In recent years, Reddit, the most popular online bulletin board and news networking service, has weathered several high-profile controversies. At the crux of the very public infighting among the Reddit community has been censorship, and how to foster free speech without creating a haven for hate speech and other ethically and legally questionable content. One of the people caught in the crossfire, the former number two at Reddit, Dan McComas, who is now exiled from the company, has rolled out a new competing website, Imzy.

It functions much like Reddit, with the explicit goal of maintaining a positive community, and avoiding the “meanness” that took root at Reddit. In sum, Imzy is the online manifestation of the “safe space” culture we’ve seen spreading in college campuses across the country. Imzy Founder McComas told Next Web that as websites like Reddit have grown their base, they tend to attract harassers, and that becomes “ingrained in the culture of the web community.”

Naturally, we wanted to learn about the new Reddit-type website that embraces the “safe space” culture that’s now a mainstay for young and impressionable Millennials. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to learn much more than already has been written. Right now, Imzy isn’t interested in press coverage.

While the press contact thanked Bold for our “thoughtful list of questions,” they politely declined to answer our questions because they’re “trying to keep a lower media profile right now.” They did however reveal that they’re “in private beta as we make sure our communities and features grow in the right way along with our user base.”

Philosophically, the website seems to be applying much of Reddit’s playbook in rolling out this website carefully and deliberately. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian once wrote: “When you get your first hundred users, treat them well, because these first hundred will make or break your product.” Imzy’s careful growth strategy is explicitly meant to avoid the problems that have made Reddit a constant target of criticism.

Maintaining free speech, while enforcing community standards is a common problem throughout the cybersphere. From Facebook and Twitter to Reddit, the tenuous balance between freedom of expression and fostering havens for cyber bullying and hate speech is often a hot-button issue. Community standards help promote a certain culture, but the enforcement of those standards can often be inconsistent. Offensiveness, much like beauty, is in the eye the beholder.

“Inherently, it’s necessary to sacrifice some freedom of speech to maintain community standards,” said Joseph Steinberg, Cyber Security Expert and CEO of Secure My Social, a service that helps businesses protect their social media to prevent reputational damage, privacy leaks, and legal entanglements. “The reality is that enforcing community standards is far from a perfect process. Instead, refining them over time creates a better general tone than if you hadn’t implemented community standards. There’s always the added problem that what we consider offensive changes across cultures and over time. Nevertheless, you don’t have to remove everything to make it positive.”

The experts we spoke to believe that solidifying a positive culture at Imzy is entirely possible through community standards. “Reddit’s DNA was very open and anything went and negativity was allowed to fester,” said Charlie O’Donnell, founder of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, and author of the influential venture capital blog This Is Going To Be Big. “A lot can be done to instill community standards and to highlight the most positively contributing members. Natural language processing can tell if commentary creates positive or negative discourse, as does various rating systems.”

Nevertheless, Imzy artificially imposing positivity may encounter some roadblocks. “I worry that most people don’t want positivity,” said O’Donnell. “They want to feel ‘right’ and there just isn’t a clear right or wrong on some issues–so we devolve into personal attacks. It makes people feel safer and more confident to believe that people who disagree with us are bad people.”

Imzy has found significant backing in its attempt to carve out this unique niche for prospective Redditors-in-exile. They’ve already raised three million dollars to launch and develop the site. Imzy’s monetization model is a radical departure from most websites, as there won’t be ads featured on the site. Their “tips program” that uses member donations to reward users and moderators for their work will also drive revenue. Imzy’s founder said he’ll explore more creative alternatives to drive revenue down the road.

Alternatives to Reddit have been popping up, but Imzy is the first to take a “safe space” approach to the problems that have landed the world’s most popular online bulletin board in hot water. It will be interesting to see if Imzy can maintain its positive tone through community standards as it experiences growth in its user base. After all, Reddit wasn’t always a haven for negativity. As Caitlin Dewey of the Washington Post wrote, “Whatever small harms or indignities existed before Reddit had 150 million monthly users were now amplified a thousand times.” There’s little doubt that avoiding those pitfalls are challenging for a nearly collaborative website as it grows its community into a multi-million member enterprise.