groupthink is also not the main problem. How are you supposed to have your own individual opinion on a wide range of phenomena -- unless, of course, you make yourself informed via hard work and gated access? So these people cannot be expected to have their own opinion. If you want elite opinion, then join an institution with institutional access to elite literature, and join an academic or professional community. Reddit is fine as it is. It's not supposed to be an elite source of information on a variety of phenomena. It's a place for humor and community discussion. I actually dislike the segment of Reddit users asking for "citations" because unless you have institutional access, then I think that this call for citations is a dishonest way of shutting down conversations.
  • awqrre 11y ago
    Some Reddits are worst then HN when talking about censure.
  • duaneb 11y ago
    Groupthink is a problem per-subreddit. Don't like it? Invest some time in finding better subreddits.
  • spchampion2 11y ago
    > I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. You mean like Metafilter? http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scrdr/ http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/scrdr/
    • dubyah 11y ago
      They did mention groupthink. I used to think Metafilter was pretty decent, but the shift over the years with regards to certain topics like identity politics has been really quite insufferable.
  • dghughes 11y ago
    The drama ebbs and flows on reddit and then settles for a bit then up again. Maybe it's my imagination but in my 9 years there it's like you can almost see the next wave of new users arrive. It's subtle at first but you soon see the common culture of that age/culture group, cohort or whatever it is. What I don't like is the new (~6 months) locking of threads I think that's a cop out of moderators or the admins. You don't like the conversation? Slam the door shut.
  • dominotw 11y ago
    I go to reddit for entertainment, camaraderie and lols. I don't go the engage in a intellectual discussion. There are tons of subreddits like /r/askhistorians that do HN level of moderation and don't have 'lazy comments'
    • mark_integerdsv 11y ago
      Similar for me. Reddit is what I do when I'm standing in a queue or waiting for something for a few minutes. I get quite confused when I see people take it so seriously.
  • gbog 11y ago
    Low moderation and high level discussion is very possible and very common, but it depends on the topic and maybe the language. Just yesterday I've been on a French language forum on gardening, and this kid of dedicated community do not seem to struggle to keep away trolls and memes. Must be much harder for an English language forum on mangas, or a French language forum on politics. I'm not sure about Reddit, the subs I visit are either monocultural and barely interesting, or full of trolls and memes.
  • partiallypro 11y ago
    HN has a totally different userbase (though there is some cross over) than Reddit. To me Reddit's trollish uninformed arguments are what makes it funny. For instance, /r/The_Donald and /r/SandersForPresident are basically parodies of themselves. Frankly, I'm going to go to Reddit for a laugh, and maybe a few sorted threads with insight into live events unfolding...but if I want something serious I'm not going to go there. Reddit to me is like Something Awful used to be but on a much larger scale, and that's why I like it. If Reddit ever matured to be like HN, I would probably stop going there. It's a happy medium between dashing moments of HN like insight and 4Chan like stupidity.
  • warlox 11y ago
    I don't think those are reddit's only problems. The blatant racism on display in the comment sections of some of the site's most heavily trafficked areas, such as /r/worldnews and /r/news, does quite a number on its reputation.
  • buro9 11y ago
    I run lots of forums, on many technologies, and the only way that I've achieved long-lived peaceful forums is to have virtually no moderation and no moderators. As soon as you have moderators, the users defer responsibility for confronting the bad stuff and it represents the start of the decline, "If that was allowed, why isn't this?". Without moderation, and with the community possessing some tools to enforce, most communities will take on that responsibility and do so. i.e. the flagging on here or on Craigslist that allows multiple people to moderate where an individual's signal is weak but collectively it becomes strong. Of the course the only thing that this doesn't address is broken group-think across the whole forum. To that, I've found making the admin of a forum the legal buck-stop for the forum works well. This is compatible with EU law, where you generally need someone to be responsible for complaints of a libel/defamation nature, and so I designate the forum owner as that and I move myself into the "mere conduit" role. This method of "everyone is a weak moderator, we have no strong moderators but we do have a strong leader who is liable" has been very effective at producing decade old, healthy and growing communities.
  • dave2000 11y ago
    That applies to the comments more than the articles; you can still learn stuff there. And it's possible to ignore group think, you know, like if you've got a mind of your own.
  • harryf 11y ago
    > I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible? We always assume human moderators are required. I wonder if AI could do something here?
  • CuriouslyC 11y ago
    The single biggest problem I encounter with reddit is that being able to downvote attracts negative, unpleasant people.
  • scient 11y ago
    It's an online community. You just described an online community or any community actually. What did you expect Reddit would be? :)
  • rmc 11y ago
    > I think it's groupthink, extremely low quality/uninformed discourse, and brigading. I wish that there was a site with an hn-level of moderation that covered issues like bikes, local news, etc. Maybe that's just not possible? It's possible on reddit. reddit.com/r/AskHistorians is a Q&A subreddit for asking historical questions. They have a very high standard for answers, comments, and even the questions you can ask. and they actively enforce it. As a result it's a very high quality resource. It can be done, if there's the will for strict moderation, from the mods and the users.
  • rthomas6 11y ago
    I like Hubski (https://www.hubski.com https://www.hubski.com). It's self-moderating in a cool way. Each user decides exactly who and what they want to see.
  • hawtbabe22 11y ago
    how about you stroke my big balls baby
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• A_COMPUTER 11y ago
  I don't know how to phrase this in an HN-approved positive way, but I think it needs to be said: the graphics are disturbingly infantilizing if this site is supposed to be for anyone over the age of 9.
  • lolidaisuki 11y ago
    Some people want to talk to interact with <10 year olds. This does interest us as well.
  • ben_jones 11y ago
    I'll make the politically incorrect sacrifice for you: The internet was not built to be, or should it ever be, a safe place for every single human being on Earth. Contradictory and radical ideas are a necessary part of progressive discourse and they will make people feel uncomfortable and angry. Deal with it.
    • beeboop 11y ago
      I disagree. I think the extreme stance of "safe places" we have today are rather stupid, but I would much rather these people make their own communities and exclude those who are deemed undesirables, than try to take over an existing platform.
    • TorKlingberg 11y ago
      How is your comment relevant to the grandparent comment in any way? A_COMPUTER was talking about the graphic design?
  • SixSigma 11y ago
    Agreed, looks like a loli site. Bring your waifu and we can talk brony.
  • return0 11y ago
    ... or for those who like humans below 9 years ...
• kinkdr 11y ago
  Cool interface. I would love to read about the back end details. What stack do they use? What database? Cache-engine?
  • johansch 11y ago
    "user: kinkdr created: 3 minutes ago" Oh would you really? :)
    • kinkdr 11y ago
      ? Did I say something wrong?
      • striking 11y ago
        Someone accused you of making an account to fluff up this post. Don't worry about it.
  • anjc 11y ago
    Why would you want to know/ask about their cache engine when it's not clear they have one, or even have a single user? Did you, by any chance, configure the site's cache engine... :)
    • kinkdr 11y ago
      Because I am curious. I love to read about what stack each company chooses to use and why. And even more so for brand new companies that start from scratch and have so many options. For example, did they use RethinkDB for the real time features? Or something more conservative like RabbitMQ? How about their primary data store? Postgres? MySQL? Or something more trendy? What about the language? Python? Node.js? Something more adventurous, like go? Why? No, I am not affiliated in anyway with them. If you google my username you will see my project, which has nothing to do with them, and is a bit too Xrated for HN.
• cookiecaper 11y ago
  Someone is going to get the mix right on news aggregators one day and it's going to be big. Definitely a category of applications to keep a pulse on.
  • rhapsodic 11y ago
    I disagree that there's such a thing as THE right mix. Some people will prefer the wild west, and others will prefer heavily moderated forums. From the looks of the cartoon characters on the home page, Imzy looks like it's targeting the infant-to-toddler demographic.
    • egypturnash 11y ago
      I read it as more "taking the cute Reddit alien and running with it". YMMV obviously.
      • kickme444 11y ago
        I have spent a good amount of my last 6 years or so trying to be happy and helping others online to be happy. What we wanted with our mascot was something that evoked happiness. Admittedly it's a fine line to walk between cute/happy/childish and we need to find the right mix.
        • rhapsodic 11y ago
          The home page looks like a scene from the Teletubbies TV show. It does not look like something designed to appeal to well-adjusted adults.
          • calibraxis 11y ago
            Fine to me. Better to "err" on that side, as a signal to hate groups who fester on reddit. Furthermore, you can take it as self-mocking irony, if you prefer...
• dragonbonheur 11y ago
  That "get an invite" business is really annoying. Do they want people to join or not? It's an antiquated way to get attention...
  • pbtflakes 11y ago
    Reason being it's a semi-private beta, not public release. Invite-only lets them ease into managing a larger userbase and the associated content.
    • kickme444 11y ago
      It's true, this is the reason we are invite only right now.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    • simonw 11y ago
      It also makes it much easier for them to keep trolls out, at least at first while the community is defining itself.
  • ben0x539 11y ago
    Probably makes it easier to grow a nicer, more positive culture.
  • CM30 11y ago
    It might also be because people tend to be more interested in joining a site if the barrier to entry is higher. It comes across as like that exclusive nightclub where only the 'coolest' people manage to get in. Do that, and your community can get a lot of attention due to all the people desperately asking how to become a member of it.
• mccr8 11y ago
  "Quietly" should really get added to a list of semi-clickbaity words that get excised from Hacker News titles. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+quietly https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.c...
  • dang 11y ago
    I'm not sure it's quite that bad, but we'll take it out of the HN title for you.
• kickme444 11y ago
  Just to put it out there, we never said anything about warmer or fuzzier. We had no intention of having any press coverage for a few months, perhaps that was a mistake for this reason exactly.
  • sixQuarks 11y ago
    Hey, don't let negative comments get to you. Always happens on HN. Best example being DropBox launch, top comments said something along the lines of "this will never work". As a long-time reddit user, I like what I see so far. I submitted my email for invite, how long does that usually take?
    • minimaxir 11y ago
      Citing an outlier event is not strong evidence against negative-comments-are-always-wrong. The complaints about Imzy on this submission are justified by the commenters and, in my opinion, accurate.
      • sixQuarks 11y ago
        DropBox is certainly not an outlier on HN, it's just the largest example.
      • zedadex 11y ago
        He didn't say negative comments were always wrong, he said to not let them get to him.
    • kwgardner 11y ago
      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.
• nathancahill 11y ago
  4chan raid in 3.. 2..
• atomical 11y ago
  You created an account just to post this? Are you affiliated with them?
  • johansch 11y ago
    This is a pattern for new sites/services that suddenly get press and then get noticed in random aggregators (like HN). Since the site is new, it doesn't get that much attention from the aggregator's core audience, and any negative comments are swiftly downvoted after 10-20 employees register and downvote them via central command. This has happened to me on HN before; I guess because I take a perverse kind of enjoyment out of sabotaging astroturfing attempts. All of this makes perfect business sense; I would probably do it too if I were in this kind of position. It also makes sense for HN to build better defenses against attacks like this.
    • dang 11y ago
      Only established users can downvote. It takes 500 karma. That's the highest threshold we have.
      • johansch 11y ago
        Ah. That's good. I guess that's why it has taken a couple of hours for my comments to heavily downvoted (comments that were initially quite heavily upvoted) in my previous attempts at smashing obvious astroturfs - their @all-employees mail needs to get to the employees who happen to have that amount of HN karma. I do realize that going further than this in terms of defenses would be quite a complicated thing.
        • striking 11y ago
          Or perhaps there are people who disagree with you, and are not affiliated with that company. People who think that accusations of astroturfing are actually pretty mean, and shouldn't be made without evidence. People like me.
• shrugger 11y ago
  Should people be striving to remove friction in discourse in the first place? I mean, if something hurts to hear, surely that should sound the alarm that it's worth confronting, rather than running away from, right? Reddit already moderates discussions quite often, and the conversations there don't often reach the level of those here at HN, but still I wonder if maybe too much is too much when it comes to moderation. I could say something totally offensive and uncalled for on HN, so long as I back it up with why it needs to be said. In other words, I'd argue that the narrative isn't all that matters when it comes to discourse. Somewhat offtopic, when I look at their material and theming, I think about whether or not I think I'd find people there worth talking to, and that answer is no. ycombinator's landing page, or hell, even Reddit's front page, looks leagues more professional than the weird children's book graphics of Imzy. I just don't understand what's to be gained in the utilitarian sense by telling people what they can and cannot contribute to a discussion. I really like the idea of just throwing it all out there and then gathering up and working on whatever sticks. Maybe that's why Reddit is semi-appealing.
  • ythl 11y ago
    "If you can't understand why your toxic contribution to the community isn't wanted then you deserved to be silenced."
    • shrugger 11y ago
      I'm not defending intentional toxicity in particular. Personally, I think it's as valid a form as expression as any other, if less productive. I'm talking about things that people don't want to hear, but are relevant. Not kind, not necessarily necessary, but true.
  • true_religion 11y ago
    > looks leagues more professional than the weird children's book graphics of Imzy. Wait... isn't Imzy actually for children? Cutsy name, cutsy graphics, tight moderation. I thought this is basically the second coming of Gaia online.
    • 11y ago
• raverbashing 11y ago
  "Positive, healthy, diverse" Looks like fun. And by fun I mean more toxic than tumblr in echoing the same "positive" thoughts and certainly criticism against those who don't share the same opinions
  • Snargorf 11y ago
    "Healthy, positive communities" is an oxymoron. A healthy community has healthy and sometimes necessarily intense disagreement in its discourse (just as a healthy mind questions itself). A "positive" community has no disagreement at all - or at least none that go deep enough to resolve really serious differences. The only way to maintain a "positive" community the way they mean is to simply ban everyone with views outside a narrow opinion corridor. But whose opinions will define that allowed opinion corridor? From the euphemistically fuzzy language and focus on good emotions, I think I know.
    • wlkr 11y ago
      I don't expect it to take off but if it does it will be interesting to see how a casual community can possibly come from constrained discussion.
    • CM30 11y ago
      I don't know. A lot of small communities about very esoteric subjects tend to be both healthy and pretty much entirely positive. My secondary forum about the Wario series has a very upbeat atmosphere without too much in the way of disagreement, but that's only a thing because the subject itself only appeals to a limited amount of people. Same sort of thing with the forums I've seen based on the Super Mario Bros movie and the Mario RPG games. But that's always going to be impossible if a community has a mainstream appeal, since large communities will inevitably have different groups with different interests and opinions, and Dunbar's Number means people can only retain super close relationships with between 100 and 250 people.
      • jsprogrammer 11y ago
        >My secondary forum about the Wario series has a very upbeat atmosphere without too much in the way of disagreement ...but that is a niche topic about a fictional universe. When a discussion forum must deal with real universe topics, like funding community projects, dealing with violence, etc., the forum will import all of the existing viewpoints, many of which may be at odds with each other and/or not "positive" in relation to each other.
• emblem21 11y ago
  "Disney’s standard is quite clear: No kid will be harassed, even if they don’t know they are being harassed." "We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence: I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny. KA-Worlds abandoned that approach. Electric Communities is right, chat is out." http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...
• Gratsby 11y ago
  I see "warmer, fuzzier" and then I go to the site, and the example thread displayed in the mobile image has the following responses in it: * "The best evuh" * "hell yeah" * "Speechless, it's F*cking beautiful" It might be a more positive site, but it doesn't look like they are going for high quality discussion.
• ben_jones 11y ago
  Anyone else get reminded of Eugenics when hearing about stuff like this? It's not entirely a history of violence, but of keeping the "undesirables" out and congregating people with attributes they agree with in order to strengthen those attributes in the general population. I'm just saying slippery slope and all..
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• DanBC 11y ago
  That "avoid undue negativty" stuff went out the window, eh?
• lowglow 11y ago
  We're building a similar type of experience over at baqqer for organic communities to exist for people to talk about the things they love. We could use some feedback from the community if you have some time. https://baqqer.com/explore/tags/startups https://baqqer.com/explore/tags/startups This url might move to https://baqqer.com/groups/startups https://baqqer.com/groups/startups or https://baqqer.com/communities/startups https://baqqer.com/communities/startups because I'm currently actively working on the codebase.
  • bpchaps 11y ago
    Really odd critique. You might get a lot of confusion from people seeing it as an underlined URL and mentally think "bagger" initially. Especially since the a and the first q kind of continue where the next letter's curl ends. Part of the problem might just be that two Qs in a row don't really mentally parse well when read - for me, at least.
    • deelowe 11y ago
      This is exactly what I though "bagger? Is that a low rider website?
      • lowglow 11y ago
        Yeah, I see what you're saying. I wonder what would help? An entirely new name? It's been on my mind quite a bit, thinking about what can simultaneously convey community, prototyping, making, and growing. It's difficult.
• cm3 11y ago
  My biggest complaint with reddit and hn is that there is a down-vote button. It serves no purpose the way I consume and participate in discussions. If I don't agree or vehemently disagree with something I pass over it and that's it. I've had the opportunity to downvote and even when I had a strong opinions against what's stated in a comment I never once downvoted. In fact, I've never used the downvoting link at all. Also, I find it enlightening to read opinions of people who are on the opposite end of some belief spectrum. It broadens my view and helps me better formulate what I think. Hence, you either ban accounts for disturbing discussions repeatedly or just let everyone say whatever they think. A voting system that tries to hide comments is a bad idea. I guess my issue is with what JBReefer calls groupthink and brigading. I personally would have called stuff-people-don't-like-to-hear. Slashdot's systems used to work very well, but it's fallen apart due to the current occupants of their comment sections. HN already is an echo chamber of sorts, so trying to filter that even more is wrong.
  • JamilD 11y ago
    I think that the point of the downvote button on HN is to reduce the visibility of comments that don't contribute to the discourse, not to dismiss dissenting opinions. This is helped by the fact that it's used sparingly and is only available to people with a certain karma threshold (an imperfect metric, but one that's worked reasonably well so far)
    • nv-vn 11y ago
      Agreed, the karma barrier does help a decent amount. But even on HackerNews I see the same "downvoting mob mentality" occasionally where all comments expressing certain views or disagreeing with comments of more popular users are reduced in visibility because of down voting. In a way, it gives the higher ranked users a platform to push their own posts higher/other posts lower, not unlike the way capitalism can widen economic gaps between the rich and the poor. While it is helpful to hide comments that don't have much to do with the discussion, upvoting related comments has the same effect without the downside of making the comment invisible to people who want to see it and without impacting the user's status on HN.
  • 11y ago
• guscost 11y ago
  Here's the challenge: No community aggregator will ever be able to filter and promote exactly the stuff you in particular want to see. Everyone has different tastes and opinions and the only thing that can possibly come from community-driven aggregation is list of the most popular stuff in that community. You'll have to actually research and filter content yourself to get any better results. The best crowdsourced results seem to come from specialized communities (HN, subreddits, maybe this new site). For anything better you'll have to go through the volumes of unwanted content yourself, or have a trusted curator do it for you.
• pessimizer 11y ago
  There have always been heavily moderated forums for users to interact with representatives of media corporations. That's why Reddit and 4chan got so huge and influential (not being that.) I can't tell what the secret sauce is supposed to be from this article.
• nv-vn 11y ago
  The article doesn't really explain how anything is actually going to work in practice. By 'warmier and fuzzier' do we mean it's targeted at kids (as the graphics might suggest)? In that case, will they be moderating profanity and whatever they deem inappropriate for children? Or is it just going to be based on reducing harassment (as they mentioned in the article)? And in that case, what would constitute harassment and how would it be dealt with? It seems like the idea is very broad without an actual target at what it should be. I don't think Reddit was the right model to base it off of for what they're attempting to do.
  • kwgardner 11y ago
    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.
    • nv-vn 11y ago
      Thanks for reaching out to answer my questions. I was really confused visiting the website after I read the article because barely anything matched up with the descriptions they gave.
• user10001 11y ago
  Reddit seems pretty adolescent in general. What comes to my mind when I think of it is cartoons/comics, video games, celebrities and mainstream news. So does warm and fuzzy mean they are catering to a more mature audience or what?
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• ForFreedom 11y ago
  Why do they have Teletubbies, that look like the head of the alien logo with 3 horns
• rayalez 11y ago
  Who wants to try it out - come join our startup community on Imzy: https://www.imzy.com/startup https://www.imzy.com/startup
• ryanlol 11y ago
  I think this screenshot I took from their site sums up how this is going to end up. https://i.imgur.com/X7z4OnF.png https://i.imgur.com/X7z4OnF.png I can't imagine "This is the best evuh!!!!" being a positive contribution to any conversation.
• chippy 11y ago
  What every social network effect platform or application ignores is group psychology. All conflicts on these services can be boiled down to how human groups work. If these services addressed group psychology up front and at the forefront of their solution, then we could see people being more aware of their group and groups and where they stand as individuals. I'd like to see an attempt to reduce conflict and increase collaboration between groups, peoples, ideologies, for example. The "problems" that all these sites are labeled with all boil down to a mass of different people clashing against each other. They are not problems, they are symptoms of how groups are behaving on the internet, many for the first time, and people within their groups do not have the tools to deal with other groups properly.
• tdyen 11y ago
  I find in some forums the issue is the group think enforced by moderators. The StackOverflow forums suffer from this as they are community moderated and many questions get closed as Off Topic which basically are chats about something tangential to the area or opinion but are valuable none the less or I wouldn't have gone to the page to begin with. Effectively moderators promote group think. Some bizarre things Ive seen in its computer science forum are questions being closed when about things like "what are the current areas of research in blah?". Somehow its gathered a bunch of crap mods and computer science doesn't really get discussed there. If its truly out of forum then these forums need to allow some kind of "Open Discussion" tag or move to another forum ability.
• stesch 11y ago
  I'm a long time Reddit user. Somehow I missed this information.
• StanislavPetrov 11y ago
  For one I'm glad that this guy is offering a "safe" place for discussion. Hopefully all the people who need to be shielded from "offensive" ideas will gravitate to this website. In a truly ideal world, sterilization would be part of the enrollment process.
• StevePerkins 11y ago
  The highest-quality discussion that I've found on the Internet generally came from "phpBB"-based website forums, built around specific interests or communities. Part of the reason for that is the common interest in a shared niche. However, I believe that most important factor by far is the lack of up or down "voting" buttons. On any platform with voting, the "imaginary Internet points" tend to drive the user experience. Upvotes trigger reward behavior, just like the social aspect of Farmville-style mindless freemium games. Downvotes trigger social anxiety and drive behavior also. Trolls relish it, while normal users are often insecure about it. Even on an "elite" platform like Hacker News, how many comments basically boil down to, "Hey guys, why did some of you downvote my last comment???". Basically, voting turns a discussion platform into an MMO video game for a large portion of the userbase. It leads to groupthink, "brigades" and manipulation, low-quality memes and running jokes, etc. I think its negative impact on high-quality discussion easily matches or exceeds its positive impact on self-moderation. Ultimately, I think the ideal model of discussion platform governance is a "benevolent dictatorship" of active mods, without user voting. It doesn't scale very well, but it's the common denominator among the highest-quality communities I've ever seen. The problem is since a micro-generation of Internet users is now accustomed to the MMO model, online discussion without voting is just... well... boring. Going back to that is like trading processed corn syrup for organic vegetables. Most aren't going to do it. Downvote if you disagree. :)
  • rustynails 11y ago
    This is a great comment. I'll expand it with a few other points that are along similar lines to what you mention. Most (if not all) platforms suffer from 2 extremes, open discussion involves conflict which is seen as bad but can end up with insightful discussion and robust conclusion. Secondly, forums suffer from prejudice of the moderators. There was a good example recently of this in a HN posting on moderators. I'll illustrate with a topical example for modern times. Why do people use the term misogynist instead of sexist? It's to reinforce a belief that sexism is a male behaviour, which, in itself is sexist. If you read the recent article on moderation, sexism didn't rate a mention but misogyny did. In other words, certain types of thinking are forbidden and some forms of prejudice are encouraged. When I read about this new spinoff, my first two thoughts were on avoidance of robust discussion and the prejudice and politics of the founders and moderators. Here's hoping they don't make the same politically correct but prejudiced mistakes that most sites make.
• stegosaurus 11y ago
  Isn't the actual issue that every discussion seems to descend into politics? Could you create a platform without that? I can't say I've noticed issues on cat photo subreddits, or /r/unixporn, or whatever else. There seems to be this slow and inevitable descent into discussing politics at every available opportunity, and not in a humourous sense. If you create a subreddit about some social issue, then the social issue will be discussed there.
• romanovcode 11y ago
  So the "safer" means more group-think and getting banned if you disagree with someone?
• randommodnar 11y ago
  My big question: how do you deal with community leadership and moderation? Is the first person to create a particular community that community's dictator for life? How can large communities, with populations larger than many nations, achieve practical, representative, and accountable self-governance?