Imzy

[liv]

So Imzy is the new cool social network, apparently. It's in closed beta and you need an invite from an existing user to create an account. melannen kindly offered one, and I'm happy to pay it forward by inviting the first five people to comment.

It seems to be aspiring to be a kind of cross between Tumblr and LJ/DW. On the plus side: you can have multiple usernames, and it claims it will never reveal the connection between different usernames. It has reasonably good fine-grained privacy settings, and it says it will contact users before revealing any personal information to law enforcement. And it has tools for blocking and banning people, though I've not investigated them in detail. These are good ideas in principle but I'm a bit skeptical, I want to wait and see if their actual security is as good as their ideals. Still, the multi identity thing could be a major draw.

It's apparently based around communities, though lots of people are creating single-person communities to act as personal blogs. It seems to have pretty good tools for encouraging conversation; by default you can comment on and / or follow posts. It does seem to manage the bare minimum of providing a chronological feed of everything that you've subscribed to, with the ability to filter, rather than having algorithms try to guess what you might find "important". At the moment it's not possible to post public at all; the lowest privacy level is that posts are visible to logged in users, but I believe making it readable without logging in is going to be an option (but probably not the default) in the future.

The site is being run by people with some experience, mostly it seems from Reddit. And it has a certain amount of investment behind it, so hopefully it's not going to just fall over as soon as it gets popular. But equally it needs to offer investors a return and right now its business plan seems basically non-existent. There is no advertising, which is good, but there's also no premium service; instead, they have a system whereby users can offer eachother "tips" (minimum payment $1), and they suggest that people add 10% "to cover site costs" when topping up their tipping accounts. I am very very suspicious of this, because places that have no sensible income stream end up either dying or getting eaten up by Google and Facebook, or at best becoming total sleaze fests. Also, if people are able to make money from "tips", then rights holders are going to get very interested in anyone reposting anything that might even slightly be copyright. And of course scammers and manipulators are going to be attracted, but that's a problem with basically all sites.

Aesthetically, it's a mess. Very cutting edge with everything grey on white. Infinite scrolling pages only. They're "working on" mobile apps, but it seems to be more or less readable on a smartphone. It's terribly terribly cutesie, which is at least better than the horrible hipster thing that was Ello. (Anyone remember Ello?) Posts are formatted with Markdown rather than HTML, and posting images and links is as easy as on modern sites like Tumblr or FB. The site communication style is very cutesie as well; I remember some people were put off DW because denise tends to write quite personally rather than sounding like a distant, objective professional, but Imzy is a hundred times worse. So either sexism will kill the site, or it'll massively attract the kind of people who are very into childish-sounding, very enthusiastic, marketing copy pretending to be human kind of stuff; that does seem to be a successful branding approach these days.

I personally don't think it's the right place for the future of fandom, because of the copyright issues and because it bans "porn". So it still has many disadvantages compared to DW, but the novelty value might just make it the next big thing.

ETA: I created a community for DW peeps. Which magically increased my number of invitations from five to 200, so if anyone is possibly interested in an invite, you can request at the community link. And if anyone's already there, feel free to join it or not.

Comments

[slashmarks]

It will be interesting -- in a morbid sort of way -- to see how the tip thing ends up interacting with fandom if they get any significant number of users there. A lot of the very youngest generation of fans doesn't seem to be quite familiar with the fact that asking for money for fan works can land you in serious legal trouble, probably thanks to the smaller number of authors crusading against them lately. I've been waiting resignedly to see that explode for a while.

I was interested in giving it a try, all faults included, up until you said it bans porn. -wry- My corner of fandom definitely won't be migrating there if that doesn't change.

(In seriousness, I think it's a kind of alarming policy for reasons that strikethrough and etc on lj demonstrated. One type of censorship almost invariably ends up extended to new places, and a wide range of material can be construed to be "porn" as desired. It might be that they just haven't thought it out, but...)

[liv]

Yup, my thoughts exactly. The tipping mechanism strikes me as a really stupid idea, and even with the privacy settings is going to make it basically impossible to post fanworks there, at least not sustainably.

And the porn ban, I think it's probably well intentioned, with the idea of people being able to look at the site without endless parades of breasts and orifices in their feed, but I agree that it's a massive freedom of speech red flag. And I suspect that the reason for the restriction is not in fact the cutesie thing about how there's plenty of other places to look at porn and this site is for communities, it's because otherwise they couldn't get any payment processors to work with them. I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt and credit that when they say "porn" they probably genuinely don't mean NC17 rated fic, or people talking about LGB+ issues, but they're naive if they haven't figured out that those things are vulnerable to accusations of being pornographic, or even just the Scunthorpe problem.

[sally_maria]

I don't know if you've seen this thread at the Fail Fandom Anon community?

We will obviously have to see, but I think that quite apart from the payment issues, they are aware of the issues Reddit had, and are trying to design them out as much as possible.

[liv]

Innnnnteresting. Thank you for linking me to that. That reinforces my impression that they're well-meaning but ridiculously naive. Like, they're so confident that they will know porn when they see it (as the old joke goes) and porn is icky and horrible but "erotic art" is pure and well-intentioned. That's very sweet, but it's not going to stand up to any sort of deliberate misbehaviour, nor is it going to reassure fandom people it's a safe site to post sexual content.

I mean, ok, they don't want to be Reddit where the misapplied free speech policy has made parts of it into hubs of really nasty criminal activity, child porn and revenge porn and so on. And I'm somewhat reassured they're not heading towards the kind of bans on breastfeeding or discussion of trans issues that have plagued sites like LJ and FB. But I don't think they have any plan for what they're going to do when a hate group (like Gamergate, say) bombards the site with stuff that's borderline within the rules as stated but actually intended to harass people and just keep auto-creating new accounts as fast as they're banned. Or when some anti porn vigilante group mass reports everything on the site that offends their sensibilities, and bugs the payment provider, the hosting provider and so about it if Imzy themselves don't fold. Or when people use frivolous offensive publication complaints (probably copyright ones as well) in order to harass members they don't like. Those things will happen, probably within months of the site launching, and having a vague woolly definition of porn, even one I'm broadly positive about, is going to be a disaster when that happens.

[green_knight]

Could I have an invite, please?

(Not sure whether I'll use the site, but I'm curious.)

[liv]

Sure, no problem. Can you PM me an email address, please?

[emperor]

I'm interested if you have a spare invite code, but I can't see why this will take off when e.g. diaspora hasn't. I mean, I don't see what their USP is...

uzzjvb@fyvzl.net

[liv]

Invite sent. I think Imzy has a clear advantage over Diaspora in that it actually has a frontend and you don't have to be willing to program and sysadmin it for yourself, it pretty much Just Works.

I don't think it quite has a unique feature, but the ability to easily switch between multiple accounts while maintaining privacy might well be attractive. I mean, I think if people were sensible they would have stuck with DW (or even LJ), but in fact most people who use social media have migrated to Facebook or Tumblr even though they're obviously worse. And people have short memories; Imzy has potential advantages over FB and Tumblr even if it's not better than some of the older sites.

[ceb]

I'd be interested in a poke around if you have a spare invite. ui35aj@fyvzl.net

[liv]

Sent!

[ceb]

Thanks :-)

[andrewducker]

Please!

andrew@ducker.org.uk

[liv]

Invite sent!

[solitarywalker]

I haven't heard of this site, but I agree with your scepticism about their business model, especially for blogging. I think in order for it to work, they would need "stars"; friends wouldn't tip back and forth the way they exchange likes since there's an actual cost. Websites that charge for subscriptions usually do so by offering the perk of no advertising; if there's no advertising for anyone, regardless of whether you tip, what does the consumer get by tipping? & If you're a content-producer who's so good that people will tip your posts, you probably can do better by publishing under a traditional business model.

10% is a very small percentage for the site to keep, too.

[liv]

They do have the ability to heart / upvote (they use a heart icon, but the text says upvote) posts without paying, so there is a "like" equivalent. But the tipping thing makes no sense as a way of funding the site, because they're not automatically keeping 10% of the tipping money, they're asking users to add a voluntary donation of 10% when they add payments. So even people who are basically willing to pay for the site are likely to end up contributing tiny amounts. I definitely agree that people who are good enough to earn significant money in tips have better options, Patreon, or hosting their own site where they get the advertising income, or any number of options.

I generally dislike the model where you pay not to get adverts. That means that the people who are paying are still screwed over by all the tracking and the need to tailor the site to advertisers, and there's a perverse incentive to make the advertising as intrusive as possible. Dreamwidth works better because nobody has adverts, but you pay to get extra features. But it seems like Imzy has very little incentive for anyone to pay at all. And of course people might altruistically want to support the site but that's not a business model, especially if they have VC investment they'll need to recoup.

[solitarywalker]

I'd missed that it was voluntary. I've seen that done in software bundling sales (buyer chooses what % goes to the developers and what % to the site), but I don't know how successful it was. There was a default amount to the site, which seemed reasonable.

DW's model is very user-friendly; I'm surprised that it works, but it seems to. (LJ had the same model at one time, but I guess it didn't pay well enough for them, despite a very large userbase.)

[lovingboth]

I suspect that most people leave the sliders at Humble Bundle etc alone.

If there are Linux versions of what I'm getting, I up the donation to the site and zero to the charity. If they don't, it's all to charity...

(Request made to the community as sitename@username-here.com)

[jack]

That is interesting. It sounds like they have a front-end working pretty well.

I'm not convinced by small-scale tipping, but it *could* work if you have some big names. Although even then, people don't make small payments much, even if they'd be happy to. I think trying "something other than advertising" is a good thing to try, because I think on fairly insular social media sites, advertising will only dwindle. But I'd rather they just asked for fees or something.

I've said before, I really want a distributed social network (like usenet with friendslock), so it _can't_ be imploded by investors. But that may never happen. So maybe this is more secure than tumblr? But no evidence if it will last long.

I'm mildly curious, but will probably wait and see if it goes anywhere before wanting to try it.

[liv]

I am utterly, utterly unconvinced by small-scale tipping. For one thing $1 isn't really small, micropayments work when they're properly micro. I find it really hard to imagine how big names will make enough money from Imzy to justify posting there rather than anywhere with a more direct and more under their control income stream, but supposing that happens, how does it even help fund the site? Like, you have a big celeb with thousands of readers and popular posts, and a small fraction of those people are going to tip $1 every so often, and a small fraction of those will agree to be charged $1.10 to "donate to the site", so how does that possibly add up to a reasonable income for Imzy? They're making dollars per year, maybe 10s of dollars at best, for each massively popular celebrity they manage to attract. It doesn't seem to scale even to paying for the site, let alone recouping VC investment. So I strongly suspect their (deliberate or unconscious) business model is to get enough buzz that they're bought out by FB or Google, and then we're back to square one.

I do really want a distributed network, which is why I had such great hopes for Diaspora. But that was a very clear lesson on why you can't just make the technical stuff work and hope the design and front end will somehow magically emerge later. Like, Usenet clearly had no front end at all, but that was the 70s and 80s, it didn't have the competition from sites with an actual professional design team.

[sally_maria]

I do understand the concern about funding going forward, it's a real issue, but I can't help hoping it or something like it does take off.

Tumblr has never worked for me, I miss the ability to have community discussions too much, but something which had that and the ability to easily post links and photos in the way that people have got used to from Tumblr and Facebook might actually lure them away from it in a way that Dreamwidth sadly never did.

[liv]

Yes, I definitely want Imzy to succeed. Not based on advertising, decent privacy and multiple identities, those are features I really want. Hypothetically I would rather people stuck with DW, but it's not going to happen because the site was outdated in 2010 and it hasn't been in active development for years. So given I'm not going to get what I want, I am really hoping for a real alternative Tumblr and FB where personal safety is a consideration and where decent conversation is possible. I'm skeptical about Imzy not because I want it to fail, but because I've spent too much of the last ten years getting optimistic over new social media players and being disappointed.

[monanotlisa]

Oh! Could I have one?

[liv]

Easiest way is if you click on the link to the Dreamwidth community in my ETA, that will allow you to request an invite. It's rather simpler to invite people to communities than to invite people to the site as an individual user, because they want to encourage communities.

[silveradept]

This probably means I won't need to do much with Imzy, since it seems likely to not attract me to itself. Thank you for the writeup, though - I like informed perspective more than just seeing people say it's a thing.

[liv]

I have been wrong before, but at least I have a reasonable body of experience of judging new social media starters, and I know what kind of questions to ask. I find the concept of Imzy actually moderately attractive myself, even if not as suited to me as Dreamwidth is. But I am not convinced it's going anywhere.