Alex Dobrenko

So seriousness isn’t some kind of final reward, a golden watch you earn for a lifetime of operating in bad faith. It is, instead, one of those basic practices you gotta do to prevent your life from disintegrating, like getting out of bed and taking a shower and talking to people. That’s because seriousness is the great Orderer of Priorities, and... See more

Robin Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University, wrote a compelling and concise essay in 2010 titled “Chase Your Reading.”

In this essay, Hanson argues that readers are more intellectually productive when they adopt a goal-oriented, critical approach (chasing) rather than a passive, exploratory one (searching). By... See more

Create engagement. As your community grows, members should create engagement among themselves, but you can always create points of engagement to help encourage it, especially in the early days.

For us, it’s been important to foreground what people are doing on Are.na, i.e. the thing . “Organizing” is not the word that I usually use when I describe that action, but when other people make software that is about organizing, a large part of the UI and UX design tends to attempt to remove friction.

For a lot of developers or people who are... See more