Imzy

Last updated
Imzy
Imzy website logo.png
Headquarters Salt Lake City, Utah [1]
Founder(s) Dan McComas [1]
Industry Social networking service
Parent Saurus, Inc. [1]
URL imzy.com
Launched2016
Current statusDefunct as of 2017

Imzy was a social media site led by ex-Reddit employee Dan McComas, which purported to create a "friendlier" alternative to Reddit. [2] The site was started in 2016 by six former employees of Reddit and one of Twitter (Joshua Fraser). Some of the first publications to announce collaboration with Imzy include Lenny Letter and the podcasts Harmontown and Black Girls Talking. [3] On 24 May 2017, Imzy announced that the site was shutting down as they had failed to "find [their] place in the market." [4]

Contents

History

Product Chief Dan McComas left Reddit in July 2015 over disagreements on how the site should be run. [5] This happened during a revolt by users that involved the shutdown of the Ask Me Anything subreddits. In August 2015, McComas's wife Jessica Moreno stepped down as Head of Community at Reddit. This made her the fourth prominent female employee to leave the company in that month. Moreno accused a Recode article of insinuating a connection with the other three departures and stated that she was leaving for family reasons. [6] Nevertheless, she later stated that threats of rape and death were a part of her experience working for Reddit. [3] Other founding members of Imzy cited the inconvenience of working in San Francisco as motivation to start a new business. [7]

The following year, McComas, Moreno and the rest of their team founded Imzy in Salt Lake City. Upon launch, it raised $3 million from Charles River Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. [5] The name was chosen as a happy-sounding word that could be easily searched. [7]

Business model

Imzy integrated a system for users to tip one another and took a percentage of each transaction. On the company's decision to avoid running ads, McComas stated "you get into this game of selling certain kinds of ads, and then you need to add enough traffic to those communities. This flies directly in the face of keeping communities healthy." [8]

McComas had also expressed a desire to enforce a positive atmosphere through the architecture of the website rather than direct intervention. As part of this effort, groups on Imzy only accepted posts from people who were already subscribed. Also, Imzy used community-wide as opposed to site-wide usernames to disincentivize the creation of new accounts. [5] Moreno had stated that some Imzy accounts belonged to people who are known for breaking some of Reddit's rules. She has stated that they were acting in a thoughtful manner on Imzy and attributed this to a culture that rewarded a different type of discourse. [3] In June 2016, Gina Bianchini revealed that she was pessimistic about Imzy becoming more than a niche platform.

In May 2017, Dan McComas announced that the site would shortly be ceasing operations due to having failed to find its place in the market.

Related Research Articles

Yahoo! Answers was a community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) website or knowledge market owned by Yahoo! where users would ask questions and answer those submitted by others, and upvote them to increase their visibility. Questions were organised into categories with multiple sub-categories under each to cover every topic users may ask questions on, such as beauty, business, finance, cars, electronics, entertainment, games, gardening, science, news, politics, parenting, pregnancy, and travel. The number of poorly formed questions and inaccurate answers made the site a target of ridicule.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reddit</span> American social news and discussion site

Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network. Registered users submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "communities" or "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are not Reddit employees. It is operated by Reddit, Inc., based in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digg</span> Social media/news aggregator website

Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

<i>Black Tar Heroin</i> (film) 1999 American TV series or program

Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street is a 1999 television documentary film directed by Steven Okazaki. Filmed from 1995 to 1998 in the Tenderloin, San Francisco, California, the documentary describes the lives of heroin addicts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Huffman</span> American web developer and entrepreneur (born 1983/1984)

Steve Huffman, also known by his Reddit username spez, is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, a social news and discussion website, which ranks in the top 20 websites in the world. He also co-founded the airfare search engine website Hipmunk, which shut down in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Imgur</span> American online image hosting service

Imgur is an American online image sharing and image hosting service with a focus on social gossip that was founded by Alan Schaaf in 2009. The service has hosted viral images and memes, particularly those posted on Reddit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fandom (website)</span> Wiki hosting service and domain

Fandom is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics. The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quora</span> Question-and-answer website

Quora is a social question-and-answer website and online knowledge market headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that have been submitted by other users. As of 2020, the website was visited by 300 million users a month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pinterest</span> American photo sharing and saving website

Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information like recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. Created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, Pinterest, Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco.

Vox Media, Inc. is an American mass media company founded in Washington, D.C. with operational headquarters in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The company was established in November 2011 by CEO Jim Bankoff and Trei Brundrett to encompass SB Nation and The Verge. Bankoff had been the CEO for SB Nation since 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yishan Wong</span> Businessperson

Yishan Wong is an American engineer and entrepreneur who was CEO of Reddit from March 2012 until his resignation in November 2014. With Niniane Wang he is also co-founder of the Mountain View coworking space Sunfire Offices, and was an advisor at Quora. Wong was briefly a contributing blogger to Forbes magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ellen Pao</span> American businesswoman (born 1970)

Ellen Kangru Pao is an American investor and former interim CEO of social media company Reddit.

Some communities on the social news site Reddit are devoted to explicit, violent, or hateful material, and have been the topic of controversy. Controversial Reddit communities sometimes receive significant media coverage.

Recode was a technology news website that focused on the business of Silicon Valley. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher founded it in January 2014, after they left Dow Jones and the similar website they had previously co-founded, All Things Digital. Vox Media acquired Recode in May 2015, and in May 2019. On March 6th, 2023, Vox media announced that in order to make the various Vox sub brands less confusing to its readers, it is retiring Recode brand but it will continue its mission to explain complex issues around technology to its readers under the unified Vox brand.

RedditGifts, stylized as redditgifts, was an online user-to-user gift exchange service for Reddit users. Free to participate in, RedditGifts was first created by Reddit user "kickme444", while working on freelance projects. The service involved signing up, filling out a profile based on the user's preferences, and agreeing to send a gift to a randomly assigned user.

Voat Inc was an American alt-tech news aggregator and social networking service where registered community members could submit content such as text posts and direct links. Registered users could then vote on these submissions. Content entries were organized by areas of interest called "subverses". The website was widely described as a Reddit clone and a hub for the alt-right. Voat CEO Justin Chastain made an announcement on December 22, 2020 that Voat would shut down. The site was shut down on December 25, 2020.

r/The_Donald Subreddit in support of U.S. president Donald Trump

r/The_Donald was a subreddit where participants created discussions and Internet memes in support of U.S. president Donald Trump. Initially created in June 2015 following the announcement of Trump's presidential campaign, the community grew to over 790,000 subscribers who described themselves as "Patriots". The community was banned in June 2020 for violating Reddit rules on harassment and targeting. It was ranked as one of the most active communities on Reddit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Outline (website)</span> News and culture website

The Outline was an online publication focused on "power, culture, and the future." It was founded independently by Joshua Topolsky in 2016 and later became a subsidiary of Bustle.

Vidme was a video hosting service that launched to the public in 2014. It described itself as a hybrid between video hosting website YouTube and social news site Reddit. It shut down in 2017.

r/IAmA Reddit forum for question-and-answer interactive interviews

r/IAmA is a subreddit for question-and-answer interactive interviews termed "AMA". AMA interviewees have ranged from various celebrities to everyday people in several lines of work. Founded in May 2009, the subreddit has gone on to become one of Reddit's most popular communities.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "About Us". Imzy. 2016. Archived from the original on April 29, 2016. Retrieved 2016-08-14.
  2. ↑ "Fired Reddit exec quietly launches 'Imzy,' a warmer, fuzzier Reddit". Thenextweb.com. Archived from the original on October 20, 2022. Retrieved May 26, 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 Dickey, Megan Rose (2016-05-18). "Anti-Reddit platform Imzy partners with Lena Dunham to build online community for Lenny Letter". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2016-08-22. Retrieved 2016-08-08.
  4. ↑ "Imzy is shutting down". Imzy. Imzy. Retrieved 24 May 2017.[ permanent dead link ]
  5. 1 2 3 Isaac, Mike (2016-06-09). "Imzy Is A Kinder, Gentler Reddit. If It Can Stay That Way". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2016-07-23. Retrieved 2016-08-08.
  6. ↑ Moreno, Jessica (2015-07-27). "Reddit's Head of Community, Jessica Moreno, has left the company". Reddit. Archived from the original on 2020-11-07. Retrieved 2016-08-08.
  7. 1 2 Meek, Andy (2016-06-09). "Ex-Redditors launch a new platform they say is 'healthier' than Reddit". BGR. Retrieved 2016-08-08.
  8. ↑ Kulwin, Noah (2016-05-20). "A group of ex-Reddit employees are launching their own safer, tamer Reddit". Recode. Archived from the original on 2016-08-20. Retrieved 2016-08-08.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.