Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Why is paragraph giving up on membership and token-gating? Is there some background to all these changes?
3 replies
0 recast
13 reactions
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).
1 reply
0 recast
7 reactions
Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Stated/revealed preference is the wrong lens here. I think the UX just hasn’t been properly figured out yet. I have several ideas I’d like to actually try but the paragraph model was too rudimentary
1 reply
0 recast
3 reactions
Reid DeRamus
@reidtandy
Would love to hear more! What ideas did you want to try? Where was Paragraph to rudimentary? I think one of the challenges we had with memberships in general was getting to a point where they were ~10x better than what exists already, or whatever threshold is needed to get writers to adopt NFT-based or token-gated memberships, and for their readers to be excited about what those unlocked. We'd love to find a way to realize that ~10x threshold as it would allow us to build differentiation relative to virtually all other publishing platforms that support credit-card-based subscriptions / memberships.
1 reply
0 recast
0 reaction
