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.

Jim prepares well for conversations, predicts what people are going to ask, always has something to say.

The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutr... See more

It is as if there existed, for what seems like millennia, tracing back to the very origins of mathematics and of other arts and sciences, a sort of “conspiracy of silence” surrounding [the] “unspeakable labors” which precede the birth of each new idea, both big and small[.]

Thinking about inputs and outputs to the system in a method-agnostic way lets you take a step back from the algorithmic jargon and consider whether other fields have developed methods that might work here using different terminology.

In the end, every single person like Nick who votes to deploy their capital into something which doesn’t produce anything beyond capital, is a vote to sit on the sidelines while every single other person works to keep the lights on, or ideally reverse the cycle.

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.

Group chats where people spend time with their friends online, and so this is where the experiences should happen. Playing a game, watching a trailer, or reading an article with friends should be as easy as sending a message to them. Experiences should build on the group chat, not move away from it.