I shut down Hiark officially in May 2020. I’ve reposted here on Medium the content from our site that provided the philosophical foundation for the now-defunct app. It was a good run. I wish I could tell you that I achieved my goal with Hiark. That I knew for certain…

Feedback is information that can be used to adjust our future action. We “feed” our results from one set of choices “back” into our model of ourselves/the world that we then use to make our next choice. It’s fundamentally how we learn anything even minimally complex. …

Marc Andreessen, our favorite VC (n.b. A16z would never invest in Hiark, wisely), wrote a truly epic piece in 2011 that can and should be read on WSJ. In it he develops the thesis that software is eating the world. This means, roughly, that all companies must become software companies…

We’ve likened the current social media offerings to digital fast food previously, and we don’t want to over-use our metaphors, but it’s worth repeating. Fast food was wildly successful in the 60s and 70s and arguably transformed the fabric of society. Our evolutionary heritage primed us to prize salt, fat…

When there is a price associated with the transfer of something, economists trenchantly call this a “transaction cost.” …

One objection we frequently field when talking about our hopes for Hiark is: yes, well, this may provide access to feedback that wouldn’t otherwise be given, but is a few private, semi-anonymous messages really enough to be helpful? Will that provide the catalysis for personal growth? …

At Hiark, we’ve read a lot of Marshall McLuhan. We love it, and tbqh, we don’t always fully understand it. We like to believe that’s how he wanted it. The equal-part poetry-futurism-techno-sociology lends itself well to being amazed by (which we are) and confused by (ditto). Our reverence for McLuhan…

Dear Software Engineer at Major Social Media Co, What do you want to experience when you look back on your career? Satisfaction that you used your effort, skill and a tremendous chunk of your life to build something meaningful? If satisfaction is at least part of your 80-year-old-regret-minimization framework, a…

NN Taleb spends a good portion of Anti-Fragile describing hormesis, a biphasic response (often to a toxic chemical or stressful situation) wherein low doses can lead to a favorable outcome while high doses can be fatal. The word ‘hormesis’ derives from the Greek for “set in motion, impel, urge on,”…