How can we help writers earn meaningful, reliable income?

Open edition NFTs haven’t quite gotten us there, so we have to find a better solution.

We wrote a couple posts on why we think coins may be a better model (part 1 below) — we'd love to hear what you think.

How can we help writers earn meaningful, reliable income?

Open edition NFTs haven’t quite gotten us there, so we have to find a better solution.

We wrote a couple posts on why we think coins may be a better model (part 1 below) — we'd love to hear what you think.

https://paragraph.com/@reidtandy/rethinking-how-writers-get-paid

My initial thought is that a publication token feels more aligned with writers than issuing a token for each individual post.

As a writer, I’d want to use the token to gate certain posts, while also rewarding my community and collaborators. Early supporters who hold the token could benefit if interest in the publication grows. Sure it might sting if some choose to sell for profit, but if the token is required for access, they may be more inclined to hold.

I also see potential for interesting experiments where a publication is run as a collective - writers are the token holders, and holding a token is required to gain access to publish posts.

Excellent feedback & ideas - thanks for sharing! 🙏

Please let us know if anything else comes to mind.

Will do! Curious if you were thinking more in terms of coins per post or a coin for the publication? We have Zora as an example and most of my friends think that Zora cares more about speculation than anything else. I really don't want that bad PR for Paragraph

CEO of Mid Curve Capital. Building @daosdotworld

We're still very early, but broadly want to lean away from hyper-financialized / speculative UX.

The copy changes mentioned above are part of that, not showing the coin market cap (instead, having some kind of popularity indicator, like three stars for trending), and other detailed UX that shifts the vibes more toward self-expression and patronage, not so much speculation.

We also want to reduce mental overhead w/ buying coins, where folks don't need to think about how many coins to buy, the price of the coin, etc. These will be hard product / design issues to chip away at.

We also need to find ways to allow bots to add value & provide liquidity without harming the integrity of the ecosystem.

We're still exploring how best to go about experimenting with coins.

There's a lot of potential value for coins at the writer- / publication-level, but would require some fairly big changes on our end. Post level coins would be more straightforward, but present their own challenges.

From a product design view, we want to steer away from the hyper-financialized version of coins. This may make it harder to get traction (not fully leaning into the speculative angle), but I think it's the kind of product experience we hope works, so want to start there.

Some more thoughts along these lines below. One aspiration we've floated is whether we can remove any numbers from the purchase flow, or at least make them secondary. We don't want readers to have to think about how many coins to buy, at what price, the market cap of the post, etc.

https://warpcast.com/reidtandy/0xc5854bdd

Curious to hear what you think.

The shift from buy to support sounds like a positive direction, but id need to hear more about the “no market cap” concept before forming a solid opinion. I like the emphasis on self-expression and patronage, though im not sure trading individual posts feels natural.

If it were up to me, id choose between two approaches:

1. No speculation: make it purely about self-expression and patronage. Still use NFTs and let creators gate access or content with them. Id also include leaderboards to highlight popular writers and collectors.

2. Tokenization at the publication level: let subscribers have skin in the game. It’s still centered on self-expression and patronage, but the publication shares its success with readers and collectors. Yes this introduces market caps and the possibility of trading/speculation, but it's not tied to individual posts (so it doesn’t feel like gambling). It’s more about being a supporter and having real ownership in something you believe in and identify with.

I remember when I first discovered Mirror, it was exciting to see people use their first post as a crowdfund for an idea. I think Paragraph should lean into that. Each publication launch could feel like a crowdfund, where the writer and readers begin building a relationship and sharing ownership from day one, even if the audience is small at the beginning