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Mirror's Road Choice: Product or Protocol?

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Despite the ups and downs, Mirror remains the most competitive content publishing platform in the industry, thanks to the support of its peers.

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Original author: shawn

Over the past two years, the content publishing platform Mirror has been constantly wavering in its strategic direction: disputes over curation direction, product vs protocol, and pitfalls in mass adoption.

With the departure of Mirror co-founder Graeme Boy in November 2022 and Rafa (DAO leader) in January 2023, the internal product direction dispute within the Mirror core team has come to an end.

In the first half of 2022, various major companies and many startup teams have approached me to discuss creating a competitor to Mirror. Unfortunately, none of them have succeeded. Despite the setbacks, Mirror remains the strongest player in this niche market, thanks to the competition pushing us forward.

A few days ago, at the Lensfans hackathon workshop, we talked about the various pitfalls that Mirror has encountered. Many friends were interested and DM'd me. I have organized my own personal experience participating in Mirror.

1. Mirror Curatorial Direction Dispute

Previously, Mirror conducted internal research and everyone evaluated the following directions.

- Recommendation algorithm;

- Professional curation team;

- Mirror DAO does curation.- Anyone can participate in voting and curation on Web3.

In early 2021, when Mirror was cold-started, curation adopted the $WRITE Race, which is option 4 (Web3 everyone can participate in voting). And in August 2021, a $WRITE airdrop was conducted for voters. In October, the $WRITE Race voting was terminated.

The main reasons for terminating the $WRITE Race voting are as follows:

- Vote buying and witch attacks are quite serious.

- The Mirror team has been hesitant to touch the tokenomics of $WRITE due to compliance issues in the United States. However, they cannot avoid using $WRITE to incentivize voting.

At the end of 2021, Plan 3 (curated by Mirror DAO) was implemented, with full support from co-founder Graeme Boy and Rafa leading the charge. After a 6-month trial, the results were mediocre, as the hundreds of influential figures within Mirror DAO were too busy to vote on curation. Ultimately, it devolved into a small circle of curators, reverting back to Plan 2 (a professional curation team).

In 2022, two co-founders, Graeme Boy and Denis Nazarov, had clear differences in their curatorial direction.

Here's a small example. On the day of the official release of writing NFT, Denis Nazarov tweeted an introduction. I wrote a reply saying, "With writing NFT, we can finally restart curated voting on Twitter." Denis Nazarov liked the comment, but Graeme Boy opposed it. Denis Nazarov and Graeme Boy made multiple comments on the tweet, but later deleted them.

With Graeme Boy's departure, Denis Nazarov continues to push for writing NFTs, becoming the main curation pathway for Mirror.

2. Product or Protocol

The Mirror development team led by Graeme Boy has always focused on protocol development rather than product development, and it is best for the front-end to be done by third-party developers within the ecosystem. The Mirror front-end is poorly designed, with some basic features missing or obvious bugs that the development team has not addressed for several months. While users complain about the poor front-end experience, the development team, as one of the earliest supporters of OP layer2, enthusiastically launched various NFT experimental projects, resulting in today's writing NFT.

Mirror core developer Patrick wrote an article titled "Thoughts on DAO Tooling", which mainly discussed that successful DAO tools will eventually become protocols, causing some discussion. After the controversy, Patrick has also left Mirror.

Doing protocols requires an ecosystem. However, developers participating in the Mirror ecosystem do not receive any money, and many even pay for server costs out of their own pockets, while Mirror earns a 2.5% on-chain commission. The Mirror DAO treasury has nearly a million dollars (from the 2.5% on-chain commission income from Mirror products), which was originally planned to partially subsidize Mirror ecosystem developers, but in reality, not a penny was paid. When I asked Rafa at the time whether this was due to concerns about US compliance issues (because this money is income for a US company in financial terms), he did not deny it.

Today, Mirror, led by Denis Nazarov, seems to be returning to product.

3. mass adoption pitfalls

Mirror brought on Veronica Saron, former Marketing Leader of Pokemon Go, at the end of 2021 to form a team with the goal of helping Mirror gain mass adoption and break out into the mainstream.

Veronica Saron left in the end, and I was also involved in this part of the work, feeling battered and bruised. Mirror not only failed to solve the high threshold of wallets, but also couldn't compete with substack/medium in terms of profitability. The front-end editing and user experience were also so counterintuitive. Who would use it except for Web3 native?

The key is that Mirror did not allocate any resources to solve these problems throughout 2022. Mass adoption cannot be solved simply by high marketing investment.

4. The core team always avoids token economic models.

On April 3, 2022, I wrote an article titled "Thoughts on Mirror DAO" in which I discussed various issues and proposed solutions. I sent it to Rafa. At the time, the core team of Mirror gathered in New York from around the world for a closed-door discussion. Despite the pandemic, Rafa traveled from Germany to New York. On that day, Rafa approached me and asked if I would be willing to share this article at the Mirror team's closed-door meeting, as these were the topics they were constantly debating.

I am also a serial entrepreneur myself and I know how difficult it is to start a business, especially in the Web3 industry where there are conflicts between ideals and reality. Regarding the direction of Mirror, personally I support Denis Nazarov. I also have respect for Graeme Boy and Rafa, who have been eliminated, as they are very pure idealists.