keep Gotham weird

When Imzy set out to be a friendly alternative to Reddit, my team was hopeful but not optimistic. They really tried to build positive experiences directly into the site design, and in some ways they succeeded (I loved the feature that allowed community-specific handles). But the platform also rested on some Social Media Startup Conventional Wisdom that I think sidelined it from the start:

It still prioritized content visibility and quantity over meaningful interaction, even if it was by degrees. There was a Twitter-style emphasis on following accounts that would show you content related to your interests, without much acknowledgement that you might want to follow people you like. 

There were very few ways to create a “home base” and express your individual personality/site identity. 

Most damning, imo: tipping as a major feature immediately narrowed the potential userbase, and basically ruled out adoption by broader fandom. This sounds counterintuitive since we all exchange kofi links and stuff, but it made site culture feel tailored for professionals of a class that finds it no big deal to casually toss each other money for sharing an enlightening opinion or link. Imzy based its monetization on people doing that.

Many of the early adopters then ended up being...well, people like my team, who have a business interest in testing out new social media platforms and seeing if they’ll take off.

It wasn’t great for transformational fandom, either--and despite being treated as damn near invisible, platforms where we congregate benefit wildly from the fact that we create and share massive amounts of original content all day. 

Reddit attracts affirmational fandom because it’s a content aggregator. Imzy was never going to attract Tumblr folks by being a friendlier content aggregator. There’s a specific Reddit behavior that underscores this, and it’s common enough to be a sitewide joke: “Hey guys, my girlfriend/little sister drew this, check it out.” 

The joke is that the original poster is often actually the artist, and they’re not taking credit for it in order to get upvotes or honest responses vs. hostility and exasperation. It’s culturally acceptable on Reddit to share your girlfriend’s fanart because you’re proud of her or because you want the community to help you bolster her self esteem; that’s a feel-good story everyone can cheer for. It’s less culturally acceptable to share your own work simply because you think people will enjoy it, unless there’s something novel about it that prompts discussion. Reddit is almost entirely a shared space, so content is judged by whether there’s a consensus on its value. Many fandom subreddits have explicit rules against people posting their own art or screenshots, because it clogs up the front page with content the community doesn’t consider universally valuable.  

For transformational fandom, it’s not only acceptable but normal to post things simply because it’s your blog and you want it there. On Tumblr, tags are a shared space--but the site design already attracts transformational fandom by being permissive toward our values, so content is primarily judged by whether it’s categorized appropriately. It would be weird and presumptuous to treat a public tag like an aggregator for objectively valuable content.  

All of Imzy’s features would have made for a nicer Reddit, if Reddit didn’t already exist to provide people who like Reddit-style interaction with everything they want. As a result, it felt weirdly sterile--my feed was mostly links, and people even posted outside links to their own content rather than share it directly. It was still a content aggregator, just one where people wouldn’t capslock slurs at you if they didn’t like the fan art your dog totally drew. I think it wanted to host content, but didn’t make it easy to do that. 

I use Imzy as an example not to whine about what they did wrong, but as a general example of how I’ve seen most startup platforms go. There is a basic principle at work here:

Non-toxic users stick with toxic sites because a lot of people use them.

Unless you identify features non-toxic users have been desperate for and missing, you may very well end up lacking the one thing that compels them to frequent your competition. This is why everybody I know thinks Twitter is a hell platform, but almost nobody uses Mastodon. They’re either tweeting for visibility, or because lots of people they know are over there. Mastodon is great for a niche userbase that really loves Twitter’s format, but doesn’t need to use Twitter for professional promotion or to chat with their entire group of friends.

If Mastodon had been “Twitter but with 500 characters and content tagging, also we ban the Nazis,” full stop, I don’t know that a shitton of people wouldn’t have immediately committed to its growth. But like Imzy’s tipping, it has a new feature--decentralization--that makes it a nonstarter for people who aren’t attached to Twitter’s format. 

ok synth but what about pillowfort

Pillowfort does two encouraging things right off:

the developers identified what people like about Tumblr

...and then added blogging features that are proven useful to their target audience. 

Discussion and community building are two things fandom assembles from cardboard and string on Tumblr. It works, but awkwardly, and it looks kind of ugly. So the basic level of functionality--Tumblr, but with features Tumblr users have been asking for and intent to ban the Nazis--isn’t fancy or novel and that’s good. It means fandom doesn’t have to adapt considerably to an entirely unfamiliar site culture, and they’re not trying to jet to viral status before they can walk. Walking’s good, you find a lot of people along the way.

But we have to be okay with walking speed for a while, probably. We’re all used to frequenting sites with millions of users and more content than we could ever take in--we’re used to using sites because they’re huge. PF is not huge. It will not magically get huge unless we decide it should be, and unless we’re willing to invest something--money, time, content, feedback, patience--in growth.

What they’re betting on is that the internet landscape hasn’t changed so dramatically that the only way to survive is through virality. This is a test of whether we want the features we say we want more than we value always being in the middle of a big, busy nexus. This is counter to most expert opinions on what will give social platforms an unavoidably slim chance at survival.