Gilman was a huge part of my life and I played various roles in participating and helping to manage it over the year, though I don't want to take ANY credit for this, it's not my place and no person should. But, the experience I had there showed me what is possible when things are started with good intentions and managed that way going forward. There were and are rocky times at Gilman, but overall it's a model that should be studied.
Also, we made and shared a lot of great music with the world, which is the real upside of gilman. I miss that time in my life.
Oh yeah, it certainly wasn't perfect, but the good far outweighed the bad IMO. Also, I'm now realizing there are probably a lot of parallels in building those sorts of communities with the Eternal September problem: getting too big and people betraying the ethics. It'd be a fun historical analogy to explore...
> I miss that time in my life.
Me too. I'm still in my 20s, but given that I now have a lot more means working in the tech world than I had when I was a teenager, I've been thinking a lot about how I might be able to help foster communities like that for younger generations (opening a venue, starting a small label, patronizing high school bands that want to record, etc.) Curious if you've thought about the same?
EDIT: Holy crap, just realized you're the subject of the article. Definitely didn't mean to imply you didn't play a role, FYI, but I imagine you played a large part given your humility on the matter. ;) Keep up the good fight, man.
We're rooting for you.
Hi, I'm the founder of Imzy. It's a hard day but I want to make myself available, especially to entrepreneurs who may have questions. This last 2 years has been fun, and hard and I've learned a lot. You can reply here or email me at dan@imzy.com
I also have an amazing staff of developers, community minded folks, product people, executives, who are looking for work. Many of them mare open to moving (we are in Salt Lake City) and all are open to remote work. They are all very talented. Please drop me a line if you're interested.
"Hi, I'm the founder of Imzy. It's a hard day but I want to make myself available, especially to entrepreneurs who may have questions. This last 2 years has been fun, and hard and I've learned a lot. You can reply here or email me at dan@imzy.com"
Have you considered contacting Internet Archive - or specifically, "Archive Team" - and coordinating with them to package up and deliver an archive of the public data that was produced on your platform ?
Hey Dan, I was a member in the early beta, am really sad to see Imzy go but really appreciate you guys branching off and making the efforts toward a new site (which I agree definitely still needs to exist).
> We still feel that the internet deserves better and hope that we see more teams take on this challenge in the future
As someone with a headful of ideas hoping to potentially take on this challenge (:P) - any writeups or info on scaling/architecture would be much appreciated. There are some HighScalability articles on the bigger sites but every bit of info on comparison of architectures helps us newbies, heh.
Also, as others asked about - if you guys do manage to open source, that could be a starting point for those who liked Imzy's layout/model (personally as one of the ones who likes aspects of "oldschool" and novel design concepts, I'd go in a diff direction; but the engine could still help me figure out components needed and possibly other scaling/metrics/etc logic)
> any writeups or info on scaling/architecture would be much appreciated. There are some HighScalability articles on the bigger sites but every bit of info on comparison of architectures helps us newbies, heh.
I don't think Imzy's scalabilities issue is what did them in. I signed up to see what it was about, and saw a JS bug and reported it, and they not only fixed it super-quick, but also sent me a thank-you sticker. So their team, while imperfect as all teams are, was at least responsive and dedicated.
If I had to guess - and I do - their problems stemmed from their community size not growing as rapidly as it could have, and monetization.
That's the interesting thing - how do you build a community? How do you build a bunch of communities? How do you advertise, how do you tackle moderation successfully, how do you keep people invested, etc.
There's a billion write-ups on writing code, but nowhere near enough on running a meta-community.
Building "a community" is one thing. You don't need a product to build one community. You really just need passion, credibility, and perseverance -- and some combination of a blog, email list, and facebook/slack group as the tool.
Building a bunch of communities (aka facilitating community) is a different beast entirely, and seldom takes off very quickly at all. The best example of facilitating community is Meetup.com.
I've been working on a facilitation of community model called Horizon (http://www.horizonapp.co) which is best thought of as airbnb/couchsurfing with friends, friends of friends, and communities. So, privately, rather than publicly with strangers.
You can either facilitate existing community, or build a community. Trying to do both is a recipe for disaster imho.
I'll give you one piece of advice: beware premature scaling. If you have a headful of ideas, I'd focus on building something people want, not thinking about scale or other technical optimizations.
If you're an engineer like me, we'll often overweight tech choices, rather than the product and user acquisition decisions that matter in a social network.
I really hope they do. It may not be up to them and more up to their investors, but having a platform like this that people in the open source community can hack on may provide new great things further down the line.
It looks like their traffic has been fairly flat. I'd guess just over 1,000 unique users a day based on their Alexa rating, and a number of sites I run for comparison numbers. At the peak of their popularity, it would have been closer to 2,000 unique users a day.
It's incredibly small for the amount of media attention they received. I think shutting down is the right, and responsible move here.
Sorry to hear that but glad you guys made the effort that you did! As another founder in a similar space, I'd love to read a post-mortem from you. And if you are in the headspace right now to maybe just share a TLDR?
Sorry to hear about your experience. I had the pain of shutting down my business a few years ago. It completely sucks, but it is also a relief.
Did you focus on any cohort or did you just experiment with lots of cohorts hoping one would take off? If you did focus, what if anything did you learn?
Why did you need to find this? Was this a pressure from investors, or did you determine internally that growth wouldn't eventually take off, ever?
(One of the things that worries me a lot about taking venture capital is the pressure to grow quickly over growing well / sustainably, so I'm pretty curious about this....)
Can you talk on the challenges and strategies of creating a community of people like Imzy? Not necessarily just online, but also in real life, how do you bring people together?
TL;DR - we over built. We were too close to the problem from our experiences at reddit and built WAY too much stuff that only really matters if you are operating at scale.
If we had done better with this, we could have gone to market quicker and probably done a better job finding product/market fit.
There's of course more, but this is the biggest thing.
I admire your openness about this. I never used Imzy, but I definitely saw the appeal. Its unfortunate things didn't work out. I'm curious; Knowing what you know now, do you think you could have made it work? Basically, how much of a difference would getting to market quicker have made?
>built WAY too much stuff that only really matters if you are operating at scale.
Why do people do this?? Please don't build for mega huge scales before you've gone to market...it's a huge waste of time and money. I guess developers have too much pride to not make the _best_ platform
TL;DR: They do it because they haven't yet learned the skills needed not to.
People doing startups are natural optimists, bold risk-takers. And to get the money, you have to sell people on a dream of giant scale, on a big vision of what is to come. If you can't create and sell that vision, nobody gives you the money.
To then turn around and say, "Ok, what's the minimum necessary?" is really hard. You have to throw out 99% of your vision. You have to turn into a risk-averse pessimist. After talking about making the best thing, you have to go and make nearly the worst thing. Then you user-test it, discover why it sucks for your core audience, and make it suck less, in hopes that this time you've got the minimum viable product.
Making that turn is definitely a skill, something you have to learn and practice. It's not something we learn at all just building things to spec, which is the normal experience. It's the kind of product management that in theory everybody should do, but that in practice you only really are forced to do if you don't have much money.
> Then you user-test it, discover why it sucks for your core audience, and make it suck less, in hopes that this time you've got the minimum viable product.
Seems related to: "MVP" --> "the rewrite / second system"
I can see why they would if they had previous been involved in Reddit. The only site that had more notorious problems scaling in its early-middle days that I can think of is Twitter with its fail whale.
Making a site scalable is an easy, defined problem. Building a site people want to visit, and getting them there, is much more difficult and undefined.
It looks like you can "tip" communities and users and be tipped yourself for things you post. The incentive to create genuinely worthwhile content is much higher, assuming people actually use the tipping feature.
I suppose with Reddit's "flair" options you could put a BTC address next to your username in a lot of subreddits. But BTC is a lot more effort than just clicking a button, unless the site sets itself up specifically to use BTC, at which point why not just use real money?
Take a look at all the "gilded" posts on Reddit. I see dozens of them every day. People love spending a few bucks here and there to show their appreciation for good content, but all of that money goes straight to Reddit rather than the person that created or shared that content. I would much prefer the majority of my "gildings" to go to the user, rather than the site.
Well, there's a lot to it and the more you use it the more you understand it. I think we need to get a lot better at getting the real value prop to new users in a better way, so thanks for highlighting this.
I have a thesis that is basically identical to yours about unmanaged expectations and community being the main root of the problem that reddit/twitter/etc are facing, which is part of the reason why we started Imzy https://www.imzy.com/imzy
We got some press early on that really told an untrue narrative of what we are trying to do, but we've made a ton of progress in a few months of our private beta and our communities and platform are really beginning to come together. The link I gave above is to our company community and if anyone wants to try Imzy out I will approve your request as soon as you make it.
Would you care to give a true narrative of what you're trying to do? You linked to an empty page where I can request an invite, and the "about us" page just says you're "rethinking" communities online. What is the nature of moderation and communication on the site?
I can glean a bit of info from news sites, but not very much if you say they're fundamentally misunderstanding you.
Crap sorry, I was offline all night being with my family and didn't see this soon enough.
In short, Imzy is attempting to find a way to align the company as best as we can with the communities. We recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all type of community and trying to fit all communities into a simple, archaic message board doesn't give the communities much to work with. Compound this with our believe that having an advertising business model not being well aligned with community's best interests, we believe that we can build a flexible commerce system into the platform so that communities can use it if and when they need it for their communities (for instance, to sell each other things, to pay for events they are putting on, to support the community leaders).
How do we do this? It's going to take a long time and require us to make our platform extendable by developers.
Right now, we are at the starting point where we have to build some initial communities and get them starting their evolution process. We have innovated a lot on our community leadership tools (and still are) and have put a very rudimentary payments platform in place. Our next phase will be to start innovating on the developer platform and the things communities are able to do on the platform.
You'll notice that nowhere in this description did I talk about free speech or harassment. That is because it isn't part of our core thesis. Our core thesis is giving communities online the attention we feel they have never been given in the right way. However, we recognize that if we are successful, we will have a lot of people on the platform and be faced with the same challenges that twitter/reddit/facebook/etc are faced with regarding harassment. So, we are focusing on it early because we feel we need to set the tone for the early communities so that as we grow they can help. There are a few things we don't allow on the site due to our past experiences: porn, hate speech, harassment, doxxing, etc.. We realize there are a lot of gray areas here and so we are equally focused on building and scaling our community team early.
That ended up being longer than I thought it was going to be, but probably not as long as it should be. I hope it gives you at least a little better idea of what we are doing.
Also, we made and shared a lot of great music with the world, which is the real upside of gilman. I miss that time in my life.