On the road to realizing the vision of redefine publishing, Mirror has had some good explorations, but we still want to go further.
Through authorized signatures, Mirror has achieved smooth user experience while verifying data credibility; storing user-generated content on Arweave makes all data publicly accessible, and then using the collect mechanism allows readers to tokenize content on the blockchain; burning $WRITE helps users obtain an ENS and a domain name on the Mirror platform... These designs are indeed very ingenious and have inspired us a lot in building a Web3 native app. But recently, I read Mirror's announcement, and I feel that some dreams are being shattered.
Today's Mirror does achieve sharing ideas that catalyze communities in web3, but the dream of redefining publishing has gone further and further away. We once had high hopes for Mirror to use crypto technology to redefine the entire publishing industry, but now, Mirror has become just a writing platform for us to discuss Web3. We cannot turn a blind eye to these changes because we should be able to go further.
About Plugins#
One of the most beautiful visions of Web3 is that content creators can directly establish content distribution channels with users and obtain revenue directly from user recognition without relying on advertisers. The emergence of plugins such as crowdfund, edition, and split was originally a step closer to this ideal. In addition, the plugin system naturally has flexibility and modularity, which is in line with the ideal of Web3's composability. And this is one of the few open-source parts of the Mirror community. But now all of these are gone.
About Web3 Subscription#
Speaking of composability, for a long time, Mirror left the choice of subscription mechanism to content creators and third-party services. For example, in June 2022, I had a screenshot as follows:
Creators have the right to choose and own their own information distribution channels, which is a very good practice for Web3 native apps. But after Mirror launched its own web3 subscription, these options disappeared.
It has become difficult to create your own content distribution channel based on mirror.xyz while establishing your own content. This web3 subscription is essentially owned by Mirror. Yes, that's right. It has nothing to do with wallet authentication and Web3. Users seem to have signed and authorized with their wallets, but all the information of these subscriptions is still stored in Mirror's centralized servers, and Mirror has the ultimate right to decide who to distribute to and who not to distribute to, and others cannot supervise this.
It is also not because the name of the subscription contains Web3 or because users need to sign with their wallets that content creators "own" their subscribers. In other words, in Web3 Subscription, Mirror not only monopolizes the distribution channels but also the relationship chains.
Speaking of subscriptions themselves, subscriptions are almost the earliest form of information distribution on the Internet, and they could have had a more elegant and simple solution of just filling in an email address. But now it is necessary to bind an email and wallet address to subscribe. This is similar to the unnecessary "must" login to use certain features of many Web2 products. Of course, in the world of cryptography, we can generate a new pair of keys almost at no cost, but the design of forcing the binding of email and wallet address still goes against the open ideals of Web3.
About Content#
Although Mirror "claims" that the content published by creators is stored on a decentralized platform, as shown in the figure below, we can see that users' images are actually hosted on Mirror's own servers. In other words, the complete reading experience still heavily relies on the availability of Mirror's own services.
In addition, in order to optimize the user's writing experience, Mirror has made many custom extensions to the Markdown format, such as link preview, video, etc., which directly use nested image Markdown syntax. Of course, choosing Markdown syntax and parsing and storing content on Arweave to a large extent achieves an independent reading experience from Mirror, but the rich non-consensus custom Markdown syntax without corresponding open-source frontend parsing tools still makes the rendering part of the content rely on the availability of mirror.xyz frontend.
About Ownership#
Although I listed data ownership here, Mirror has never claimed to implement data ownership. Because Web3, decentralization, and ownership are often discussed together, I mentioned this point just to clarify that Mirror's practices have nothing to do with data ownership.
First of all, Arweave, as a decentralized storage platform where content cannot be modified, essentially only has authorship, not ownership. Ownership requires certain financial attributes. Essentially, what Mirror has done is just backup the content of the article on a decentralized storage.
In addition, it is Mirror-initiated transactions that help users store content on Arweave, not transactions initiated by users themselves. Although this does not affect the verification of the source of the content ultimately on the chain, it makes the user's publishing experience highly dependent on the stability of Mirror's own services, especially considering that Mirror has not open-sourced their backend services—users have no choice but to rely on mirror.xyz and have no other service providers to choose from.
So in reality, users neither have the right to freely publish content nor do they really own the content they publish.
Afterword#
Rereading the Mirror team's initial blog post, we can still feel the enthusiasm and ambition for the industry, but perhaps due to the analysis of user data or pressure from investors, Mirror eventually chose the practices we see today. As an entrepreneur myself, I understand this from the perspective of product decision-making. But I am still very regretful, including the recent sanctioning incident against Tornado Cash. We came to this industry with ideals to a greater or lesser extent, but now it seems that the ideals of Web3 have been proven false, and the entire industry has been slapped in the face. And what I don't want to see is that after being slapped in the face, everyone is desperately trying to make the story go round and round, acting as if the emperor is wearing new clothes. I have to think about why this is happening, and I believe we can do better.