Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Why is paragraph giving up on membership and token-gating? Is there some background to all these changes?
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Colin
@colin
In addition to what Reid said: - token-gating seems to be a stated vs revealed preference. It got very little usage on Paragraph; maximizing distribution is more tempting for most writers - Paragraph (and Mirror, now that we acquired them) had significantly more success with posts-as-NFTs instead of NFTs-for-gating - there's a better chance to get to product-market fit focused on distribution & monetizing free content (micropayments, onchain citations, etc) instead of memberships, which incumbents are already doing very well There's a good chance we'd bring it back in the future, but we'd take a different approach (eg just using Hypersub directly instead of rolling our own membership stack, which had very high maintenance burden).
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Reid DeRamus
@reidtandy
It was definitely a tough call. We decided to deprecate paid subscriptions / memberships and gating (for now) to simplify the product and focus on collecting & other forms of monetization where we can drive differentiation. We tried to make paid subscriptions & token-gating work over the past few years, but these features didn't gain much traction. They required significant ongoing maintenance & it was unlikely we'd be able to meet or exceed paid subscription functionality on other publishing platforms (Ghost, Beehiiv, Substack, etc.). We're still big fans of recurring payments, so could certainly see us reintroducing these features in the future.
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Samuel ツ
@samuellhuber.eth
reworking the UI, will come back. you can toggle to still see the old one and get the features. (I recall @colin stating that, haven't used the new UI to toggle back to the old)
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