news.buyenne.com

(credit: Nan Palmero)

Imzy is trying to be everything you want out of Internet community, minus the awfulness. Founded by a group of ex-Reddit employees, including Dan McComas and Jessica Moreno, the company has raised $3 million in investments, partnered with Lena Dunham and Dan Harmon's online communities, and attracted tens of thousands of users in closed beta. They did it based on one promise: they would not be like Reddit. What exactly that means depends on what you hated about Reddit in the first place.

For people like Dunham—whose email list known as Lenny Letter already has its own verified group in the new community—Imzy means being free from a lot of the harassment and trolling that haunts other platforms. Imzy CEO McComas told Ars via phone that part of the company's strategy is inviting a wide range of groups including Lenny Letter and Black Girls Talking to be part of Imzy from the start. "We're trying to get diverse groups to work with us now, because [as the company grows] you're only as diverse as your private beta. People tend to bring in people like themselves," he said. "If we waited a couple of years to address this, it would be too late. We would already have a cultural norm and that's tough to change." Essentially, Imzy is hedging against developing a community that would embrace groups like Reddit's racist r/CoonTown or the pro-rape subreddit r/rapingwomen. McComas added that a big part of their strategy is to pay community moderators—they have two working full time on staff already. "At Reddit, there was one staffer per 20 million unique visitors. We think we need a higher ratio of staff to community members,"

But as McComas admits, creating good policies around community and diversity don't really rake in the dough. That's why the backbone of Imzy is going to be their tipping and payment system. Currently the beta allows users to tip moderators and other community members, but in the long term the idea would be for each community to figure out how it wants to use its payment system. Comedian Dan Harmon, creator of the cult hit Community, has an Imzy group called Harmontown where members can pay $5 per month to listen in while Harmon tapes his weekly podcast. Imzy gets a cut of those payments. In the longer term, with Imzy providing a variety of tools for buying and selling, groups might form around selling clothing, games, or art. Imagine joining a group devoted to homebrew telescopes, and meeting people there who would sell you their latest kits, to your exact specifications. For Imzy, that's the goal.

Flying the W.U.R.M. (video link)

Walk into the room and you might be forgiven for asking, "This is my space ship?!"

W.U.R.M: Escape from a Dying Star is a low-fi, two-player space survival game that debuted the first week of May 2016 at Culture Hub as part of Creative Tech week in New York City. The "ship" is fashioned from foam and 3D-printed materials in the middle of an empty space, while the screen ahead displays an ever-shifting, dynamically generated wormhole.

Enlarge / Supercharging at my usual stop in Columbus. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

A few weeks ago, I finally tried Tesla Motors' "autopilot" feature. A Tesla rep and I tooled around Houston's I-45 in a Model X crossover SUV for 15 minutes, just long enough to test the vehicle's adaptive cruise/automatic lane-keeping wizardry. Once I toggled on the autopilot, the rep relaxed by checking e-mail on her phone. This sent a clear message: keep an eye on the dumb journalist when he's driving the $140,000 SUV, but once the machine takes over, everything’s fine.

As we pulled back into the showroom (or whatever Texas’ insane dealership protection laws demand Tesla call the places it’s not allowed to sell or service vehicles), I told the rep that I was driving to Austin soon; Autopilot would be just the thing for the long stretches of empty road out on I-10 and TX-71. Without missing a beat, she offered me a loaner Model S.

Ars has officially driven a Model S with autopilot before, but only under controlled circumstances. The Austin trip would let me take the car out for nearly four hundred miles of driving in a big mix of traffic scenarios. Plus, I'd get to log more cockpit time in a Tesla. Of course I said yes. Who wouldn’t?

(credit: flickr user: MIKI Yoshihito)

If you were asked whether you’d prefer to be given $140 today or $1400 in five years' time, the smart answer is obvious. But immediate cash can be really tempting: perhaps you have expensive car repairs looming or you want to buy a gift for someone—that $140 would do the trick. It can be easy to justify cheating your future self out of $1260 in the face of instant gratification.

The tendency to ignore or discount the value of a future benefit is called "time discounting." Plenty of research suggests that time discounting can be linked to criminal behavior, which is the ultimate example of choosing an immediate reward despite an abstract risk of losses. Although the link is intuitive, it still needs confirmation through empirical research, because so many things that seem intuitive turn out to be wrong.

Investigating this question is a tough gig, though. You could test people’s time discounting behaviors and look at their criminal records, but even if you found a link, you wouldn't know whether the time behaviors led to the crime, or vice versa. Ideally, you need to find a way to test children’s time discount rates, and then wait to see if they get involved in crime as adults (and whether this tendency lasts past the adolescent crime peak).

As the first collected edition of Unfollow hits comic book stores this week, the high concept behind DC/Vertigo's social media thriller threatens to overshadow the comic itself. A pitch like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meets Battle Royale meets social media" sounds cooked up by an overeager marketing consultant as much as it does the recipe for a compelling story.

Yet it works. As proven by this week's 140 Characters printed collection of the first six issues, the comic moves with a speed, subtlety and self-awareness that belies its elevator pitch. The result can stand alongside previous Vertigo hits such as Y: The Last Man, Scalped, and Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Like those titles, Unfollow is simultaneously of the moment and timeless, making a big point about big subjects while also telling a genre story filled with pulpy thrills in a way that only comics can.

In large part, Unfollow works because writer Rob Williams leans into the sticky parts of the series' DNA (including tongue-in-cheek references to Willy Wonka's golden tickets) while steering the larger tale in another direction. Unfollow begins with Larry Ferrell, bazillionaire founder of social media empire Headspace, choosing 140 users at random to inherit his fortune upon his death. Should one of them die, their share will be split equally between the remaining inheritors. But that's just the MacGuffin.