Ian Vanagas

What do people actually want from their interactive experiences? The first insight from the pandemic era is that most formal presentations should simply be abolished. The sad reality is that hardly anyone is listening, or for that matter should be.

Communities should think hard about their onboarding process for new and returning users. They should understand what information is shared and needed to engage with the community, and what path those users are going on. They should think about how to summarize context to be more consumable for both new and returning users.

An accurate definition of an internet “creator” would have to be: someone whose income is determined by a platform’s algorithms.

We are on a trend “inward”, where capital, our proxy for GDP, is better served deployed into things that generate more capital, instead of things that generate production.

When she was laid off from her role at a fintech startup in the pandemic panic of early 2020, Paris doubled down on driving traffic to her DePop store to make money. She saw TikTok as an untapped fount of opportunity, and made creating videos for it her full-time job. She posted dozens of times a day, drawing viewers in with her... See more

A person with this perspective is one who witnessed the more orderly society functioning, yet did not witness the building of the more orderly society , and thus does not understand the mechanics of the more orderly society. In other words, this person has a distinctive blind spot —he knows what could be reaped from a more orderly society, yet not... See more

When things are innovative, nobody really cares what they look like. 

DOOM embraced the idea of shared creativity. Rather than requiring the user to start from a blank slate, DOOM provided the structure and tools which allowed people to re-combine and add things to an existing system. This lowered the barrier to entry, not only in terms of the required technical skill (since it was not necessary to learn to write... See more