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Imzy is shutting down

imzy.com

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Re: Imzy is shutting down

#91

Post by timdeneau »

distantsounds wrote: post #89

nothing 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.

I 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.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#92

Post by pavel_lishin »

nebabyte wrote: post #46
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…

Hey Dan, I was a member in the early beta, am really sad to see Imzy go but really appreciate you guys branching off and making the efforts toward a new site (which I agree definitely still needs to exist). > We still feel that the internet deserves better and hope that we see more teams take on this challenge in the future As someone with a headful of ideas hoping to potentially take on this challenge (:P) - any wri…

> any writeups or info on scaling/architecture would be much appreciated. There are some HighScalability articles on the bigger sites but every bit of info on comparison of architectures helps us newbies, heh.

I don't think Imzy's scalabilities issue is what did them in. I signed up to see what it was about, and saw a JS bug and reported it, and they not only fixed it super-quick, but also sent me a thank-you sticker. So their team, while imperfect as all teams are, was at least responsive and dedicated.

If I had to guess - and I do - their problems stemmed from their community size not growing as rapidly as it could have, and monetization.

That's the interesting thing - how do you build a community? How do you build a bunch of communities? How do you advertise, how do you tackle moderation successfully, how do you keep people invested, etc.

There's a billion write-ups on writing code, but nowhere near enough on running a meta-community.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#93

Post by lowglow »

I 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.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#95

Post by detaro »

mbesto wrote: post #88
TylerE wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a propaganda success, not a business success. Reddit has always lost money, and continues to lose money quarter after quarter.

My 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™!"

Since when is being associated with Reddit a huge signal of success, esp. compared to other sucessful startups?

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#96

Post by TekMol »

October 2016: 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

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#97

Post by acjohnson55 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #22
acjohnson55 wrote: post #18

It 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.

> seems in some ways similar to a concept I had for online communities built around discussion of content. Like Reddit?

A little, but organized more so on individuals and groups than verticals.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#98

Post by detaro »

TekMol wrote: post #96

October 2016: 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 ?

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#99

Post by [deleted] »

detaro wrote: post #98
TekMol wrote: post #96

October 2016: 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 ?

[deleted]

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#100

Post by killin_dan »

jmcgough wrote: post #28
arkitaip wrote: post #15

"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.

Reddit took off within months of its launch. ~30 days to download data is pretty standard.

Reddit spammed fake comments for months in order to gain traction...

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.)

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