2023 in Review: What’s Writing Good For Anyway?

Mirror Development

0x9651

James Beck

December 21st, 2023

59 Collected

Mint

A lot of writing about GPTs and LLMs in 2023 asked whether writing itself might become obsolete. In the same year, media companies cut 20,342 jobs. 2023 was a year where broadcast feed social networks like Lens, Warpcast, and Bluesky dented X/Twitter’s dominance. Yet despite having more platforms than ever to broadcast one's ideas, more and more people sought smaller, niche communities online.

As a web3 publishing protocol built on credibly neutral infrastructure, Mirror is in many ways an anticipation – a reaction – to these tech and media trends. On Mirror, writing is collectable, ad-free, and stored permanently online. But what about the writing itself on Mirror? In the era of GPTs and algorithmically curated feeds, would it too become obsolete?

We’ve seen the opposite. Readers have further defined their cultural identity through collecting, not just liking. While some writing on Mirror is meant for a global audience, much more is written for niche communities. These niche communities are in themselves an answer to why we still write. Writing is an invitation. It’s an attempt to bring people in – into new ways of thinking about art, technology, and society.

There were a lot of invitations into niche worlds on Mirror in 2023 — 217,464 to be precise.

• People wrote essays as letters to the future: on autonomous worlds, the dematerialisation of fashion, and the future of content authentication in the age of AI.

• People wrote about complex topics relevant to people building in the blockchain and distributed systems space: scaling blockchains, internet governance, MEV supply chain, retroactive funding mechanisms, and wallets-as-a-service.

• There was writing about art: generative art, onchain art, pixel art on digital surveillance, and art made from digital waste.

• There were manifestos: on taking back ownership, the importance of thinking about dynasty, the onchain cooperative, and from artist collectives.

• Newsletters launched: on gaming, privacy, Ethereum news, and onchain music.

• The big web3 brands came as well: Base, Linea, and even PayPal.

We write to find our communities online, and to signal support for ideas, or disagree with conventional wisdom. But perhaps most importantly, the reason why we write, or collect art and music, is to see ourselves in another.

From the start, we wanted to build a web3-worthy publishing tool. As a creator, though, you need more than just publishing. You need to bootstrap an audience on the networks they use most. You also need a platform that incentivizes people to find and collect your work. In addition to improving our core editor, we rolled out a bunch of new updates — from better discovery, to notifications, to collectable embeds, rewards, and more.

Perhaps our most significant update was creating a new homepage for Mirror. As some social media platforms diminished in significance as primary news sources, homepages and curated feeds made a big comeback (RSS anyone?). Mirror made it a mission to build new discovery and curation surfaces to help collectors find interesting content, and help creators reach new fans.

When you log in to Mirror, you’re now met with an Inbox tab and an Explore tab. The Inbox tab is a chronological feed of the latest entries from creators you subscribe to, as well as the entries that they are collecting. It's your personalized content stream, ensuring you never miss an update. The Explore tab features a curated collection of entries that the Mirror team thinks are worth collecting. All the news fit to mint.

2023 in Review: What’s Writing Good For Anyway?

Mirror Development

0x9651

James Beck

December 21st, 2023

59 Collected

Mint

A lot of writing about GPTs and LLMs in 2023 asked whether writing itself might become obsolete. In the same year, media companies cut 20,342 jobs. 2023 was a year where broadcast feed social networks like Lens, Warpcast, and Bluesky dented X/Twitter’s dominance. Yet despite having more platforms than ever to broadcast one's ideas, more and more people sought smaller, niche communities online.

As a web3 publishing protocol built on credibly neutral infrastructure, Mirror is in many ways an anticipation – a reaction – to these tech and media trends. On Mirror, writing is collectable, ad-free, and stored permanently online. But what about the writing itself on Mirror? In the era of GPTs and algorithmically curated feeds, would it too become obsolete?

We’ve seen the opposite. Readers have further defined their cultural identity through collecting, not just liking. While some writing on Mirror is meant for a global audience, much more is written for niche communities. These niche communities are in themselves an answer to why we still write. Writing is an invitation. It’s an attempt to bring people in – into new ways of thinking about art, technology, and society.

There were a lot of invitations into niche worlds on Mirror in 2023 — 217,464 to be precise.

• People wrote essays as letters to the future: on autonomous worlds, the dematerialisation of fashion, and the future of content authentication in the age of AI.

• People wrote about complex topics relevant to people building in the blockchain and distributed systems space: scaling blockchains, internet governance, MEV supply chain, retroactive funding mechanisms, and wallets-as-a-service.

• There was writing about art: generative art, onchain art, pixel art on digital surveillance, and art made from digital waste.

• There were manifestos: on taking back ownership, the importance of thinking about dynasty, the onchain cooperative, and from artist collectives.

• Newsletters launched: on gaming, privacy, Ethereum news, and onchain music.

• The big web3 brands came as well: Base, Linea, and even PayPal.

We write to find our communities online, and to signal support for ideas, or disagree with conventional wisdom. But perhaps most importantly, the reason why we write, or collect art and music, is to see ourselves in another.

From the start, we wanted to build a web3-worthy publishing tool. As a creator, though, you need more than just publishing. You need to bootstrap an audience on the networks they use most. You also need a platform that incentivizes people to find and collect your work. In addition to improving our core editor, we rolled out a bunch of new updates — from better discovery, to notifications, to collectable embeds, rewards, and more.

Perhaps our most significant update was creating a new homepage for Mirror. As some social media platforms diminished in significance as primary news sources, homepages and curated feeds made a big comeback (RSS anyone?). Mirror made it a mission to build new discovery and curation surfaces to help collectors find interesting content, and help creators reach new fans.

When you log in to Mirror, you’re now met with an Inbox tab and an Explore tab. The Inbox tab is a chronological feed of the latest entries from creators you subscribe to, as well as the entries that they are collecting. It's your personalized content stream, ensuring you never miss an update. The Explore tab features a curated collection of entries that the Mirror team thinks are worth collecting. All the news fit to mint.