Dan McComas thinks he knows a better way of building communities online.
McComas is the CEO and cofounder of Imzy, a social platform that wants to banish hate and harassment from the beginning. That’s not exactly a modest undertaking. Sites like Reddit and Twitter struggle to curb abuse without sacrificing their ideals of openness and democratic rule. Both services foster fresh, vibrant discussions. But any site that relies upon the wisdom of the crowd often finds the crowd turns into a mob.
McComas has some relevant perspective on this. He led the product development team at Reddit until shortly after a site-wide revolt temporarily crippled the site last summer. (McComas says Reddit fired him; the company did not respond to a request for comment.) After leaving Reddit, McComas thought deeply about community. He concluded that the best way to curb harassment is to build a diverse user base and community standards from the start. Otherwise, it's easy for an abusive culture to become entrenched. "You end up with an echo chamber—a lot of the same voice and a really hard time balancing opinions and balancing viewpoints,” he says.
To help create this vision of a positive online community, Imzy will power the online forums of Lenny Letter, Lena Dunham’s feminist-themed newsletter. Other high-profile partners include Dan Harmon, Feral Audio and Black Girls Talking. "That's really going to set the course of Imzy and our future," says McComas.
But maintaining standards depends upon providing the tools to enforce them. McComas says you must be a member of one of Imzy's topic-based forums to post, and the site incentivizes quality and good behavior by allowing users to tip one another with real money. Overall, Imzy has decided to trade a little openness for more control. The question is how many users will be willing to accept that trade.
Since launching in private beta last month, Imzy has amassed 12,000 users and 1,500 topic-based forums or "communities." (McComas hopes to launch Imzy publicly in a month or so.) A "community leader" runs each community, exercising control over posts and seeking help from a dedicated support team when necessary.
New members don't see content at first. Instead, Imzy asks you to choose from several categories of interest, like books and writing, business, diversity, or politics. Then you select specific communities that interest you. They populate your homepage feed, which resembles Facebook or Tumblr.
According to McComas, community membership is key to quelling harassment. You must be a member to post to a particular forum, making drive-by trolling impossible. But unlike Facebook, which requires you to post under your real name, Imzy lets users create profiles on a community-by-community basis. Community leaders have the latitude to determine if and how to allow anonymous posts. When leaders ban an anonymous user for abuse, the ban applies to the user's entire account---a move meant to limit the ability to return under a different alias.
"Platforms tend to pick one type of identity for them," McComas says. The way Imzy looks at it, he says, all these identities are valid, but should be dictated by the contract between a user and the topic-based community they join. In a neighborhood forum, for example, it might be important that you disclose your identity as a resident. But in a forum for abuse victims, anonymity may be paramount.
Commerce also features prominently on Imzy; McComas was the founder of the Redditgifts, a way to connect gift-givers and receivers via Reddit. On Imzy, users can support each other, and their community leaders, with cash "tips." In the future, McComas hopes to add tools for subscriptions, crowdfunding, and marketplaces.
McComas says Imzy will take a percentage of these transactions to make money. He says Imzy is shunning ads because depending upon site traffic could force the company into decisions contrary to what's best for users. "There’s a better way that benefits our users rather than selling their information and eyeballs," McComas says.
"Communities in real life function through people exchanging money," he says. "We want to provide all the ways that communities exist in real life to be able to exist online as well."
James Grimmelmann, a law professor at the University of Maryland, studies how technology shapes communities and says such an approach offers upsides---and downsides. Avoiding advertising means not having to compromise your mission or identity. But it also makes it harder to achieve the kind of scale that could give it true influence. "That's the reason Reddit dominates conversations and the mediascape: because it got big," Grimmelmann says.
Still, he says, plenty of smaller online communities thrive serving niche interests, such as fan fiction and sports. “We tend to think and talk about big platforms like Reddit and Facebook, but the web is full of communities that function successfully at smaller scale,” Grimmelmann says. “But we’re not talking about those thriving small communities right now---because they don’t create the kinds of massive dramas as those platforms.”
McComas believes Imzy can grow while sticking to its standards. But ultimately, he says, the site won't prioritize scale over the health of its communities. "Growing huge at the expense of quality communities is not on the table," he says. "However, I think we can can do both."
Maybe. The last decade is rife with failed social networks. But if harassment abounds on successful platforms, how successful are they, really? Until someone finds a truly effective way of eliminating online abuse, the Internet will always have room to try creating a better social network.
