[NotAMoose]

>Their basic premise seems to hinge on the idea of "tipping people's niceness".

This isn't actually true. Some news article decided that was our basic premise because it made a good clickbait headline. Our tipping system is the beginning of a larger business model that we hope to implement in the future.

https://medium.com/imzyhq/why-imzy-doesnt-have-ads-and-what-...

We don't want to have advertisements on the site, and the tipping system is part of our strategy to avoid that.

[webwanderings]

Isn't the business model the real premise? Without which, you won't be able to self-sustain, which then renders any other supposed premise, useless.

[rtpg]

I think for more community-run sites, the business model is not the real premise.

No one would say that the real premise of Wikipedia is collecting donations.

[webwanderings]

But Wikipedia proves that the real premise is not sustainable if they don't collect donations.

So whether one defines the hierarchy of premises or not, the fact of the matter is that the intention matters. The intention of Imzy seems to be that they want to stand against Reddit, and their stand out qualification is for people to be nice via reward-system. Now here I am not going to go into the argument of whether reward systems should be used for adults...but it is one of their premise for sure.

[NotAMoose]

I'm saying that literally no where do we say that people should "tip each other for being nice", nor do we have some sort of reward system based on that. That is entirely a thing invented by clickbait headlines.

From the medium article I linked:

>Most of you know you can tip posts, comments, and communities on Imzy. It was important to us that we include our payments platform in some way from day one, and this was the simplest way to do it. You can give any community, post, or comment a reward for great content that you really appreciate. But that is just the tiniest little seed of what’s to come.

That is what got misconstrued into "tipping people for being nice."

To use something you might be familiar with, reddit has reddit gold. It gives some minor perks, and you can gift it to other people. Reddit calls this "gilding". People gild some pretty ridiculous and even awful content all the time. The idea that we would institute a tipping system (which in some ways could be seen as analogous to gilding, except with real money) and just magically everyone would use it for "being nice" simply doesn't make sense, and would have been a pretty odd idea on our part.

A lot of times folks want to tip content creators and others. We wanted to give them a way to do this. We have a bunch of other stuff planned for the payment system in the future, as outlined in that Medium piece.

Hopefully this clarifies some.

[webwanderings]

So I am not really a regular Reddit user, nor do I even participate there (I subscribe my selected content there via RSS).

When I joined Imzy, the very first thing I was told, was to use this reward system. But you are saying that it is just a tinniest part of the whole. To me, it seems contradictory because otherwise a tinniest part wouldn't stand out up front.

I am not necessarily against this system (tiny or otherwise), but Imzy clearly seems to have an issue establishing its narrative properly. I recently read or heard somewhere, that it is psychologically proven, that if you tell someone what to do, they won't like it (or they'd do the opposite). You give people unconditional choice, and they won't go home regretting, even if they'd do what you want them to do anyway.

[NotAMoose]

>I recently read or heard somewhere, that it is psychologically proven, that if you tell someone what to do, they won't like it (or they'd do the opposite).

Have you found stop signs working that way? There was a crash at a stop sign near my house tonight. Perhaps the people were just psychologically driven to ignore the stop sign because of science.

I don't really understand what you're talking about with "unconditional choice." Yes, you have a choice to run a stop sign. That choice has the consequence of potentially killing you or other people. Yes, you will get your drivers license taken away if you are constantly driving around yelling "screw the man!" and running every stopsign you see because of some strange notion of "unconditional choice" to run stopsigns.

No you can't start a racist hate mob on our platform. That should go without saying, but for some reason that is considered "novel" to some folks on the internet.

Regarding the tipping system, we're not forcing anyone to use it. Only a small amount of our users use it, and that is totally fine.