Imzy

» see imzy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

imzy was an american anti-reddit, founded in salt lake city by people who used to work at reddit. it was the kind of product whose audience was a slice of english-speaking internet users who had specifically decided that reddit had become too toxic. that slice was real but small. i was not in it. by 2016 i had a long-running set of forums and discord servers that already filled the same role for me, and a new us-only community platform with a unique-username-per-group rule was a hard sell against tools i already used.

dan mccomas had been reddit's head of product before leaving in july 2015 over disagreements about the direction of the platform. his wife ellen pao had had her own well-publicized exit from reddit a few weeks earlier. mccomas raised three million dollars from charles river ventures and o'reilly alphatech ventures, pulled in six ex-reddit colleagues plus joshua fraser from twitter, and launched imzy on april 19, 2016 in invite-only mode. the press coverage was friendly. the product was clean. the user base built slowly through 2016 and into 2017.

the design choices were what made imzy imzy. no advertising, which closed off the standard scale path. community-specific usernames, so you could be one person in a books community and another in a knitting one. posting in a community required a subscription first, so you could not parachute into a group from r/all and start a fight. user-to-user tipping where the company took a cut. all of these were direct responses to reddit's design problems, and that was both the strength and the trap. imzy defined itself by what reddit was not. it never built a positive identity that pulled people in for its own reasons.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the early communities on imzy were exactly what mccomas hoped for. small focused groups with strong moderation and real conversation, very little flamewar surface anywhere. the lgbtq communities were particularly active and treated imzy as the safer place to talk that they had been looking for. fanfiction writers showed up in numbers alongside mental-health support groups that built communities closer to forums of the early 2000s than to reddit of the late 2010s. the people who used imzy genuinely loved it.

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is that imzy almost worked. the product was good and the team was experienced, with the funding sitting in the bank. what they did not have was the thing reddit had accidentally inherited from digg in 2010: a large mass of users who had to be somewhere and chose this place. imzy needed people to actively migrate from reddit, and very few did. mccomas's may 24, 2017 farewell post was honest about it. they could not find their place. the platform shut down its remaining communities on june 23 and gave users about a month to export their content.

~ the inheritance ~

mccomas later founded another community-products company called persona. cohost picked up some of imzy's design ideas a few years later and itself died in 2024, while discord absorbed most of the small-community use case by accident without ever calling itself a reddit alternative. the lesson kept being the same: you cannot build a network by defining yourself against a bigger network. you have to give people a reason to be on yours that has nothing to do with the one they are leaving.

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