105. Slow and steady: how Are.na became the Good Web for artists, designers, and researchers who love unusual connections

A podcast with Are.na's founder Charles Broskoski. Arena "boasts a healthy, creative community and stable finances while rejecting many of the hallmarks of popular social media".

"relative to other social platforms. It’s ... a little tiny village that you might not have heard of in the whole country... half a million registered accounts", with around 40,000 monthly active users who "have to actually do something... make a channel or a connection... around half ... pay for a subscription", which is enough to cover 4 fulltime staff, contractors and costs.

That's an interesting case study of how small a copzyweb can be while actually building something new: if the software came ready made, a community could be much smaller and still remain viable.

"if we were starting it again today... I would never go out and raise money. I would start charging right away", which ensures we listen to our customers. It also means "you’re building your software for are the people who are using it... not ... to create valuable data to sell to people who want to buy ads"

More money data points: "500,000 total accounts, there’s like 40,000 people who use it really regularly", costing 300-400k/y.

Interesting insight: the things people say they want from social media can't be achieved from the standard social media " hockey stick" model, but only through a "gradual evolution of the product ... organic growth". They started with a fremium model because charging for social media was unheard of, and had to change what people had to pay for a few times as some iterations impacted community quality negatively. A crowdfunding campaign "raised close to $300,000", but only "within the past two, three years, have we been able to just be solely full time on Are.na".

The community's successful "because socializing isn’t the sort of like first thing that you’re supposed to do on it... when you’re posting on Are.na... you’re just kind of doing your thing. It just happens to be public... you’re a little bit more yourself."

Are.na one is a lot less performative: "I personally don’t like presenting my face on the internet... What I am willing to do is sometimes show people the way that I organize things and things that I’m into... it’s not like oriented around discussion."

Is it vulnerable to "a bunch of 4chan trolls wake up ... Hey, here’s this like community where we can ... post a lot of really bad shit... What are some simple design decisions you can make so that you don’t have to confront the worst stuff right off the bat?" Fundamentally, "discussion is not really like at the forefront of how you do interact with people on Are.na", plus it's small.

But they did have spam problems because they had good SEO, "but it’s not much more than a drop in a bucket" - similarly to MyHub.

Also, there's the nature of posting: "right now, anyone can flag something as inappropriate or spam" but while "if you’re posting something on Twitter, it’s pretty similar to you saying it [whereas] If you’re putting something on a Are.na, you could be researching it", so they need to add nuance to their community guidelines cover such edge cases.

What really helps is that "it’s such a small community, we know them" - probably the essence of what makes a cozyweb cozy. Also, whereas Twitter = entertainment, "being slightly more oriented towards introversion [means]... there’s a distinction between what is being viewed and the things that are being said around what is being viewed".

In the end, "a handful of companies are deciding how we define what social media is... there are lots of different ways of being online that are not reflected now in current social platforms ... [so] you just end up with this incredibly unhealthy diet that kind of makes you feel awful".

"we don’t aspire to be indie or like necessarily small. We aspire to be extremely good... the only way ... is to grow at the right pace."