At 13 years old, Are.na boasts a healthy, creative community and stable finances while rejecting many of the hallmarks of popular social media platforms such as a focus on video, endless push notifications, or surveillant advertising. For this week’s edition of our Good Web series, founder Charles Broskoski sits with Mike to walk through what slow and steady growth has looked like over the years, and why he thinks Are.na will be valuable to its community members for a long time to come.

Charles Broskoski, aka CAB, is an artist and founder of Are.na. His essay “Here For the Wrong Reasons” is essential Good Web reading.

Transcript

Mike Sugarman:

Hello everybody, welcome back to Reimagining the Internet. I am Mike Sugarman and you are joining us for, well I don’t know when this one is going to run but it’s the first interview that I’m recording for our new Good Web series. Ethan interviewed Cory Doctorow about enshitification. That was kind of the beginning of the Good Web series but what we’re gonna be doing for the next several episodes, maybe indefinite number of episodes, is being really focused on things that are working on the internet, trying to figure out why they’re working and trying to inspire other folks and show them how they can take on similar work themselves. So this is kind of like an extension of that Three-Legged Stool paper that we wrote in spring of 2023. Yeah, we’re gonna be having some old friends back on the show. One of those joining me today is Charles, Charles Broskoski from Are.na. That’s A-R-E dot N-A. Are.na is probably the most idiosyncratic social network you can find, at least visually. It’s a bunch of blocks. There’s not a whole lot of people talking to each other and it’s full of researchers, artists, designers. It’s a really wonderful place online. Charles, thank you for joining the show and I don’t know, is there anything else? Anything else I should introduce you with?

Charles Broskoski:

No, that’s great. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah, so it’s kind of funny because as we were talking right before recording, there’s not any big news with Are.na. There’s almost never any big news with Are.na. Everyone’s talking about you put out a periodical. I guess periodically you put out a periodical. Yeah, so some people might be asking like why have this guy back on. It’s not like Are.na had a big crisis. We’ve just got a billion dollars from an angel investor. So what’s up over there?

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah, we’re just like, yeah, yeah, we never have gigantic news. We’re always just kind of like continuing on forever and ever. But let’s see. So I guess the big news, the big news for us is that we doubled our team size from two full-time people to four full-time people, which is gigantic for us, you know. In August of 2023, we rehired for the third time one of the original Are.na co-founders, Damon Zucconi, to head of engineering. And then earlier this year, Meg Miller, who has been running the editorial projects on Are.na. The Are.na annual, which you mentioned we put out once a year, then just kind of like interviews and blog posts and things that we do with people on Are.na. Meg does all that and we hired her full-time. So that was like, these are doubling our team is like the big news, but it’s all like it’s all tiny news.

Yeah, I don’t know. We also re-recently, we recently relaunched the front-end of our website, which is also funnily like not really big news because we rewrote it to look nearly identical to the old one. We just did it better. So we’re always kind of trying to keep things on a very even keel, which I guess is, yeah, to your point, it’s idiosyncratic in a way. Just relative to other things.

There’s just sort of like an entropy that happens with software, especially software as old as Are.na, like where we’re gonna be 13 this year in August. And you can continually maintain things, but when it gets to a certain point, it’s just like you’re almost as painful as it is. You just like in order to move forward, you have to rethink everything.

The main reason we did it was because of speed and performance. And it’s like a gigantic difference between the new one and the old one. But the reason why we kept it the same is because people on Are.na are the exact type of people who would like people to complain about redesigns, you know what I mean? Like that’s what happens when you redesign something. But people on Are.na are especially like the key audience for complaining about a redesign. So we knew that like there was really like almost no leeway in terms of like we had to just do the thing that we did before, but do it way better. And that actually felt more on the brand in any way. So yeah.

Mike Sugarman:

Okay, there’s a nicer way to say what you just said, which is… Yeah, okay, yes, the people on Are.na are people who complain about redesign, but that also means they’re really happy with how Are.na is designed. It means that they’re not currently complaining about what Are.na looks like.

Charles Broskoski:

That’s true. We knew that people were happy with the way things looked and functioned and the most complaints that we got were around performance. And in order to solve those problems, we tried a bunch of things. Some things helped a little bit, but ultimately the problem was like architecture. But yeah, you’re right. That’s a much nicer way to say it, is that people were happy. Yeah, we also got that message when people did inevitably complain about the relaunch as you know what I mean, as people do. And they were just like, “We could have just left it as it was before.” Which is like, yeah, to your point, it’s kind of a nice message to get.

Mike Sugarman:

It’s one of those things where it’s like, how would you explain Are.na to someone without a computer? And it might actually be a little bit easier than explaining Are.na to someone who mainly uses Facebook for social media. That’s a really good point. Basically what Are.na is is like, let’s say you want to add a link to Are.na. You can add it, but Are.na is going to ask you to put it into a channel, which is basically a folder. And then you can put that channel into other channels. And you can have a channel be a mix of channels and blocks. Blocks is let’s say the link or the little Post-It note that she wrote or the image that you want to share. And then other people, if you let them can add stuff to that channel, but other people can connect to channels, other stuff, you can have private ones.

I am probably a bad Are.na community member because almost all of the channels I use are private, but mainly because I just kind of use it to vomit research into something that’s totally unformatted. And honestly, there’s so many aesthetically oriented people on Are.na who do such a nice job presenting cool things and maintaining their channel. They can do that and I’ll just hide here in the shadows.

Charles Broskoski:

No, we always say there’s no wrong way to use Are.na. And I think that’s a really typical thing that people do just like they only do stuff in private. I have very close friends who only use it privately, which I think is totally valid. I mean, every way is valid. But I think the last time, we didn’t like to keep an eye on the ratio. But the last time I looked, the ratio was slightly more private to public.

Mike Sugarman:

To kind of give people listening to this as a sense of scale, like how many people are like regularly using Are.na? And, I mean, there’s metrics to describe that monthly user or something, but maybe you have a more holistic way of looking at it. Like, I consider myself a regular Are.na user. I don’t log on all that often, but I do regularly use it for things that I use it for, you know.

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, some, I would say, okay, so there’s a couple of different ways of talking about this. And I mean, the short answer to your question is relative to other social platforms. It’s extremely tiny. It’s like a little tiny village that you might not have heard of in the whole country. You know what I mean?

We’re talking like, half a million registered accounts. But in terms of people who use it, we’re pretty strict on how we measure active users. It’s like monthly active users and monthly active people rather. And for a month, the way that we measure it is like, you have to actually do something, you have to make a channel or a connection or, you know, it’s not just logging in. It’s around 40,000, which, you know, is like a lot of people, when you think about just like, that’s a large number of humans, but relative to other platforms, like if I was going to try to raise money or something, I don’t think anyone would think that was impressive.

But the interesting thing about it is that around half of the monthly active people pay for a subscription. And that’s how we keep the lights on.

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah, I’m paying for a subscription. I mean, that’s, I think, like a yearly cost. I don’t remember how much it is, but you have a price here and you have a student here. Student educator, something like that.

Charles Broskoski:

That’s right. Yeah. So we have, so a month, monthly is 70, sorry, monthly is 7, yearly is 70. Educator, education and discount is half, half, half. And that’s all on our system.

Mike Sugarman:

I hate to do this to you because I know that number, I don’t know. I don’t know how you feel about numbers. Like for instance, I put out, yeah,

Charles Broskoski:

We’re fine saying what the numbers are. Yeah.

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah. I don’t know why I have an aversion to stuff. It probably needs, I’m not, there’s a reason why I’ve never like gone to business school or something, but I mean, I mean, I mean, just the back, the napkin math is like, even if let’s say actually everybody is paying the student rate, let’s say all those 40,000 people are paying the student rate and they’re paying $35 a month. I see there’s like a credit card processing fee that goes into that, but whatever, let’s just say it’s 35. Like off the top of my head, that sounds like that would be 35 a year. 35 a year, right? Sorry. Yes. 35 a year. It’d be like one point, the lowest is like 1.4 million a year from 40,000 people.

Charles Broskoski:

It’s a little bit less than that, but yeah, it’s like around there.

Mike Sugarman:

Okay. Oh, wow. But okay. And it’s like, you can hire four full-time staff members, I assume. You’re also, you have some contractors you can pay.

Charles Broskoski:

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Servers. Yeah. The servers are a bit instead of being like all the servers, all the software, all that stuff, and so being around like a third of that and then everything else just goes to salaries basically.

Mike Sugarman:

So the reason why I’m willing to torture you just a tiny bit by getting exact about numbers and talking about the number of staff you have and what costs go to you is because a lot of people would look at 40,000 users, a lot of people who are in like Silicon Valley, potential investors, and they’d be like, they might laugh you out of the room, right? Or they, they, maybe Facebook would want to buy something like Are.na, not for the users, but so that Facebook has proprietary rights to like the design logic or something like Are.na.

But 40,000 people are paying subscriptions and that gets you like, you know, literally like a million and a third dollars and that pays for salaries and servers. It runs it, right? It’s like, actually it doesn’t take that many people. Like, yeah, it’s kind of a laughable amount of people if you’re comparing the scales to like, I don’t know, Instagram.

But it’s actually like, it’s incredibly heartening that you can run something so small scale and so specifically designed that people love how it’s designed so much that you wouldn’t even change the look of it when you update the front end. And you don’t need all that many people to pay subscriptions to do it. That’s fascinating. I think that flies in the face of how people think of websites.

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. That’s, yeah, I agree. That’s also kind of why I’m like, when anyone, when I talk to anyone about starting like, say they want to start a company, a software project, anything like this, I’m like, you and they ask what I think about raising money. I’m like, I just think you could probably just do it on your own. And it’s the outcome. I mean, for us, it took a really long time. And I think it took probably a long time because of, I don’t know, how specific we are about how we want things to be. And we’re not really like, we’re sort of like intentionally not growth hacking it, you know, we, we were, I don’t know, we have our own taste. And maybe that taste is not like the most efficient way of building a business.

But anyways, if we were starting it again today, I would, I would never go out and raise money. I would start charging right away. It’s also like a really, for us, we try to be transparent because we want people to understand that like the ultimate, the ultimate metric for us is like, is this working enough that you would spend $3.50 or $7 a month on it? You know what I mean? It’s, it’s really like, is it worth it enough for you to like take out your credit card and like trust us to continually maintain this thing and keep making it better? You know what I mean? And you can try it out for a little while and see what you think before you do that. That’s basically what it does.

That as a dynamic is, it is like the outcomes that come out from that are pretty nice. You know what I mean? Because when people want something, it’s like, we have a big motivation to like to listen to them. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like the customers are actually the people that we’re serving. Like, you know what I mean? The people who are paying, like our job is to like to make them happy. And we were transparent about how well that’s going. You know what I mean?

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah. And you’re also describing a business model, which is in fact quite different from how a lot of other things work on the internet where the actual people who you’re building your software for are the people who are using it, right? You’re not actually building software to create valuable data to sell to people who want to buy ads, right?

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah. It’s not about, it’s not about amassing an audience to sell, you know, a large amount of people to someone else, you know, which I think is what most social media businesses that are streaming platforms is that any kind of large non-SasS project product is that, you know?

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah. And I think that there are things that are costly to run. I think streaming is a really good example of it, whether that’s video or music, because you do need the server space. But like, you just told me that basically all of your tech and server stuff costs around like a third of the money that you get from revenue, like, for those 500,000 total accounts, there’s like 40,000 people who use it really regularly. Like, what is that? Like 300 something thousand dollars or 400 something thousand dollars to run? That doesn’t sound very expensive. When you compare it to how much something like Twitter is, how much something like Facebook is worth, right?

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it’s interesting because I mean, the other part of it is interesting, like the things that people talk about, the things that they want from a social network, you know, everyone kind of says the same thing. And the critiques of mainstream social networks are all kind of the same, you know, like it’s addictive. It feels kind of empty. Like, I don’t really want to go on there. I don’t get anything from that. And what do you want? And it’s like a community, you know, like a connection over like sort of shared interests, shared ideals. And the answer to all to those things that people want, I think, is like, it can’t be achieved by that kind of hockey stick, you know, like it can only be achieved through like a really long sort of gradual evolution of the product on sort of like a like an actually organic, and actually organic growth.

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell me a bit about how that has worked over the past 13 years? I mean, how you got to this point where it’s like 13 years later, it’s working pretty well. Like it’s pretty stable. There’s a good community.

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah. So I think, I mean, part of it is also when we started, I think charging, charging for a social network was just like, completely out of the question. So it took kind of a long time for that business model to work and for us to figure out exactly what exactly the setup is. So like, first, when we launched, it was only extra features, if you pay a subscription, it was only extra features, that not really did not work. And then we did, there was a limit to how many private connections you could save. And that worked better. But then what happened is just like everything, people who didn’t want to pay would just put everything in the open. And that sounds nice on paper. And I think like on paper, that’s actually a much more elegant business model, especially for us. Conceptually, it’s better. But in practice, it just meant that there were a lot of like throwaway channels that were public. So the quality of the community deteriorated in our opinion, a little bit.  And we didn’t grow quite as fast as we needed to revenue wise.

And then we switched it to be just a limit on the number of connections you could save with a free account. And the limit is now 200. And we, I don’t know, it’s kind of an interesting thing to know like what a good, what a good level there is. But it feels like the right amount or the right amount where you can try it for long enough that once you hit the limit, you kind of know if you’re going to if you want to continue or not, you know. And if you do, and if you can’t afford it, like people often write and especially people from other countries and say like, I really like this, I want to use it, I can’t afford it. And we’ll, you know, we have discounts for discounts or, you know, whatever grants for those people too.

So, I mean, the other side of that is like, for a really long time, we didn’t really make enough money to like live off of for me, so let’s see, I’m trying to figure out how to explain this or to like go into detail without going into budget detail because it’s 13 years. But there were periods where like, so there was a period in 2017, we did a crowdfunding campaign, which I think we talked about last time, where we raised close to $300,000, which is a lot of money, but it’s also not a lot of money, you know, when you’re talking about, I think at the time, that was for people. So, during that period, we worked full time and we were kind of trying to get it to a point where we could like transition into, you know, just relying solely on revenue, but we didn’t grow fast enough. So then like, like I alluded to earlier, we hired Damon Zucconi, who’s like one of the original co-founders of Are.na, three different times and there have been times when we could afford it and times where we couldn’t. Also for myself, there have been times when I could just afford to live on Are.na salary and then times when I really couldn’t and like Are.na couldn’t afford it, so I would take freelance jobs.

So just now, like within the past two, three years, have we been able to just be solely full time on Are.na, which to me feels like the ultimate achievement because I think Are.na is really cool and I like working on it and getting to work on it today is kind of like, that’s the, that’s like my version of like a Silicon Valley person selling my startup or something for like a hundred-million dollars, you know? I get to work on this thing that I think is really cool. I love all the people who work on it. I love the community. I’ve made so many friends on Are.na. Like, you know what I mean? It feels all very harmonious, but it did take a while to get there.

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah. Yeah. I want to just pivot because you mentioned something about he made a lot of friends on Are.na and it’s something that I’ve always wondered about Are.na because it is, I mean, if you use the thing, especially if you use it regularly, you have a way of thinking that at least works with the way that other people on the platform think, which again is quite different than how other how their social media works, we’re trying to be the biggest tent possible or something. But tell me a bit about that community and like why that community is so healthy. And like, I guess my other question is like, aside from yourself, are you aware of Are.na place where people like met collaborators for projects for people who made friends, the kind of classic question I ask when I do ethnographic work on this stuff is like, has anyone started dating because of Are.na?

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah. Oh yeah. Most definitely. And I actually think that I mean, I know, I know, I know of relationships anecdotally, but I’m sure it’s happened more than I know. And I know of friendships and projects that have emerged just from people telling me about it. I’m sure there’s a lot more than that I don’t know about.

But I think I sort of think the reason why it works out so well is because socializing isn’t the sort of like first thing that you’re supposed to do on it, you know, it’s more introverted and like, well, like, I wouldn’t say that there’s no performance on Are.na, like it’s social, you kind of like are aware that you’re doing things and that there’s like, some kind of perceived audience, but it’s definitely not as strong as like posting a story on Instagram or posting a post or being on TikTok or Twitter, like all of those things are like, there’s like a moment when you’re posting on Are.na, it’s a little bit more ambient and you’re just kind of doing your thing. It just happens to be public.

Yeah, I think it works out better like that because people like you’re a little bit more yourself. You’re a little bit more to a lot more yourself than on other social platforms.

And so when you meet someone like we had an event yesterday that Laurel Schwulst organized called Are.na Spring Cleaning. There were a couple of people that I met there who I had been who I’d seen on Are.na for years before. And it was really easy to talk to them. I like it, I already know what they’re into. They already knew what I was into. We sort of knew that we would get along. You know what I mean? The things that the platforms that like myself and other people who started over Are.na, the things that we used before Are.na existed, those are the kind of experiences that we had, you know, and those are the kinds of things that we wanted to like, figure out how to make more of, you know, like, like, how do you perpetuate that feeling of like, like, there’s no pressure to meet this person, you know, I’m like seeing this person around. It’s not like we have to take this to the next level. You know what I mean? There’s no like, like, you’re just kind of like, yeah, cool, you’re into that thing. That’s interesting. You know, maybe there’s some overlap. Maybe there’s not, you know, like messaging isn’t sort of like the key interaction, you know.

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah. So I’m going to do it, it feels like the light side and the dark side of that. Because I think there’s interesting things about it. Let me do the light side first, since the dark side. We’re doing a lot of dark side on the podcast recently. Light side is, there’s a lot of conversations that are happening about the ways that something like Instagram is detrimental to teen girls, right? Like eating disorder content and that sort of stuff. But I would say well, first off, I don’t think you have a culture that isn’t Are.na, but second, some actually reason I like the thing so much and feel more drawn to it than other things is because like, I personally don’t like presenting my face on the internet. Like I don’t really like putting my personality as kind of like some kind of verisimilitude 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, you know, specifically, I tend to look at Are.na really mechanistically in the past. I used it to share safety resources for throwing, you know, DIY concerts and stuff like fire safety and that sort of stuff. I was working on that a lot several years ago.

But I think that’s nice. It’s like, it’s a little refuge from this, I don’t know, kind of weird game that we have to play online. All that this like, Philip K. Dick A Scanner Darkly thing where you’re figuring out what is the like face that you’re going to put on as like interactive worlds. And I guess like part of my question is like, yeah, what type of social interactions does the design of Are.na like lend itself towards or just kind of what like personal expression does it lend itself towards, which is like a funny expression, a funny question to ask about social media since like it, I don’t know, personal expression, I think means something a lot more creative when it comes to creative and the kind of like, you know, artistic way as opposed to the like creating content way.

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting because I think there’s a bunch of different ways that can manifest. And I mean, off the top, like on my mind is so Laurel organized this event called Are.na Spring Cleaning. The point of it was like, maybe you want to revisit your own profile, the channels and the things that you’ve saved, clean some things out, reorganize some things, like add some attribution where there needs to be attribution, that kind of thing. And so we held an event wherever and brought their laptops, and we just kind of worked in a parallel playstyle, everyone did their own thing. But what the other thing that sort of came up in that was like, people use it in all sorts of different ways, like you’re saying, use it all in private, other people, you know, were expressing like their versions of using it and their patterns that emerge, that are people sort of using the platform creatively in ways that we didn’t intend.

So I think that like, people have used channels sort of like turning channels into a guest book, and people can go and add things to their guest book, that kind of thing. Someone made a calendar that was like, if like, put your birthday in here, and I’ll rearrange the blocks and like set it up so that it’s like all in order, you know, just these kinds of things where it’s like, it’s like, it’s definitely social, you’re interacting with other people, but it’s not like words isn’t sort of the primary way that you’re, you know, it’s not like oriented around discussion.

And then the other way that, you know, the sort of typical way that I think people, the main thing that you’re doing on Are.na, if you’re, if you’re doing it in public, it’s sort of like being public about what, what your perspective is, where your gaze is oriented towards, you know, you’re saying like, you’re organizing resources around how to safely do DIY parties, like, it’s like, really obvious that like a person would see that as a hook, you know what I mean, there’s like a person who could be interested in that and be like, I’m interested in that too, I’m sure we share a lot in common, you know what I mean, and because you’re sort of doing that for years, it’s like half for yourself, half putting resources up for other people, you know, it’s not like, like the way that I don’t know how you would do that on Twitter and Instagram, you know what I mean, or like another social platform.

Mike Sugarman:

I tried and that was part of what I like about Are.na. I mean, that’s actually the stuff of mine that people still like to connect to other blocks like yeah, that’s cool. Anything I put on Twitter from in, you know, 2017, 2018, 2019, when I was doing this stuff a lot, like it’s lost, like it’s on a website, you have to know your website, like, and that’s yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I do want to talk a bit about the ways that people talk to each other. Well, that’s the dark side of what I was gonna do. So by the time this episode comes out, we’ll have done kind of a few episodes about the like, very terrible ways that people use the social internet. Brian Levine talked about CSAM and his cybersecurity research on CSAM. Diana Freed talked about the inherent user facing everyday cybersecurity vulnerabilities in things like iPhones and other just regular technology we all use that you don’t have to hack it in order to harass somebody, in order to stalk somebody, in order to trap someone into a domestic abuse situation.

I look at something like Are.na and I say, okay, okay, one more use case.

There is a researcher in our lab, Ifat, who studies, Ifat Gazia, who studies silencing, basically how governments silence activists and dissidents often using sometimes using a very simple tool, which is stirring up a lot of anger among constituents, followers, and that sort of stuff and kind of sending them to a target. A version of this is someone’s tweets get flooded with this series of notifications of people saying, I want to kill you, I want to rape you, XYZ, whatever other thing.

You don’t see stuff like that on Are.na. And there’s also a lot of other kinds of abusive stuff that just isn’t possible. I mean, direct messages are such an essential vulnerability on any social network because they’re not moderated. I mean, especially in a case where they’re end-to-end encrypted, like what’s happening with Facebook or I think what Elon Musk said he’s going to do with Twitter, X, whatever. There’s no one who can stop a direct message and whatever might be in that from going to someone, even if you block someone, you still get that message that one time it could be some really bad stuff.

But I am kind of curious, it seems like so much of like the moderation issues that could happen don’t happen because of this good design. And of course, community norms, right? It’s like, I crossed my fingers, never happens. It’s never impossible that one day, a bunch of 4chan trolls wake up and they say, Hey, here’s this like community where we can post images, we can post a lot of really bad shit. And some of it’s going to get through even if a lot of it gets auto blocked.

But I would like to hear a bit about what moderation looks like for your kind of incredibly idiosyncratic social media platform, what your concerns are, what slips through the cracks. And if you have any advice to people who might want to try a similar project of like, what are some, you know, rake you can avoid stepping on, what are some buckets you can avoid getting your foot stuck in? What are some simple design decisions you can make so that you don’t have to confront the worst stuff right off the bat? I think you probably have 13 years of experience with this.

Charles Broskoski:

Well, yeah, it’s interesting because I think most of it comes from something that’s sort of more foundational to Are.na, which is like, like I said before, I think, like discussion is not really like at the forefront of how you do interact with people on Are.na. So it’s not really highlighted in the design as such. It’s not sort of like an obvious vector.

The other thing is like, because it’s so small scale, it’s like, like you would be one would be better off doing this on like a popular message board or stuff. You know, there’s like a bigger audience on like, like, like such lower, you know what I mean? There’s like, there’s like, like, even the gulf between us and Twitter is so vast. And there’s so many other places where someone would go if they really wanted attention, you know? So that’s one of them.

We have interesting moderation problems where spam was one. And that’s like, we had really good SEO for a long time. So that was sort of like an obvious motivation for people who want to sort of like to promote whatever spam people like to promote. So they would, you know, join make channels, and then just go away. And, you know, it’s not like it’s a it’s, it’s more than a drop in a bucket, but it’s not much more than a drop in a bucket. And you often never see it. You might see it if you like to search for pills or something like that. Search the word pills, it might come up. We’ve seen it more lately. And it’s just like, it’s all humans, you know, we’re such a small team. So there’s like, there’s a time in the day when I will go through like, I know the signatures of spam accounts, and I’ll just mark them as spam.

The interesting thing for us, I’ll just like the more interesting moderation problem that we have, not maybe we don’t really have it now, but I could foresee having it later is that the difference between us and something like Twitter is if you’re posting something on Twitter, it’s pretty similar to you saying it. If you’re putting something on a Are.na, you could be researching it.

So like a friend of mine was researching swastikas in design, like when different people have used like, like punk using swastikas, you know, there’s this kind of thing. And it has to be very clear through like descriptions in the channel disclaimer and these kinds of things that like, this is like a research project, you know, but the line is really, it’s hard, you know what I mean? It’s hard to understand where something falls, you know what I mean?

And so I think going forward, what we have our eye on is kind of like trying to figure out with people, members of who are active, people who are active on Are.na, who are passionate about this kind of moderations topic. What are some ways that we can add to our community guidelines to sort of make those kinds of weird edge cases a little bit more clear cut than they feel like they are now. Because right now, anyone can flag something as inappropriate or spam or not safe for work.

But again, it’s like, you know, we’re looking at it. So we’re making the decision like, okay, this is like, you know, so those are the hard things. It’s just, you know, a small company is like, it’s nice because, you know, if someone has a support question, I personally, the chances of me answering them are very high, you know, and that’s also the hard thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, just that, you know, like when it’s so personal, it’s good that it’s personal, but it’s also complicated that it’s personal.

Mike Sugarman:

I mean, have you ever encountered something where it’s like, man, this is a real bad one. This feels like, “I’m a little out of my depth. What do I do here?” Has it stayed pretty tame?

Charles Broskoski:

I mean, it stayed pretty tame. There was one case where it was like, like, it was like someone was having mental health issues. And that was tough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But again, it’s like, it’s like, we know, like the people who are reporting them, because it’s such a small community, we know them. And the person who was happening to us also knew them. So it’s just like, all right, we’ll like to coordinate here and it’s fine. And that is a very positive side of growing slow and steady and sort of like growing our team alongside like the scale of the platform, that kind of thing, you know.

Mike Sugarman:

I don’t know if you realize this, but you actually just described something pretty remarkable. And let me try to flesh out what that is. So what you just described is someone had a disruption like a community disrupting a mental health crisis that was solvable, because to some extent, there could be a community response to it, right? They were embedded in some kind of like, I don’t know if this is someone that like, you know, where you live, where you just know through Are.na, but you knew them enough other people knew them. And there was like a way forward to handle this in a pretty one on one way, a community oriented way.

In the past, we’ve had Tom Tyler and Tracy Meares on the show to talk about their participatory justice framework for, you know, in a local community or in a small online group. If someone does something wrong, you can have a conversation about it. It’s kind of like one step forward from restorative justice even to say like, everyone in the community can take part in how justice is administered, what’s fair.

The reason why that’s so, I think, remarkable is not just because that’s rare for the internet, but because there are plenty of platforms where someone’s mental health crisis is actually matches up perfectly with the type of behavior that makes you engaging on that platform and will result in them getting lots of engagement from a lot of strangers, sometimes exacerbating that mental health crisis. And a lot of times skewering that person what they’re going through.

It’s one thing for everyone to suddenly have an opinion about something that gets published in an actual magazine. It’s another thing for everyone to have an opinion about someone’s mental health crisis, right? I mean, I think we generally don’t want that in our society, much less the community to join online. So I’m not saying that just be like, you know, wow, this is the official Are.na propaganda arm. This is so wonderful. It’s just like, it’s, it’s, it’s, yeah, I think it really does point to a legitimate alternative to the way that a lot of social interactions on the internet are currently geared to work because of a series of incentives on a software and kind of business level. And I would say that that is special, that is unique.

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, thank you for saying that. And putting it in those terms. It’s, it’s nice to be, yeah, well, you’re saying it back in a way that I, it’s a different perspective than I was thinking about it. And it’s, it’s nice to hear. But yeah, I think the other part, what you’re saying, the other part of what you’re saying.

The thing that it’s making me think is like on Twitter, what people, people’s discussion is content. You’re looking, you’re everything that people are saying is entertainment, regardless of the pitch or tone of what they’re saying, you know, even if it’s something like you’re saying someone having a crisis, it’s all under the guise of like, this is all entertainment. And I think the plus side of a platform being slightly more oriented towards introversion is that it’s clear what is discussion and what is like content that the discussion based around, you know what I mean, like there’s a distinction between what is being viewed and the things that are being said around what is being viewed, if that makes sense. Do you know what I mean?

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah, certainly it’s like, I guess what would be the best way to put this. I maybe don’t have a better way to put it, except yeah, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe the thing I can say is that I think Are.na points towards that. I think your insight there points towards there’s probably a lot of other ways to foster existing on the internet around other people that are not just around speech and discussion.

Charles Broskoski:

I think it’s kind of like part of the drum that I try and beat a lot, which is like, there are a handful of companies who are deciding how we define what social media is, what the word, what those, what that term means. And I think Are.na happens to be like, I would say that most of the people who work on Are.na like tend towards being a little bit more introverted online. And the way that we interact, the way that we build Are.na reflects that. I don’t think that the difference between us and something that’s like a large corporation is there’s no way that we think that this is the one way that you know what I mean. It’s for a certain type of person who might gravitate towards that type of way of being online. But I think there are lots of different ways of being online that are not reflected now in current social platforms. And that’s the thing that I feel like should be encouraged that, you know, if someone has a way that they think could be cool, there could be a motivation to make a social platform that is not to make a billion dollars, but like to represent a different type of interaction online, you know what I mean.

Mike Sugarman:

Yeah. Here’s the kind of analogy I would offer, tell me if this sounds right. I think it’s really tempting to look at Are.na and be like, oh, you’re like standing at the farmers market. Like you are selling like a thing that you put a lot of work and developing and bringing it to people. And there’s like a relatively small amount of it that you can sell. There’s a relatively small market for it.

Another way is like maybe you are at the farmers market, right? Maybe this is where like all of the people who have their little things that they put their work into come together. But I would actually say it’s super interesting to think about it in terms of like a few companies get to decide what social media is because it’s almost like you are not described as a situation where there’s like farm stands in a farmers market, but where it’s like where the restaurants you can go to are like Olive Garden and McDonald’s and Cheesecake Factory. And you either figure out how to get what you want when you go to those places because that’s all that’s really available to you or you just end up with this incredibly unhealthy diet that kind of makes you feel awful, but like that’s what you have access to. And you’re actually kind of making a case for how you can open like an independent donut store. It doesn’t have to threaten McDonald’s entire business model to be really successful and it can be on Main Street of your town. And actually the Main Street that is kind of nicer to interact with are the ones that have a variety of local businesses, some of which are better run and offer better stuff than others than the ones where it’s just like McDonald’s Olive Garden, Cheesecake Factory, McDonald’s.

And I always think it’s like short changing Are.na to be like you’re the farmers market, you’re the hipster thing. It’s like, yeah, okay, you can be at the farmers market and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s also like it’s not like the only options are McDonald’s or the farmers market, right? It’s like not that’s not actually like the world that we live in. It’s not very helpful to see those as like those are the two things you can do.

Charles Broskoski:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, maybe a different way to put where you’re saying it’s like the part of the problem that I’ve seen, especially with companies making social products online, is that the measure of success is one scale and that’s just like biggest to smallest, you know what I mean? And then amongst the biggest, you have like a varying degree of kind of like different qualities to represent them. I’m talking about from a consumer level, you know what I mean? It’s like, like, it’s basically like what you’re saying, Olive Garden versus Cheesecake Factory, you know, and maybe you can find your nice salad in the Olive Garden or whatever, like the thing that, you know, feels kind of okay.

But yeah, yeah, the problem that I have is like there has to be there has to be a range like, like, we don’t aspire to be indie or like necessarily small. We aspire to be extremely good. And I think the only way to be very good is to grow at the right pace. You know what I mean? And I think if we have, if there is one of those skills that we do, that we aspire to, it’s like, yeah, it’s like, it’s like some notion of good, however you define good, but it’s like oldest, you know what I mean? Like, we want to be like the oldest social platform. And I think like in order to be oldest, there’s a different set of conditions that have to be present. You know what I mean? Then maybe you might optimize for if you were trying to be the biggest.

Mike Sugarman:

That feels good note to end on. Charles Broskoski. Am I saying that right? Charles Broskoski. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Charles Broskoski, Are.na, one of the three founders he’s currently a full-time employee at Are.na. This has been a wonderful conversation, I think, really, it’s going to surprise people in a lot of ways, like how your thing actually runs. And I hope some people who are listening can inspire us to go start their own thing, give it a shot, just make it focused, and make sure you have a community you like there. I think that’s kind of what you’re telling us. So thank you so much for taking part in this. It’s a wonderful avenue.

Charles Broskoski:

Thank you. Thank you.