Like many people, I have a complicated relationship with my own birthday. I have a simultaneous urge to want the day to feel extra special and to skip over it entirely. I want the day to be and feel good, but I also don’t want special attention.

Ironically, the best birthday I’ve had was one where I had to do some public speaking. On my 40th birthday, I was invited by Light Industry to do a screening of skate videos (the talk was called “skate video parts worth watching” after an Are.na channel of the same name). 

I think a lot about skate videos, and have continuously since I started skateboarding nearly 30 years ago. Skate videos are a particularly weird medium, as skateboarding is a particularly weird sport — it’s about athletic prowess, but also simultaneously about a person’s expression of their own individuality, through their selection of tricks and clothing and music.

I went into a crazy spiral beforehand, trying to select video parts that represented both my own taste and also a variety of approaches that a skater might take. A lot of the spiral came from wanting to define what people often refer to in shorthand as “style.” I wanted to show that “style” is the sum total of a lot of things, most of which are close to being intangible. Style is an assemblage of attributes that stem from a skateboarder somehow representing themselves honestly—who they are and how they relate to the world—through physical activity.

Despite all my anxiety beforehand, the night was a success. Afterwards, we went to Honey's with friends who came to the screening, and conversations ensued about skate videos, what people liked, what they didn’t, and the techniques and qualities exhibited by the various skaters. From my perspective, this was heaven. We didn’t land on any kind of consensus on what constituted a good skate video part or what good “style” was. But discussions were had and attempts were made to shine a light on a spectrum of expression, which was good enough for me.

The whole experience made me (re)remember, that "style" is one of those words that mean different things to different people, a word that is both continually and collectively defined.

I’ve been thinking recently about this day and its structure: an intense period of stress stemming from wanting to do justice to a project that I care deeply about, followed by a sense of elation when it works out, the feeling heightened because the project was so personal. I realized that, on a smaller scale, it mirrored my experience (in general) with Are.na. 

For one, the first ten years of Are.na were relatively stressful. It wasn’t excruciating or anything but there was definitely a persistent undertone of anxiety that it might not work out. 

Around our tenth birthday, that feeling started to shift. It’s not that the work is never stressful now, but it’s a different kind of stress. That existential anxiety is no longer present, and at the risk of a major jinx, we no longer feel like we haven’t “made it.” 

The other way I’ve been relating this night to my experience with Are.na is that, similar to my attempt to name the attributes of “style,” we (at Are.na) also struggled early on to succinctly define what the platform actually is. 

At first, we wanted a description that captured everything we thought was special about Are.na: the tool itself, the people who used it, and the quality of the content. That struggle was intensified because being able to describe it succinctly and accurately had a real world business outcome tied to it. In theory, the better we are at describing it to a person who is completely uninitiated, the more likely a person is to try it.

But over time, we started to realize the benefit to leaving Are.na a little bit opaque. There’s an aspect of illegibility that functions as a filter. There are some people who, intrigued by the challenge of figuring out a piece of software, push through towards understanding it, towards making it their own and toward building the habit of using it in the way that’s most useful and natural to them. Some others, who are used to websites or platforms that make every effort to remove friction, lose patience and leave. On some level, this is expected and acceptable.

Admittedly, there was also some internal reluctance to arrive at a perfect description of Are.na. We (the people that maintain Are.na) are all drawn towards software that is open-ended. We don’t want to be particularly hemmed in by a use case. We are comfortable with the potential that comes with ambiguity.

Anyway, the point is, somewhere along the way, it became easier to just let Are.na be what it is, without a strong definition to guide it.

Of course, there are still situations where you find yourself needing a quick explanation…

Today, August 9th 2026, Are.na turns 15.

As part of this "birthday celebration," we tasked ourselves with designing a new homepage, which, as you can imagine, inevitably brings us back to the question of “how do you describe Are.na?”

We decided to try again because we’d like to be as inviting towards an uninitiated person as possible. We would never want a person who could potentially be one of our people to feel alienated.

So we found ourselves back in the position of trying to capture Are.na with a definition that is succinct, accurate, and evocative. The difficulty we kept coming against is that Are.na is both a tool and a network. We could describe it in the sense of what you use it for but by doing that, we frame it within the context of productivity or problem solving. That’s ok, but also not the thing we’d like to evoke right out of the gate. 

Alternatively, we could describe it in the terms that social media networks describe themselves, but the danger with that approach is that most people have increasingly negative associations with social media networks (for good reasons). Measuring Are.na against a typical social network only goes so far in explaining what it is and what’s special about it. 

One of my favorite ways that I have to describe Are.na is as an “online Montessori school for adults.” This is partly a joke but also kind of serious. The caveat here is that I have no personal experience with Montessori schools. But from reading about Montessori in theory, what I find fitting as a metaphor for Are.na is the idea of a “prepared environment.” In other words, that an environment that is both beautiful and purposeful can encourage curiosity and self-discovery for a person situated in it.

I like the idea of using this description because it accurately depicts the scope of our responsibility. It is our job to maintain the environment. Anything else—the learning, the forming of networks, the assemblage of information and the connections—are the work of all the people who use Are.na.

During the earlier phase of wanting to have a good description, 11 years ago, we started an open channel called “How do you describe Are.na at a party?” We did this in the hopes that someone out there with the proper distance and faculty of language could do a better job than we could at describing the thing we were making.

One of the first descriptions that I remember striking a chord is the now-famous “Research as leisure activity” by Karly Wildenhaus. It’s a simple idea, but I had never heard it articulated so directly. This was one of the early descriptions that made us feel seen.

Some other all-time favorites: “Playlists but for ideas,” “It’s like having an API for your mind,” “like quietly sharing a table at the library with strangers,” “a flowing river,” “a tool for networked curation.”

Over the years, we’ve leaned on so many of these descriptions. Not just as useful ways of talking about Are.na, but as actual definitions. Are.na has grown to 15 years old, and was raised by all of us—shaped collectively through language and usage.

Our previous homepage had just two explanations for what Are.na is: “Online software for organizing and saving the content that is important to you” and “toolkit for assembling new worlds from scraps of the old,” with a handful of others scattered around various paragraphs. 

When we sat down to make this new version of the homepage, it felt like the best decision was to more accurately represent the reality of Are.na: that we all (all the people who use it) have an active hand in shaping its definition.

Thank you to all the people who use and shape Are.na. Happy birthday.

Charles Broskoski is one of the many co-founders of Are.na.