imzy thoughts

[tielan]

I think one of the issues I'm currently experiencing with Imzy is that they're rather overfriendly. Lots of "Hi! We just want to sound really cheery about something that's minor, or make someone friending you sound exciting! Lots of exclamation marks will do this, and it should make you feel right at home!"

As a matter of fact, I'm not a fan of overdone 'chumminess', although I guess it might appeal to other people. It makes my skin crawl, just a little, but there's no option to remove this or change it.

Also, I feel that only notifying a user of the first comment in a post is a little like blackmail: "YOU MUST VISIT OUR SITE AND INTERACT IN ORDER TO SEE WHAT'S GOING ON." You know what? I don't want to visit your site 'just to see what's going on'. I'd like the option to be notified when people respond to my posts - every comment but my own.

Basically, I feel like imzy is trying to force a whole bunch of things on the community to make it a community, without letting the community organically grow itself as communities do. There's no absolute way to make a successful social media site, although there are reliable metrics for me - interaction, commonality, and the easy ability of the individual to mark lines and maintain them.

While they're pushing the interaction and the commonality on me, they've taken away my ability to mark the lines and maintain them - or complicated it rather more than I'm particularly comfortable with.

Maybe they'll convert me; at this point, the answer is "no". And when they keep coming at me with bright and chirpy email messages, then the answer is "HELL, no."

Comments

[alexseanchai]

That is a valid point about the comment notifs.

[tielan]

Maybe it's fine now. But what about in 10 years time when I have hundreds of posts. Am I supposed to check them all regulatly to see if someone's started a conversation?

I still sometimes get comments on older posts. Admittedly, these days they're most spam, but previously, people would go back through my older posts and comment on them, and I'd discuss things with them, and some of them would come back and comment on my more current things...

I don't know if someone's pointed this out to them.

[alexseanchai]

Apparently?

*nod*

Yeah, I don't know if anyone has said this to them.

[muccamukk]

They really need to learn that nag e-mails are just going to drive people off, are in fact currently driving people off. I'm pretty immune to manufactured cheer, and have turned off all possible e-mails, but I shouldn't have to do that. That should be default.

[monanotlisa]

Same here -- I dislike manufactured cheer (it's anathema to my cultural upbringing, in fact) but working in Silicon Valley Tech Culture I've learned to tune it out, or turn it off without leaving entirely.

But yeah, it's annoying, and enough so to drive folks away.

[tielan]

I'd rather interfaces be function; I'm capable of manufacturing my own cheer, thanks.

And I imagine anyone who such people would think need "cheerfulness' is probably not in a good place, and should most certainly not be "cheered up" by the impersonality of emails.

[tielan]

Twitter is mildly over-cheerful, but at least they keep their messages relatively short. "X has replied to your tweet!"

Plus there are things I'll forgive a popular platform that I won't a start-up.