#1: Are.na – The social network antithesis

In this world of distraction, Are.na presence is a bliss

Aug 21, 2023

About the identity
Are.na can be explained in many ways. To me, it's a platform for saving visual bookmarks. It launched over 12 years ago and it's fully supported and funded by its humble community.

Workspaces. I love workspaces.

Ever since I got into design, I've been obsessed with the bits and bites of behind-the-scenes of other creatives.

Early in my yet-to-be career, I got excited by pretty mundane stuff. At first, as a Windows kid, it was the discovery of the Mac and those cool screensavers.

https://osxdaily.com/2011/02/14/flip-clock-screensaver/

Over the course of time, this curiosity of mine led to an excitement of good-looking workspaces – especially at startup offices. I liked those kinds of culture videos so much, that I even managed to produce one for the first startup I ever worked in as a farewell project.

I realized that a workspace holds in itself something more profound than just aesthetics. Of course, there’s the human personality that might be reflected through a room or a small space filled with a laptop sitting on a desk, but in my eyes, a workspace is more than just that. It tells a story. A personal story about the core of creative work.

And what started as an aesthetically pleasing habit triggered deeper questions:

What if I could read the mind of other creatives? what would I find?
How does the creative process look for others?
What tools do others use? do they hold a special secret?

That’s part of the gap Are.na fills for me.

Curation is goldmine

Initially, whenever I had to start a new design project, I usually went to scroll through the endless feeds of dribbble and other design galleries. It often felt like entering a giant supermarket, searching for a very specific product that often I don’t really know where or how to find.

I’m not here to say there’s anything wrong with such websites. In fact, I grew up with them. I discovered many designers and got my first work inquiries through them. However, it became clear to me that those websites weren’t built for nourishing the creative process, at least for me.

When I discovered Are.na, something changed in the process. All of a sudden, a whole new channel has opened for me. A giant database of the most niched and unique findings was now being offered to me as a glimpse into the brain of other creatives.

And the deeper I dug the more exciting it got.

I guess the main reason I like Are.na so much is because it highlights the creative process itself.

Most designers’ resources focus on showcasing the end result — the beautiful shiny and polished web design or the well-written case study.

Inversely, the content on Are.na is more meta. It’s not focused on showcasing. The content is centered around people's passions, interests, and motivations. I see it as a reflection of the daunting process of thinking – and that’s where in my opinion, the design process starts.

While the majority of our traditional resources are based on query searching, Are.na is built around the idea of curation.

It has become the ‘save for later’ place for me, hosting articles to interface screenshots. Instead of going on a content hunt whenever I need to do some kind of research or when I try to find some inspiration, I revisit blocks of content I previously saved. I find this shift in the process makes me more mindful:

Save > Search. Rather than searching for something I might not even know how to find, I now have dedicated repositories categorized the way I think. It makes it easier for me to revisit references I’d usually save in silos.
Feeds tend to escalate very quickly. As social networks shift direction to recommendations-based media it’s easy to get lost in feeds. You enter with a purpose in mind and exit completely oblivious. So less wandering, and more check-ins with content I intentionally saved.
Break through the noise. I think bookmarking is a forgotten concept in today’s web culture. Although every social network lets you bookmark posts, it basically ends there. Perhaps the heyday of bookmarking apps like del.icio.us, Pinboard, Pocket, Pinterest, etc. was more than a decade ago (even Are.na itself bloomed around this time1), but the problem of content abundance is now even bigger than it was back then.

A social antidote?

We could browse feeds for hours to… oh wait, that’s what we actually already do on mainstream social networks – and that proved to be not a great habit, to say the least.

Even without watching the Social Dilemma, it’s not hard to understand the business motivation of social giants like Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. We’ve gone from keeping connected with our friends and family to being connected to the platform itself.

“The technology that connects us also controls us”
The Social Dilemma

Are.na isn’t on a mission to change the way social networks work today. Still, it surely demonstrates a radically different approach to how we can socially interact and engage with each other in the digital space.

Moreover, Are.na’s novelty is also something to appreciate. It has been around for more than 12 years now, and it pretty much hasn’t changed.

Are.na doesn’t encourage you to spend your whole day inside its platform, scrolling and scrolling. Ads don’t get you distracted. Push notifications don’t try to suck you in again and again.

It’s not funded by the largest VC funds, nor by famous investors but rather by a small and modest community that wishes to keep Are.na up and running.

There’s no Silicon Valley rush for tremendous growth and scale. And it doesn't make you feel the need to chase after popularity in the form of likes and followers.

There are only ~~users~~ members and ~~data~~ content. 2

Your activity on Are.na could be the most authentic one, and that’s what I like about it. Perhaps this is where all social networks have started in their humble beginnings, but it obviously not the case anymore.

“And we've moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation based technology environment. That's what's changed.”
Tristan Harris, The Social Dilemma

Are.na is a social platform, but I primarily see it as a personal tool. Yes – it’s also where you can spend your time digging through a huge amount of content, but at its core, Are.na is a place to better organize the endless content one finds or bumps into. I think of its social aspect as an extension of personal usage: first, organize your mess, then connect it with others.

As a tool built by creatives for creatives, it serves as a place that helps me to answer these types of questions:

How can I remember an interesting website I saw the other day?
Where do I save references during creative research?
Where do I save visual bookmarks?

In today’s reality, content creators are on a constant hunt to beat the algorithm. Like startups try to win by optimizing their conversions with A/B testing, creators seek the right text, audio, or video that would make their posts go viral.

However, the way to engage with other members on Are.na isn’t traditionally ‘purely social’. Instead of pressing a like button or leaving a short comment, you connect your content to others’ content.

I think it’s a more meaningful way to say why I engaged with your content. It’s not just an act of thumb movement. It’s deeper than that. Maybe it gets me inspired. Maybe it helps me with the research I run. Or perhaps it just puts a smile on my face.

Every social platform is designed around content and Are.na is no different, but thanks to the lack of typical ‘getting famous’ metrics and an aggressive algorithm, Are.na just feels like a calm place on the crowded internet. And as we’re so used to shallow content, it feels that authenticity and uniqueness are what drives Are.na to remain a place to live in.

Thanks Leslie Liu, for reading drafts and contributing to this very first publication piece.