kwgardner

5 ms·

1.
by kwgardner 10y ago
I think this is all great stuff. On Imzy, we've removed karma, removed downvotes, and turned upvotes just into more generic likes kind of like they are on FB, Twitter, or IG, that do not roll up or affect your account in any way, becau
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Thanks for the suggestion! That's a good one. The other word I'm thinking about is "limitless" to suggest the flexibility and the open developer platform. Our business model will definitely have tipping and probably attr
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by kwgardner 10y ago
You're right. We're learning that we need to probably revisit some of how we present ourselves. To be fair, though, we did do some extensive user testing through several different methods. And interestingly, people generally alway
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by kwgardner 10y ago
We've actually never used the words "safe space" to describe ourselves, fwiw. It's an extremely polarizing term that has evolved to mean very different things to people, and the image it triggers in most people's
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Yes, agreed. It's impossible to be totally comprehensive. That was meant as an example of the types of things you should not persecute people for.
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Oh, interesting. I'll pass this along to our developers. Thanks for letting me know, and sorry about that!
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by kwgardner 10y ago
I'm curious, what do you think could make this better/possible? An obvious first step is removing downvotes so you can't completely obliterate someone who crosses sides to try to have a conversation, but after that, what else
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by kwgardner 10y ago
This is actually what we're doing on Imzy! We ask people their interests and then show them what communities they may want to join based on that. Then they choose which ones they want to join. Hopefully by doing that, we'll decrea
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by kwgardner 10y ago
This is probably WAY more than you want to know, but this is a very nuanced issue that can't be addressed briefly to do it any kind of justice, as made obvious by the headline of the article we're commenting on describing us as a
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Yes, absolutely. Everyone can get too entrenched, and it's really easy for anyone to divide it into an "us" and a "them," and once you do that, it's too easy to really villainize the other side. Once you decide
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Thanks for all the input! We're pretty young and still figuring out how to talk about ourselves and present ourselves to the world, and we'll be refining things as we go.
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by kwgardner 10y ago
We'll probably take the "positive" part out. But if people want to come here looking for help, that's totally fine! We already have some support groups started.
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Got it. Thank you for the response! It's always helpful to be able to learn more from all other platforms. We do require community leaders to enter a reason whenever they remove a post or comment, ban someone, etc., and the OP is alway
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by kwgardner 10y ago
No worries! Thanks for the kind words. I do think the dinos set a happier tone, which probably helps people to converse in a more civil way, but we definitely don't want to infantilize people. We just like dinos ourselves. :) Also, jus
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Thanks! It sounds like there's definitely some stuff we could be doing to improve our branding--we're new and we're learning, and the word "positive" seems to have been misconstrued by everyone from what we meant it
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Thank you! We have an amazing designer. You can check out her stuff here: https://dribbble.com/jaleh
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by kwgardner 10y ago
We actually thought the same thing about downvotes, which is why we removed them in Imzy. One of the things we've tried to do to decrease the groupthink/echochamber is get rid of any kind of "default" communities or a un
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Thanks! :) We're trying really hard to purposely grow things slowly to keep them at a scale we can manage both on the community and technology side. Dumping a whole bunch of people into one place all at once turns into a free-for-all,
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Yeah, I think it is an unfair characterization, because it's extremely narrow and oversimplified. And yeah, we're learning today that maybe we do need to rethink our presentation, and especially the use of the word "positive&
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by kwgardner 10y ago
No, definitely not, and we're not trying to remove that. Our goal, and what we meant by using the word "positive" is that Imzy, and the communities on it, enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean e
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Hi! A few things. 1. We're not trying to be "warmer and fuzzier"--those are the author's words. 2. We're not trying to be a children's site--we just wanted to make something that made us (and hopefully others)
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by kwgardner 10y ago
I'm copy/pasting this response that I shared with someone else; I hope that's okay, but I wanted to explain what we meant. I completely agree that negative content has a place and is valuable. Not being able to disagree or on
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Maybe "positive" wasn't the right word for us to use. Let me explain what we meant, because it's not that at all. I completely agree that negative content has a place and is valuable. Not being able to disagree or only b
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by kwgardner 10y ago
That's something we're making a huge priority--to give our community leaders a really awesome experience to be able to do everything they need or want to. We've built the whole platform to be as flexible as possible so that c
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Awesome! Shoot me an email here and let's talk: kaela@imzy.com (Also, sorry it took me so long to reply--apparently I was commenting too fast because I just created my account. Whoops.)
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by kwgardner 10y ago
We made something that makes us happy. Will it appeal to every single human being? No, of course not, nor should it. And that's okay! Nothing on the internet has that power. Not even cats. We chose to go in this direction because it ma
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by kwgardner 10y ago
We have a report flag on every post and comment to allow items to be escalated and reviewed. Users are required to explain why they are reporting something so that it's hopefully not just used as a downvote. (And, tbh, downvotes don&#x
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Agreed. I'm learning that the use of the word "positive" on our homepage may not be conveying quite what we had envisioned, and maybe we'll need to change it. (Hey, everyone learns.) We absolutely don't think Imzy s
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by kwgardner 10y ago
We've actually done a few things to try to deal with those issues. We don't have any "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conver
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by kwgardner 10y ago
Imzy actually has removed karma for users, precisely for that reason. It's usually something that ends up only being there for people to game and creates more negative consequences than the good it's intended for. You can like&#x2

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