Heat Street has gotten an early look at Imzy, the new social media networking forum created by fired Reddit exec Dan McComas.
The site, which says it is “backed by the investors of Patreon, Twitter, and Foursquare,” promises to be a warmer and fuzzier Reddit, a safe space if you will, opposed to its wilder, laissez faire forebearer.
McComas was fired from Reddit at a turbulent time. R/FatPeopleHate, along with other controversial subreddits, had been banned from the site. The firing of his colleague Victoria Taylor, who had been in charge of the site’s popular AMA (ask me anything) forum, had prompted a site-wide revolt.
McComas was a critic of what he saw as toxicity enabled by Reddit’s attitude toward unrestrained free speech, so he set out to create something nicer.
For the most part, Imzy — which is in an invitation-only beta testing phase — appears to achieve this stated goal. Its cutesy aesthetic creates a warmer environment than Reddit’s old-school minimalism. Browsing of the site revealed no heated arguments or name calling, although the site is still young and contains few controversial threads.
The newsfeed appears to have a Tumblr-like feel to it, as opposed to Reddit’s plainer message-board aesthetic.
The site has a tipping function, where you can tip moderators, users, and communities, with an option to give to Imzy itself. This function was probably incorporated to encourage more proactive moderation. A safer forum can only work with dedicated moderators policing the content.
As far as the communities themselves, the political makeup slants to the left. Plenty of communities are dedicated to esoteric gender/sexual distinctions and leftist ideologies, but most communities are dedicated to general interests or hobbies.
Some of the notable communities include: “Diversity in Gaming,” “Body Positive Women’s Fitness,” “Monarchy of Equestria” (a My Little Pony role-playing community), and “Asexuals and Aromantics.”
A few of the more militant politically correct communities of Reddit have migrated to Imzy as well. Most notably r/ShitRedditSays appears to have set up shop as the Fempire (Fempire shares a logo with ShitRedditSays and features similar content). This is an interesting addition to the warm, fuzzy site as ShitRedditSays was found by a data analyst to be the most toxic subreddit.
There is a Gamergate community… dedicated to discussing how awful Gamergate is.
Imzy does have one conservative community that Heat Street was able to identify, The Donald, with only five members. Based on the sites rules it seems to be in the same vain as Reddit’s r/the_donald.
If this group grows, it will test the waters on how Imzy decides to handle communities that are not seemingly in line with Imzy’s values but are not explicitly making the site “unsafe.”
Will they ban all controversial conservative communities? How will they make sure the right leaders are in charge to moderate? Imzy declined to comment for this story.
Imzy is breaking new ground and will no doubt have to spend a considerable amount of effort to keep their site a “safe place” in an internet that is anything but.
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