It’s Like Reddit, Without the Trolls

The discussion site Imzy promises to be—you ready?—“a community as welcoming / conscientious / creative / intellectual / opinionated / fanatical / diverse / curious / active / passionate / goofy /funny / tough / adventurous / interesting / obsessed / quirky / generous / playful / artistic as you are.” The internet isn’t often a place you’d call welcoming or conscientious these days, so a forum like this seems anachronistic at best; no one would question that it’s naive, not even the founders, Dan McComas, 42, and his wife, Jessica Moreno, 43, who started it in October. They learned just how rough things can get online when they worked for Reddit, the eighth-most-visited site in the U.S.

Originally, all McComas, an independent web developer obsessed with Christmas, wanted to do was set up a secret Santa exchange for the news and discussion platform’s users. In December 2009, he built a separate forum, Redditgifts, that lets people sign up for a randomly assigned gift sent through the mail. (Reddit was cool with it, though it didn’t have ownership.) “It was an idea I didn’t put more than five minutes of thought into, and then thousands of people were using it,” McComas says. Just by word-of-mouth, Redditgifts attracted so many people that McComas was quickly overwhelmed with maintaining the code. He handed off customer service to Moreno, a soft-spoken artist who enjoys the medium of felt. Still, the unpaid hobby was taking so much time that, after Christmas 2010, McComas planned to shut down the service. Instead, Reddit bought it for an undisclosed sum and brought the couple officially on board. Redditgifts grew to have more than 200,000 participants by 2014, landing the Guinness record for world’s largest gift exchange, and McComas became the jolly face of the forum. He even delivered a TEDx Talk titled “It’s All About the Giving.”