Will Mirror.xyz be the Substack of Web3?
Is Web3 really coming for Creators?
Hey Guys,
Will NFTs and crypto leverage more adoption in new ownership and blogging platforms? Time will tell, but it feels as if Web2 is slowly dying. As a follower of Medium’s crypto tradition and off-shoots like Hacker Noon, I’ve often wondered about this.
Mirror Introduces Subscriptions
Substack struggles with youth culture topics, so who is the beneficiary? Mirror’s Twitter handle is literally “literature”, I have no idea why.
On July 26th, 2022 Mirror was excited to announce the launch of web3 subscriptions. This new feature allows readers to subscribe to any Mirror publication with their wallets and receive email notifications when new content is posted. For creators, web3 subscriptions open the door to building a wallet-based community that can be used across web3.
This is my hope for Moment, that I wrote about previously. Substack is part of a trend that is seeing Newsletter overload (with recommendations feature not helping) and subscription overload for consumers suffering from inflation, stagflation and less financial certainty.
As far as I know Mirror is mostly like Hacker Noon in the types of content that currently thrives there. But will its move into subscriptions increase and attract new kinds of Creators?
Built on web3 for web3, Mirror’s robust publishing platform pushes the boundaries of writing online—whether it’s the next big white paper or a weekly community update.
We know there will be many Web3 iterations of Patreon and Substack, and young people will be more likely to join and follow them. You need young people to build sustainable growth into your product. You need GenZ’s interest and investment.
Mirror is tethered to crypto culture, for good or for bad. The company says: “Mirror has always been a place for web3 creators to publish and make announcements. The output has encompassed project and product launches, whitepapers, thought leadership, education, fundraising announcements, and NFT drops. But until now, there hasn't been a way for communities to stay engaged through notifications.”
But can it be a platform more than just the noise of the crypto culture fanatics and ideologically modified? Can it find more mainstream appeal?
Hacker Noon itself still feels like some underbelly of Hacker News, it’s hardly mainstream topics but some mismatch of software developer and Web3 culture. With Ethereum 2.0 finally coming, perhaps Mirror can finally enter a growth period. I mean, who doesn’t want to be paid in ETH? Actually, it’s quite a lot of people. Mirror has just two investors, we cannot be so optimistic about it.
Substack does have a crypto culture to some extent though in recent months since the crypto winter onset, it’s noticeably less interesting. Creating content platforms is notoriously difficult. Now that walled gardens are locking down, fearful of TikTok like retailers are fearful of Amazon, the growth of the personal brand online has been stunted in too many directions.
What do you think about Mirror.xyz?
The Future of Community is Wallet-Native
Mirror’s team believes that the social and economic characteristics of wallets already converge across web3 in activities like NFT collection and participation in community governance, is just at the beginning.
Socially, wallets are evolving into the means by which everyone in web3 communicates, interacts, and follows each other. Blurring the lines between social and economic identity presents a completely new design space with enormous opportunities for the next generation of social applications. At Mirror, our mission is to build great publishing tools at this junction.
According to them, for the next generation of creators and builders, a wallet-based community will be an immeasurably powerful asset. Nice sales pitch.
Ownership Economy Proper?
In web3, community isn’t about passive consumption, liking, or sharing—wallets transform a community into active participants via collection, ownership, patronage, and governance participation. Mirror claims that wallet-based communities can facilitate new creation models, new engagement models, and new business models.
You can read their full announcement here.
Wallet-Based Subscriptions
Use cases currently on Mirror include but are not limited to the following:
Subscribe to essays from leading web3 thinkers
Subscribe to weekly updates from the best DAOs and web3 projects
Token-gated experiences for subscribers
Token and NFT airdrops to subscribers
Whitelisting subscribers for NFT mints
Dune dashboards to analyze subscriber preferences and activity
Subscriber-only governance proposals
Wallet Based NFT Integrations?
Wallet-based subscriptions also pair perfectly with collectible entries on Mirror. According to them, your audience can “collect their favorite writing from you on-chain” and also subscribe to you so they never miss what you publish next, never miss an opportunity to collect an entry, and never miss a call to action from your project.
Wonderful!
Thanks for reading!
Insightful. Was looking into web3 and by now I’m convince it will inherit all the centralized diseases of current platforms. Same greed dressed younger