After a long bout of illness and injury sustained from battling racism, misogyny, and general depravity, Imzy — the last hope for human decency on the internet — has died. It was 2 years old.
Imzy, the “nice Reddit” created by Jessica Moreno and Dan McComas, two former Reddit executives who left the company in 2015 amid intense controversy over their anti-harassment policies, will officially shut down June 23.
The reason? There’s no room for a platform that promotes basic politeness in the social media market.
“Imzy was too pure for this internet. This is a sad day for a lot of good people.”
In a blog post announcing the impending shut down Wednesday, McComas wrote “it is time for us to shut down the site” as Imzy couldn’t find a “place in the market.”
Some of you have been here since our launch into beta and some are brand new. We’ve loved getting to know all of you and seeing you build communities and make new friends. Unfortunately, we were not able to find our place in the market. We still feel that the internet deserves better and hope that we see more teams take on this challenge in the future.
That’s all the explanation McComas gives for Imzy’s sudden demise. Users lament their loss in the comment sidebar. The top one so far was posted under the username “sauce” and reads, “Imzy was too pure for this internet. This is a sad day for a lot of good people.”
Imzy set out to build a community of people that were as passionate about life as its creators, who came armed with lessons learned from Reddit’s cesspool-tendencies in tow. Like a lotus flower torn to shreds by a boat’s propeller, born out of the mire and muck of online hate McComas and Moreno witnessed at Reddit, Imzy simply wasn’t able to thrive in its environment.
There’s no room for human decency on the internet.
The Reddit competitor reportedly amassed about 70,000 users and built more than 6,000 communities, with half of them getting weekly activity. Imzy also raised $8 million in venture capital funding in October.
“This is such a deep loss.”
McComas told TechCrunch at the time that the money was to help curate the platform to “take the time that your communities need so that we can really evolve the tools” to “really get this stuff right” and not rush to relying on advertising dollars.
Following Imzy’s announcement Wednesday, forums sprang up dedicated to mourning and users trying to process the grief that comes when your favorite hang out closes its doors without warning.
One thread wanted to know why. Was it too expensive? Was it lack of advertising? Was it a marketing problem?
Moreno, who was Reddit’s beloved head of community development, weighed in to prevent rumors from starting. “There’s a lot for us to think about and a lot of factors in why we have not succeeded,” she wrote to the original poster.
In a subsequent thread that suggested it was lack of ad revenue, Moreno cautioned users about drawing conclusions.
I don’t necessarily want to stop people from discussing it. I have a hard time when misinformation is stated as fact and I’m unable to correct it or rumors start and all that. It’s hard from an emotional place. This is such a deep loss. If I were able to engage in the discussion I absolutely would.
I just want people to understand that unless something is stated by staff it may not be exactly factual, even if it’s not intentionally false. There are just so many details that others don’t know.
I do appreciate you asking. Thank you : )
Imzy’s sunset isn’t just a loss for users, who regarded it as a place of belonging, it’s also a sign that the worst things about human interaction — bullying, harassment, forums dedicated to promoting racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia, unsolicited photos of genitalia, beheading and other snuff videos, child pornography — are likely permanent fixtures on the internet, and by extension in society.
Like the ever-drifting lovers of Dante’s Inferno, Imzy’s death shows there’s probably no hope of having even a small piece of the internet where people can come together, share interests, and have intense yet civil conversations about topics without descending into a tar pit of mean-spirited, personal attacks. Users are doomed to trudge through or opt out, never to actually live in the online oasis they so desperately want.
The digital age’s biggest challenge has been striking a balance between free speech without consequence and light curation that necessarily filters out the worst of humanity without hampering public discourse. That balancing act has at times felt more like a tug-of-war, with multiple ropes pulling in different directions.
The world’s top social media platforms haven’t been able to figure it out. Twitter has only recently begun taking harassment and abuse issues seriously, modifying policies and its technology to make it easier for users to report and block out the trolls. Facebook, often criticized for being too heavy-handed with its moderation, has similarly struggled across its platforms.
The company’s head of global policy, Monika Bickert, responded to the Guardian’s reporting on Facebook’s content moderation policies and practices in an op-ed, acknowledging the company sometimes gets it wrong but that it always strives to make its platforms safer. Facebook announced it plans to increase its moderation staff by 3,000 earlier following a run of killing videos broadcast on the site. But while the addition of moderators is a much appreciated move, it raises other concerns, namely the human cost of subjecting individuals to the worst parts of our society.
The life of moderators isn’t glamorous. They burn out quickly and are subjected to thousands of comments, images, and videos daily that range from pictures of erect penises to violent assaults and killings. On the relatively more benign end, moderators filter out spam tailored to extort money or valuable data from users.
Even if the bad actors are few, which they are, their messages can be amplified by bots programmed to do their bidding and imperfect algorithms that are easily taken advantage of. Then there are the keyboard thugs who dedicate chunks of their day to send hateful messages to strangers, saying things they would never have the gall to say in person.
Maybe this is what life on the internet is supposed to be. After all, the internet is just a mirror of the society it serves and a product of the biases and blind spots of a technology’s creators, so why would we expect it to be any different? Why should the internet somehow be better than the casual and blatant nastiness people experience every day?
Imzy, with it’s huggable, three-horned dino mascot Saurus, dared to think differently. It dared to dream that the kinder people on the internet could find each other and be safe from pollutants. As one user called it, “a bright spot in a hostile world.” And for that bravery and bit of brilliance, we, the peaceful wanderers of the internet salute you, Imzy.
Imzy is survived by its creators, its tens of thousands of users, and the undying hope that maybe one day the internet will be a little less terrible.