Ian Vanagas
@ianvanagas
Writing about internet communities, products, creation, and crypto.
Ian Vanagas
Ideas are alien life forms with an agency and intelligence independent of any mind or substrate which they inhabit.
Roger's Bacon • Ideas are Alive and You are Dead
Gamifying of apps means companies can't make products look better, so they are tapping into your human biology and psychology.
Invest like the Best • Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt... See more
Venkatesh Rao • A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
Community Design and
The next time you are attending a formal presentation at a conference, ask yourself these questions: Is this better than all of those Zoom calls I am turning down? Is this better than the next best YouTube clip I might be watching? For most people, the answers are obvious. Conference organizers need to be willing to pull the trigger and usher the... See more
Bloomberg • Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
When things are innovative, nobody really cares what they look like.
Invest like the Best • Gabriel Leydon - Designing Digital Economies - Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Just as important as the ability to share content itself is the ability to easily share how something is made. The most common remixed media is all visual; meme templates lay out the recognizable format and it’s intuitively obvious how to change them into messages that suit your niche or community.