Imzy was a social media site led by ex-

Reddit Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...

employee Dan McComas, which purported to create a "friendlier" alternative to

. The site was started in 2016 by six former employees of Reddit and one of

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. Some of the first publications to announce collaboration with Imzy include ''

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'' and the podcasts ''

Harmontown ''Harmontown'' is a comedy podcast that aired live weekly from June 16, 2012 to December 3, 2019. It was hosted by writer Dan Harmon, best known as the creator of the television series ''Community'' and the co-creator of ''Rick and Morty'', along ...

'' and ''Black Girls Talking''. On 24 May 2017, Imzy announced that the site was shutting down as they had failed to "find heirplace in the market."

History

Product Chief Dan McComas left Reddit in July 2015 over disagreements on how the site should be run. 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. Nevertheless, she later stated that threats of rape and death were a part of her experience working for Reddit. Other founding members of Imzy cited the inconvenience of working in

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as motivation to start a new business. The following year, McComas, Moreno and the rest of their team founded Imzy in

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the capital and most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in Utah. With a population of 200,133 in 2020, th ...

. Upon launch, it raised $3 million from

Charles River Ventures Charles River Ventures (CRV) is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage investments in technology. The firm was founded in 1970 to commercialize research that came out of MIT. Its name comes from the Charles River. History The firm has ra ...

and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The name was chosen as a happy-sounding word that could be easily searched.

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." 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. 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. 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.

References

{{Reflist Internet properties established in 2016 Internet properties disestablished in 2017 Social media