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Imzy is shutting down
- minimaxir 9y agoWait, what? They raised a $8M Series A less than a year ago! https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/imzy-raises-8-million-series-a-round-opens-communities-platform-to-everyone/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/imzy-raises-8-million-seri... That was also the time it was opened to the public. This shutdown appears to be a strong counterpoint against Reddit alternatives becoming an inherently successful business prospect.
- GuiA 9y agoYeah, ~10 employees in SF + office rent + other various costs (lawyers, accountants, the odd office party, etc.) will easily burn through $4M a year. Edit: oh wait, that's $8M in October 2016, not 2015 - ie 8 months ago. Burning $1M a month does seem quite high. Maybe they're shutting down early to give some money back to investors?
- kickme444 9y agoWe're in SLC and still have the majority of that money left.
- arkitaip 9y agoAre you working on another startup? Will you use that money to finance the new startup?
- ontoillogical 9y agoSLC?
- codezero 9y agoSalt Lake City
- stale2002 9y agoGood on you! To many startups these days just try to throw good money after bad.
- fictioncircle 9y agoI know it's probably out of your hands but if you could AGPL the codebase, pitch decks, etc. It would be wonderful to help ppl learn, if nothing else.
- drewrv 9y agoI'll bet either they're returning some of that to investors, or the money was tranched to begin with and contingent on a certain amount of growth.
- koolba 9y agoHow did they spend $8M in one year? The pic in your linked article shows 12 people. If they didn't have traction, they shouldn't have exorbitant server costs either. So where's it all go?
- lillesvin 9y agoThey didn't spend them all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411586
- r721 9y ago>a strong counterpoint against Reddit alternatives becoming an inherently successful business prospect It looks like Voat is not in good financial shape too: https://voat.co/v/announcements/1866053 https://voat.co/v/announcements/1866053 https://voat.co/v/announcements/1881376 https://voat.co/v/announcements/1881376
- minimaxir 9y agoVoat never raised millions in venture capital, though. (and can't given their content/userbase)
- erikpukinskis 9y agoThey will probably have a hard time raising from institutional investors, but my guess is their userbase is primarily single men who spend large amounts of time on the computer, a decent subset of whom have spending cash. The "goats" are also people who feel like they've been politically badgered into a corner, so I suspect they will spend to maintain their last refuge. Your will to fight goes up as the space you are confined to gets smaller. I think there's definitely a market for a "social network of last resort" in this age of community guidelines. Which... I think is a great thing. It's good that Twitter, Reddit, etc, are being aggressive about harassment. That promotes the freer flow of certain ideas (feminism, social justice, etc). But then that necessitates an alternate space for the free flow of opposing viewpoints (harassment filters out the weak, feminism is cancer, this woman should be raped for her opinions, etc).
- djsumdog 9y ago> primarily single men I was at this event with a close friend of mine and noticed the distinctive Voat logo on her phone. "Are you .. are browsing Voat?" I'd classify her as libertarian-esque. I know it's just one datapoint, but I don't think the voat userbase is as 1-dimensional is you think.
- Frondo 9y agoOh man, I know this is not always the most popular viewpoint, but I would be happy to live in a world in which "this woman should be raped for her opinions" had no place to be expressed, ever.
- TylerE 9y agoReddit itself is not a successful business project.
- exelius 9y agoIt is if your goal is to control (or at least influence) the Internet zeitgeist without appearing to...
- TylerE 9y agoThat's a propaganda success, not a business success. Reddit has always lost money, and continues to lose money quarter after quarter.
- mbesto 9y agoMy theory - Reddit is kept alive by YC and YC-affiliates to keep the "hype" engine around their investments alive. In other words "remember, this is from the smart people that invested in the Frontpage of the Internet™!"
- detaro 9y agoSince when is being associated with Reddit a huge signal of success, esp. compared to other sucessful startups?
- mbesto 9y agoSince it's been on the homepage of the YC website: http://www.ycombinator.com/ http://www.ycombinator.com/ and regularly gets talked about as being association with YC's success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator_(company)
- btreesOfSpring 9y agoSerena Williams might have an opinion on that.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kickme444 9y agoHi, I'm the founder of Imzy. It's a hard day but I want to make myself available, especially to entrepreneurs who may have questions. This last 2 years has been fun, and hard and I've learned a lot. You can reply here or email me at dan@imzy.com I also have an amazing staff of developers, community minded folks, product people, executives, who are looking for work. Many of them mare open to moving (we are in Salt Lake City) and all are open to remote work. They are all very talented. Please drop me a line if you're interested.
- wehadfun 9y agoWhy did you shut it down?
- kickme444 9y agoWe were unable to find growth in any cohort.
- wehadfun 9y agoGrowth as in $$$ or visitors of the site
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kickme444 9y agoTo clarify, growth of users.
- geofft 9y agoWhy did you need to find this? Was this a pressure from investors, or did you determine internally that growth wouldn't eventually take off, ever? (One of the things that worries me a lot about taking venture capital is the pressure to grow quickly over growing well / sustainably, so I'm pretty curious about this....)
- williamstein 9y agoI spent 5 minutes on the site, and I still have no clue what it is... I would like to know, since it's interesting to understand what people have tried and gave up on.
- drewrv 9y agoIt was like reddit with a shinier but harder to use UI, and less racists.
- nebabyte 9y ago> shinier but harder to use give it time. reddit's not done shittying up their UI - hell, they're just getting started :)
- r721 9y agoYeah, did you see this? https://i.redd.it/qzl5uzte483y.png https://i.redd.it/qzl5uzte483y.png /shudders/
- shakestheclown 9y agoThey need to get rid of the sidebar. How often are you thinking I wish I could read the subreddit rules and moderator list constantly while I am browsing content? Obviously the sidebar content has value to be placed somewhere, but the sidebar along with 95% of custom CSS make the site even uglier than it needs to be.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago> less racists isn't that mostly a function of the userbase? any social network is bounded to attract radicals from all sides, especially one that allows anonymous users, and those are the ones that produces the highest content/user
- dboreham 9y agoFewer racists. Or did you actually mean people who on average were less racist?
- nik736 9y agoSurprise, surprise. Last time I heared something about Imzy was when they were handing out beta invites.
- seibelj 9y agoTurns out the vast majority of people don't want to spend their lives in a permanent "safe space"[0]. That was a fast flameout [0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/25/a-chat-with-imzy-co-founder-jessica-moreno-on-building-a-kinder-online-community/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/25/a-chat-with-imzy-co-founde...
- geofft 9y agoThat's a pretty funny comment to make on Hacker News, which is regularly accused of being a hivemind and downvoting comments / censoring stories that challenge its ideologies.
- seibelj 9y agoWasn't this a real-world, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is bet that people wanted a heavily moderated forum for communication?
- geofft 9y agoYes, but it's not at all clear to me that it failed because that bet failed. It's not at all clear to me why it failed, period -- the post says that they "were not able to find our place in the market", which could mean lots of things, e.g., that there were lots of users but no obvious monetization strategy. In general, "Startup X failed" is extremely weak evidence for "People don't want the product that startup X was building." Take Rdio for example: given the success of Spotify, Amazon Music, and others, it would be absolutely incorrect to conclude from Rdio's failure that people didn't want on-demand music in their browser or a mobile app for a fixed fee.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe comment being ironic-in-context doesn't make it any the less true.
- GoatHerderson 9y agoWhat did Imzy do? Anyone know?
- cookiecaper 9y agoThey were a Reddit clone that tried to be more mainstream both in UX and content moderation.
- Danihan 9y agoReddit never would have been reddit without gonewild and jailbait.
- r721 9y agoHere is a TechCrunch piece from last year: https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/18/anti-reddit-platform-imzy-partners-with-lena-dunham-to-build-online-community-for-lenny-letter/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/18/anti-reddit-platform-imzy-...
- GoatHerderson 9y agoOh, I thought Imzy was putting on a show. Character looked fun! Sounds like it had nothing to do with the project...
- arkitaip 9y ago"The site will go dark on June 23rd." (1) Two years is too little time to create a Reddit alternative (2) shutting it down in less than 30 days is really bad.
- jmcgough 9y agoReddit took off within months of its launch. ~30 days to download data is pretty standard.
- killin_dan 9y agoReddit spammed fake comments for months in order to gain traction... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-reddit-got-hu... (I'm not proposing Vice as a great source, but it's the first thing that came up on google.)
- nostrademons 9y agoI first checked them out the day they opened (July 05), and was using them daily by January 06. There were definitely real people and a growing community by then. I wouldn't attribute their success to fake accounts, although the fake accounts were probably necessary to seed the community. Rather, they took off once they added comments (Dec 05, IIRC). It's the same story as Whatsapp (messaging), YouTube (related videos), and AirBnB (pro photos): there was one feature that they really needed for product/market fit, and once they added it, people started using the product on their own.
- killin_dan 9y agoSteve Huffman himself attributes early success to the spam campaign.
- spyhi 9y agoYep, because otherwise the site would have seemed like a ghost town despite growing because of the 1-9-90 rule. They had to keep submissions going until they attracted the 10% of users that makes a community truly come alive.
- acjohnson55 9y agoIt seems perverse that I only learn about a lot of products when news of their shutdown hits HN. I'm not exactly sure I'm sure what Imzy is for, but it seems in some ways similar to a concept I had for online communities built around discussion of content. Might have been right up my alley.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago> seems in some ways similar to a concept I had for online communities built around discussion of content. Like Reddit?
- acjohnson55 9y agoA little, but organized more so on individuals and groups than verticals.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoLike Google Plus Circles? :P
- Macha 9y agoReddit's new profile, Digg v4 both tried this. Both were not popular with the userbase.
- munificent 9y ago> I'm not exactly sure I'm sure what Imzy is for If I recall, it got started right around the time there was a lot of shenanigans going on at Reddit around corporate drama, censorship, and the nastier subreddits. Imzy and Voat popped up to try to offer an alternative. (My impression is that Imzy was aiming for less awfulness and Voat aims for less censorship.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
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- DanBC 9y agoImzy was a nice place to be. Some of the problems I had: 1) The interface was confusing. Making posts was confusing. 2) Users were allowed to create communities, and they did. There were a gajillion of very tiny communities. This fragments the userbase and makes each tiny community seem dead. 3) Not enough users. Seriously, seeding the community with posts is a good thing. It sets tone and gives people something to interact with. If you're a startup in this space you need to hire a few people on minimum wage and get them to spend 9 hours a day making posts on different accounts. It's a shame to see it go.
- nebabyte 9y ago4) login required. Seeded content does nothing to attract new users when behind a wall. Hell, I had an account and the content still felt a degree removed from when I wanted it. Even a static cached digest would at least attract new users. Agree on it being a shame though. Imzy was founded by a contingent of "the good admins" who've left reddit, as far as I can tell.
- wehadfun 9y agoRequired login is a problem.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sanswork 9y agoI tried switching to them a few months back as I was tired of the negative stuff on reddit so reddit but nice was awesome sounding. After a day someone posted a bunch of spam posts in one of the communities in the form of "hey I came across this blog suggesting this what do you think" same user multiple links to the same blog with each article trying to sell the same supplement affiliate offer. I reported it as spam and was told that they'd just hired a spam expert who determined it wasn't spam. I decided that if their spam matster couldn't recognise affiliate offer spam the place would be 90% affiliate offers soon enough as the affiliate forums heard about it so I stopped visiting that very day.
- phyzome 9y agoI'll miss the community. Really nice folks. :-(
- antonber 9y agoI run an online community. Building a safe space is extremely difficult and full of grey area, online or offline. There's a fine line between the freedom to express yourself and offending someone else. As a community moderator, choosing what is and isn't offensive is by definition subjective. It's an impossible task for a global, multi-cultural community. You end up with a vanilla message board where most interesting thought/debate is stifled. Reminds me of the campus "safe space" debate.
- prodmerc 9y agoYou really don't want to cater to the easily offendable, imo. I remember writing an ebook on affiliate marketing when it was a new thing (free for email subscribers), which had the word Bullshit stamped on an image. Two people said maybe I should tone down the language heh. Fuck right off, buddy :D
- rexpop 9y ago> You really don't want to cater to the easily offendable, imo. This attitude rings with the dismissive tone of the unapologetically privileged who — rebelling against the slightest whiff of shame — are quick to marginalize any and every voice with whom empathizing would require their stingily hoarded emotional labor and energy. Ironically, communities populated by such misers enthusiastically take umbrage with the peculiar struggles of their own, insular milieu. Twinkle, twinkle, little snowflake.
- 55555 9y agoI feel that you're making a lot of assumptions about a stranger. Also, the groups of 'oppressed' and 'easily offended' people don't perfectly overlap. Overall I find your comment confusing because I'm not as 'caught up' with this movement but I'd love to hear more of your thoughts if you feel like elaborating. Maybe try using small words like Trump does.
- stale2002 9y agoThe advantage of being someone who doesn't cater to the offended is you can respond to something like this by saying: "Lol! You nailed it. Fortunately for me, I don't care. You mad bro?"
- sigi45 9y agoWho? What? Ah whatever
- javabr 9y agoyet another startup I only hear about when they are shutting down.
- mysterydip 9y agoAgreed. Why is that, and how can it be avoided? I guess that's the million dollar question.
- cphoover 9y agothat's probably why they are shutting down? Bad marketing?
- brian-armstrong 9y agoI don't know anything about Imzy but this page traps my back button. I hate that :(
- cocktailpeanuts 9y agoI wish the founders well, but I feel like people nowadays give up too early. And this is one of the most extreme examples of that. Most community sites take a while to grow and you really never know what will happen. Even Reddit was sort of a failure vs. Digg and they sold it off to conde nast. It was only later AFTER the sale when Digg messed up on their own and Reddit enjoyed success as a side effect. You really shouldn't be building a community site if you're so impatient to give up so early. I mean the site opened to public in October 26 of 2016, that's exactly 7 months in existence. It's probably because they raised so much money, which is why you should never raise too much money when you're trying to build a community site. I have never seen a successful community site that raised that much money before getting traction.
- TekMol 9y agoI have never seen a successful community site that raised that much money before getting traction. What are some successful community sites?
- djsumdog 9y agoUgh...sadly Voat. They recently ran into budget problems (they run at $6k/month) and were able to raise enough to keep running for a few months and get volunteers help move it off Azure's overpriced hosting. So there's an example of site, without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism. I still like browsing it, just to see the opinions, try to understand where others are coming from and expose myself to viewpoints I disagree with. There is some good content and some viewpoints I agree with, but I wish more reasonable people on there weren't so drown out. I think moderate people do try, but after barrages of downvotes, they give up (new accounts can't downvote either; you have to build 100 comment points -- which keeps that group think going).
- FireBeyond 9y ago> without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism Probably not helped when they get kicked off payment processors or fundraiser sites for openly hosting underage nudity, sorry, "jailbait"...
- icedchai 9y agoWhy are you shutting down so soon? ~2 years doesn't seem like a very long time.
- distantsounds 9y agonothing on the home page or "learn more" link actually shows anything about the site, just that it's yet another online community. I'm not surprised this shut down so quickly, you're giving almost no details to the user at all about how it works, what it looks like, or any sort of interactive demo. requiring someone to sign up just to see it in action is silly.
- timdeneau 9y agoI wonder what their bounce rate was. Seems like such a strange decision to put a community behind mandatory registration… should have dropped you into some public topics instead.
- chrshawkes 9y agoHow in the world did they raised 8 Million a mere 8 months ago is baffling to me
- lowglow 9y agoI checked out Imzy a couple of weeks ago: 1. Barrier to entry was a login (I had previously gone here and left when it first started, and didn't sign in. I eventually created an account just to check it out.) 2. Interface was confusing 3. Exploration felt difficult 4. It wasn't immediately obvious why I was there 5. Not enough juice/content to bring me back tl;dr: Social networks + open domain communities are hard.
- killin_dan 9y agoI disagree that it's hard, but rather that Imzy was doing a very poor job. Look at Twitter. It wasn't a revolutionary UX masterpiece in the beginning, it was useful. Imzy was never useful. It's not useful to talk to a bunch of people who need censorship to feel comfortable talking to other humans. I'd argue it's the least rewarding group of people to have a conversation with in the first place. 1) I agree that more sites' content should be public in the sense that logged-out users should be able to browse. Twitter does the best job at this. 2) I only used it for a few days, very early on, but yeah it was pretty bad. I've seen much worse though. 3) I explored quite a bit, but kept finding low-quality users and content. 4) To me, the killer feature of Imzy was for people who were """triggered""" somewhere else on the internet and need a website that forces people to be cuddlebuddies and censors the living shit out of any inconvenient truths. I never actually posted on Imzy, but all the signaling there lead me to believe that that was the case for the platform. 5) Yeah, I only kept using it for those few days to see if anything/anybody cool was going to be on there, and there were a few minor headlines about it. I am exactly 0% surprised that it's shutting down. I can't believe it made it this far to begin with, there's no way they ever made more than 5 digits, it was just an awful product with no space to exist in and no money to make from being there.
- lowglow 9y agoI'm actually curious about the internal analytics and feedback processes and KPIs use to make design and development decisions on the site. That would be the most useful outcome of all of this: what tools they used, what drove their decisions, and why that control loop failed.
- chrisabrams 9y agoI still didn't get my stickers....
- TekMol 9y agoOctober 2016: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/imzy https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/imzy "We now have a number of years to take our time and get the community thing right." Less then a year later they give up. Why? Some minutes ago, there was a post of the founder here saying they still have most of that $8m: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411586
- detaro 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14411586 ?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stupidhn 9y agoI'm on HackerNews multiple times every day. Imzy is a company that came, raised over $10MM in funding, and went out of business in 7 months. This is the first I've heard of them. How on earth does that happen? It's inexplicable.
- r721 9y agoThere were a couple of big discussions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11556017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11556017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13145922
- kickme444 9y agoWe were actually a company just shy of 2 years.
- imchillyb 9y agoYou were a /usable platform/ for just shy of 7 months. Being a company and having a usable product are not similar things.
- Danihan 9y ago"The CEO worked for reddit... therefore he passes our elitist / in-group biases! Let's throw money at him... oops"
- joshu 9y agoWhat was this? It appears to be some sort of community, yet the front page offers zero discoverability?
- bbctol 9y agoBeen on there for a while, but not posting much as... there isn't much to post about. Something of a pity, but also very expected.
- owenversteeg 9y agoThat's too bad. I tried it out, made an account and posted and everything, but there were too few people and everything was very tricky to figure out. I wish there was a simple Reddit clone that focused on positivity, like Imzy, but it seems that all of these things are way too expensive. I mean cmon, eight million dollars (in the last round alone) wasn't enough to keep a link sharing site alive? How is that possible? What on earth were they spending that money on?
- prodmerc 9y agoI sort of don't like how centralized Reddit is, but there is indeed a subreddit for everything. UpliftingNews, Wholesomememes seem to be very popular, positive shit being the main content
- 5_minutes 9y agoLooks like a wonderful product. Too bad I find out about it on the day they're shutting down.
- GlobalServices 9y agoReddit may have more people, but are they profitable either? I'm not sure if they're a particularly "good" business.
- buro9 9y agoI worked on https://microco.sm https://microco.sm with mattrco and it was forum/community software too. It looks like https://www.lfgss.com/ https://www.lfgss.com/ The #1 problem with a community startup: Every community is itself a startup. The revenue math and compounded growth all makes sense, but you need to assume that few of your communities survive, and that they each take as long as a startup to get traction and grow. If it takes you 1 year to get an MVP of sufficient quality to start attracting communities, it's still going to take the community at least a year to have sufficient attractiveness to bring in members. And it's unlikely that either will take as short as a year, and if it did that isn't going to be enough to bring in another round of funds to keep going. Community startups are hard.
- rats 9y agomicrocosm looks very sleek, congrats
- drewmeyers24 9y ago"Community startups are hard." Ain't that the truth. I've got scars to prove it.
- Huhty 9y agoMy team and I launched a Reddit-like platform called Snapzu (http://snapzu.com http://snapzu.com) in 2013, a couple years before Imzy launched and I know exactly what the struggles/hurdles are in building community and generating consistent but vital user growth. | However, we are extremely lean (all of us are working part time and out of pocket) so our monthly costs of operations are extremely low, allowing us to keep going. We also have no outside funding, so basically no investors breathing down our necks, or any rush to monetize. That being said, our original base plan (like Imzy's) never really materialized (because of the harsh "network effects" AKA "chicken or egg problem"), so we've since pivoted allowing us to use most of our core tech (of which we admit we slightly over-built at the time) in a separate (but still completely tied in) SaaS-like service that allows bloggers to have their own Reddit-like communities for their blogs. Utilizing a voting community on a blog brings several previously untapped benefits which I won't get into here, but our recently launched landing page at the Blog Enhancement Suite (http://blogenhancement.com http://blogenhancement.com) explains it. Note: It's still a work in progress and we're playing around and A/B testing the copy, but the service is live. I've been paying attention to and observing Imzy ever since I learned about it, which was shortly after their launch. Some mistakes I feel they made, right off the top of my head: 1. No front page (for lurkers): They force users to join to be able to view content. The 90/9/1 rule is real, ESPECIALLY in the "community" space. 90% of users just want to lurk and that's just the nature of the internet. It's probably the same here on HN. 9% will participate in some ways, voting, etc. 1% will submit and comment, etc. 2. Lacking in social media: I've been following the @Imzy Twitter account for the entire duration, and most of their Twitter activity basically stopped approx 5-6 months ago. At that point I had a feeling that they we're starting to "give up" because it likely wasn't effective enough for the time they we're dedicating to it. We faced that exact problem, but we split up our content into 15 main categories (science, gaming, politics, tech, etc) and have Twitter, Medium, Wordpress, etc profiles for each. We then automated them using IFTTT using our category RSS feeds so that each account automatically tweets/shares the best posts as submitted by our users into said category. 3. No real target market: It's really hard to get people to stick around when most of them DO NOT share most common interests. Again, it's why we made sure to categorize the content so that people that want Science stuff can easily find it and/or subscribe to the Science RSS, follow the Science Twitter account, etc. We now also only focus on attracting bloggers, our new REAL target market (in a business sense) after the pivot. 4. Giveaways: Imzy was giving away all these plushys and stickers and stuff in return for loyalty. I just don't believe many people care about gimmicky things like that and it must drive up the costs/expenses that could otherwise be spent elsewhere with more effectiveness. Imzy IMHO also did a lot right. I envy their PR tactics/strategy, as they got mentioned on all the top tech sites numerous times. Their devs/team made a solid app/website. I wish the Imzy folks best of luck in their future endeavors.
- DavidJM 9y agoDo you think if you pivoted into a niche like drivetribe you could have survived? https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/533ml7/our_journey_building_imzy_for_the_first_year/ https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/533ml7/our_journe...
- mindcrime 9y agoHow did they go about promoting the site? I ask only because I have never even heard of Imzy until just now.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThere were a couple of splashes of coverage about June/July 2016, and again in October. Faded out quickly after that.
- spiderfarmer 9y agoHow do you burn through 8 million dollars in 2 years on what's basically a forum? This is crazy.
- fs111 9y agobay area salaries?
- chrshawkes 9y agoThey are front Salt Lake City
- orionblastar 9y agoI like Imzy and am sad they are shutting down. Reddit needs alternatives to it that works better. I am working with someone to open source their Kr5ddit code on Github by rewriting it. Look at http://k666.kr5ddit.com http://k666.kr5ddit.com which is a start with no money invested yet. Look at http://kr5ddit.com http://kr5ddit.com to see how it uses bitcoins to buy Kr5ddits used to moderate stories and comments. It is not complete yet, but it is a good idea and allows anonymous posts without an account, but you can't earn kr5ddits without an account. Imzy tequired invites to get an account.
- dredmorbius 9y agoWhy does Reddit need alternatives? What would "works better" entail?
- jjman 9y agoWill you guys follow the trend recently and Open Source your code base?
- Overtonwindow 9y agoWhenever I see a startup shutting down, sadly, my first thought is: Who? Granted I don't work in technology, but I'm a big user, fan, consumer, etc. So I have to wonder: Am I just missing these companies, is their market too narrow, or do they have trouble reaching a larger audience?
- wott 9y agoHey, Imzy is the first one of those startups you are talking about, that I did know before reading its "incredible journey" message :-) It's also one of the very few the purpose of which I understood. Granted, I didn't think it was a startup but a hobby project run by 2 or 3 volunteers on their free time... That millions and millions are invested in such projects is a mystery to me.
- sideproject 9y agoIf you're looking to create your own community, I run a small tool called HelloBox https://www.hellobox.co https://www.hellobox.co We started as a "build your own HackerNews" then we transitioned it to a "build your community" tool. We've been going for about 3 years - a plenty of work to do and undergoing a pretty big re-design at the moment.
- pervycreeper 9y agoThis was inevitable from the very beginning. Disagreement forms the kernel of worthwhile discussion. An argument can also be made that "echo-chamber bubbles" are affecting people personally, intellectually, and culturally in tremendously harmful ways, so this is a very tiny step in the right direction.
- davidivadavid 9y agoCan that argument be made persuasively, though? I for one do not enjoy online "debating" one bit and try to avoid it as much as possible. I see it mostly as people shouting at each other. Meanwhile, the best "debates" I've ever had were with people within what could arguably be described as my "filter bubble."
- crsv 9y agoOverall execution feels lazy. Can't believe someone funded this team at a series A at that valuation.
- crsv 9y agoThe execution overall at Imzy seems lazy. Kind of shocked that a founding team that raised an A last October is folding in May. Embarrassing performance all around.
- INTPenis 9y agoI clearly remember when Imzy and Voat sprung up out of reddit turbulence, trying to ride a wave of discontent in the reddit community. I'm sorry to say I was cynical and doubted they would last. You can't force a community to happen. I never followed Voat but I did give imzy a chance and the feeling was very much that they were trying to force a community. Personally I think the best chance of building a community is to build it around a service. Look at reddit and imgur for examples. They both started out offering a pretty specific service to users but grew into communities because people could use the service in a social way. I believe there are other examples of this but mentioning instagram feels silly since they're now owned by THE largest community. But it's the same thing, they were a photo website and now every 13 year old is there. I'm sure there are more examples of this. Offer a service to people, something mildly useful or entertaining, and attach a social aspect to it and I'm sure you'll get a community to spring up.
- anant90 9y agohttp://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the-network/ http://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the-... This article by Chris Dixon sums up what you're trying to say — couldn't agree more with it!
- lyra_comms 9y agoIf you will miss Imzy, check out Lyra - we're a nonprofit conversation service which respects language and the reader's attention. www.hellolyra.com We're also a nonprofit and don't accept ad revenue or investment, so please excuse the plug. In contrast to Imzy, we're more focussed on conversation than community-building, but this enables us to make our sharing model harrassment-proof by design.
- drewmeyers24 9y agoJust checked your home page. Really no idea what the service is after 3 seconds of looking. Sadly, that's all most people are going to give you when they land on your website.
- henrygrew 9y agoImzy suffered from the big launch syndrome which always fails, instead they should have applied the proven path approach http://course.feverbee.com/the-proven-path/theprovenpath.pdf http://course.feverbee.com/the-proven-path/theprovenpath.pdf community startups are hard but success is possible with lots of patience, i run https://www.kenyatalk.com/index.php https://www.kenyatalk.com/index.php and can vouch for the proven path