Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Imzy is shutting down

imzy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 268 posts

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#241

Post by INTPenis »

I 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.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#242

Post by EdiX »

kristianc wrote: post #176
LordKano wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you join a Subreddit which reinforces these political beliefs and is that not a safe space in itself? If I understand your question, yes. I would join such a Subreddit because an echo-chamber isn't what I seek. I completely agree with forbidding things like doxing or making threats of violence but I'm concerned that "Safe spaces" only encourage intolerance towards other points of view. Disagreement is good. May…

> If I understand your question, yes. I would join such a Subreddit because an echo-chamber isn't what I seek. Good. > I completely agree with forbidding things like doxing or making threats of violence but I'm concerned that "Safe spaces" only encourage intolerance towards other points of view. Now now. If I went on /r/the_donald and started leaving comments about Gun Control, Trans Rights and Abortion, you and I bo…

> Now now. If I went on /r/the_donald and started leaving comments about Gun Control, Trans Rights and Abortion, you and I both have a fairly good idea what would happen.

/r/the_donald has become (or maybe always was) a safe space for 1488 identitarians. Things like /r/The_Donald and Stormfront are part of the problem just as much as safe space policies.

> Well, a giant Pepe the fucking Frog fills half the screen when I even load the page, for a start, and I literally cannot upvote in /r/the_donald until I click the frog and subscribe

Disable custom CSS, it's a dumb feature anyway.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#243

Post by annnnd »

steedsofwar wrote: post #234
Angostura wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there from early in the beta. The thing that annoyed me, when I suggested that people should take a look at it was the decision that you had to make an account to see content. Most people visited the homepage and then said 'no'.

This is one of the main reasons i detest pinterest. Lately they have changed, so that you can see small amount of the content, before annoying you with the login screen.

Ditto for Quora. I see interesting content, but they annoy me so much with their accounts (even when I'm just reading) that I never spend much time there. Don-t worry, I will create an account when I have something to say, but until then just let me be.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#244

Post by dennisgorelik »

kickme444 wrote: post #3

Hi, 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 Lak…

What did happen with $11M in funding Imzy received?

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/imzy

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#245

Post by austenallred »

EpicEng wrote: post #235
austenallred wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't spend all of the $11m. Only a tiny fraction of it. And they worked on the site for two years.

Then why did they raise so much? How do you know how much the spent? And two years to build that site? I'm not convinced any of this was well thought out.

> Then why did they raise so much?

To be prepared if there was success? I don't know

> How do you know how much they spent?

Because the CEO talked about it in another comment

> And two years to build that site?

Yup. A lot of iterating and trying to find the right fit. Why is that so hard to believe?

> I'm not convinced any of this was well thought out

That's the thing - you have almost zero information about this, so declaring all of these things to be obviously-avoidable mistakes is just silly. If you think you would do a better job you're welcome to try, but learning about a company for <5 minutes I don't think there's any possible way for you to make that call.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#246

Post by belorn »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #183
Frondo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh 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.

I don't. I would like to live in a world where no one ever thinks it. I think the only way you get there is by keeping dialog open with the people who do think it. If you refuse to listen to them, you strengthen their belief that they're seeing something other people are unwilling to look at. And I think trying to "no platform" those people only strengthens their rhetorical position, making it easier for them to extr…

Quite a astute connection to compare the black civil rights community handling of crime and violence with and Men's Rights handling of the issue of rape. The "Not all men!", or "Judge me not for the color of my skin" both address the problem of conflating a demographic with a crime. This results naturally in a very defense attitude for those that are born into the accused group without addressing any underlying issues.

Now the question I wonder is if the change in the discussion regarding crime and race was caused by the black civil rights community, or if it was caused by society in large realizing that there is better social theories to explain the statistics.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#247

Post by sejiss »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #187
rhizome wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes product fit takes longer than $VC_ATTENTION_SPAN

Indeed, there are many other ways of building a business on-line than startups. Makes me think, maybe it's time to create a "bootstrapped" badge, or something like that; something that sites that didn't take VC money could proudly display? At least for me personally, whether something is an investor startup or not is an important data point for deciding whether to invest my time in it.

http://37signals.com/bootstrapped

Hasn't been updated in a while though.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#248

Post by beagle3 »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #66

I 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 sh…

On the other hand, life is short.

As an entrepreneur, if you spend 10 years on something, you can get 4, potentially 5 done over your life time. If you fail early, you can try 20-30. I suspect the chances of actually succeeding are much higher in the latter case.

Instagram was already a hit at 7 months, and even whatsapp was clearly going to be big. I totally understand closing shop without enough traction.

I've been involved with quite a few startups and initiatives, and for every "we shouldn't have closed so early", there are about twenty "we should have closed it much much earlier"

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#249

Post by CM30 »

minimaxir wrote: post #29
r721 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/1881376

Voat never raised millions in venture capital, though. (and can't given their content/userbase)

Voat were approached by VCs at one point though:

https://voat.co/v/AskVoat/comments/196002/579547

Not sure how it turned out, but investors were apparently interested in investing in them. And may have raised a decent amount of cash through the process as well.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#250

Post by CM30 »

prodmerc wrote: post #204
antonber wrote: post #52

I 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…

You 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

This. The easily offended are a tiny minority, and those who attempt to cater for them too much have usually had their product or business fail.

Don't worry about people in a community who get easily offended. If they like the community they'll stay, if not then there's not really anything lost.

Post reply on HN