Ian Vanagas

The personal computing revolution succeeded and we are all miserable. The dream of personal computing as augmentation for the intellect, and the joyful, radical counterculture that arose around the first PC’s has given way to our increasingly dismal present.

An accurate definition of “influencer” is: a virtuoso of a particular internet platform; someone who has learned to use its mechanisms to achieve their own objectives, rather than the other way around.

Every project provides a story about the access they provide. The projects and communities that succeed create the best stories about why their access is most valuable.

Arcades should help members prioritize their path into a community. It should help them make decisions about where they want to go and what they want to do. If users know what information is important to them, they can make this decision better. The community arcade should give a view into the community from the outside without overwhelming users.

You should be able to easily see connections between all of the web pages you have open at once, any subset of them, and explore them / navigate through them visually.

Many people think of onboarding only when a member first joins a community, but onboarding happens every time a member re-enters a community space. Communities should always be onboarding. Onboarding is the process of providing members with the context necessary to function in the community. It is needed because context changes constantly.