View the balance of ownership of Web3 from the perspective of Paragraph canceling custom designs

Paragraph can change the visual presentation of the blog at will, and the creator cannot do anything about it.

Author:0xAntidote.eth

Compiled by: Zen, PANews

A recent update from Paragraph, which acquired Mirror, a well-known Web3 content platform, brought about some changes. One of the points that was not widely discussed was that it eliminated the ability to customize CSS design blogs. The Paragraph team said that there are only a few creators using this feature, and I happen to be one of them. I have spent a lot of time carefully designing the brand vision to give my blog a unique style. But this update completely undermined those efforts by removing custom fonts and background colors, causing the overall design of the blog to become confusing.

Although I have plans to continue publishing content and expand my readership on Paragraph, the current size of the blog is not large, and Paragraph will not lose users just because of my departure. Each product team’s resources are limited, sometimes due to funding issues, sometimes due to limited developer energy, and sometimes due to different priorities for product decisions. Therefore, it is impossible to meet everyone’s needs.

However, I would also add that the Paragraph team has always been very friendly to me. They twice selected my article as a weekly selection, listened carefully to my feedback, and provided professional explanations during communication.

Although I understand their decision, I believe the thinking behind the decision is to imitate existing Web2 content distribution platforms to increase the control of centralized distribution platforms by standardizing the appearance of content. I still wish the Paragraph team all the best, but for me, the current Paragraph is no longer able to solve a core issue worth solving, so I decided to leave.

Paragraph’s value proposition

Judging from the official introduction, Paragraph’s core value proposition mainly revolves around“content ownership”。

In short, Paragraph is a cryptography-based blog/newsletter platform. Articles are stored on Arweave and can be sold as digital collections, allowing creators to monetize them directly through content. In theory, this model enhances creators ‘ownership of their content.

However, after thinking about it carefully, I think that just because you create content on Paragraph does not mean that you truly own it.

What is true ownership?

“Ownership has always been an important concept in the Web3 narrative. One of the origins of Ethereum is that Vitalik questioned the ownership of digital assets: If game developers shut down servers, what would happen to your game props?

This thinking gave birth to Ethereum and later smart contract platforms, driving the evolution of the concept of ownership. Today, blockchain technology allows almost all types of assets to be owned.

But the essence of ownership is not just about owning something. It also involves more complex levels.

In a multi-person interactive world, ownership must have four key elements:

1. Possession: Are you recognized as the owner of the asset?

2. Monetization: Can you sell the asset or charge non-owners?

3. Appearance: Does the way the asset is displayed to the outside world meet your expectations?

4. Distribution: Can your assets be widely disseminated so that more people recognize your ownership?

If there is a problem in any of these four aspects, true ownership cannot be established.

Paragraph’s flaws at the ownership level

Blockchain improves many aspects of ownership through decentralized ledger and encryption technology. But if certain key links fail, ownership may still be eroded. For example:

• If everyone mistakenly thinks that you have something else, are you the real owner?

• If your videos can only be presented with tan filters (because YouTube or your network provider forces them), is this your content?

This is where Paragraph currently finds itself: it can change the visual presentation of a blog at will, and there is nothing the creator can do about it.

As can be seen from the above figure, Paragraph has improved in terms of possession and monetization of ownership, but its contribution to appearance and distribution is limited and may even be negative.

Compromise and trade-off of ownership

Of course, perfect ownership is an ideal state that may never be fully achieved. However, we can measure whether we are moving towards this ideal. I think we have generally been moving closer to this ideal over the past decade. Blockchain plays a role in this, but other technological advances are equally important, such as decentralized energy production (mainly renewable energy) or Starlink (which provides high-speed Internet access around the world).

However, in the current state of affairs, everything is more or less a compromise. The question is, in terms of the four aspects of ownership: Possession, Monetization, Appearance, and Distribution. What are you willing to compromise?

Different assets and platforms have different compromises.

For example, for certain assets, such as Memecoins, teams are often willing to sacrifice appearance and distribution autonomy to use X (former Twitter) and Discord to promote their projects in exchange for greater market reach. The reason why these projects are willing to make such compromises is because these traditional social media platforms have a huge audience base, and even if they have limited content, they still provide far better coverage than more ownership-oriented but smaller open platforms such as Farcaster or Lens. The development of memecoin into a multi-billion-dollar industry in itself proves that this compromise is effective in reality.

However, when it comes to media content, the situation is different. X will restrict the distribution of links to external media platforms, such as Substack. Writing memecoin-related content for X is content expanded by TAM (Total Available Market), while content linked to external media platforms is content contracted by TAM. This is also a problem faced by many Web3 media platforms. Their value gain will only appear after reaching a certain scale. Previously, for many digital asset creators, sacrificing certain aspects of ownership may make more economic sense in exchange for better distribution than insisting on the ideal state of ownership.

This is particularly evident on Web3 media platforms such as Paragraph. They do not fully optimize possession, monetization, appearance and distribution, leaving them in an awkward middle ground: they do not provide enough additional ownership control to make creators willing to sacrifice distribution advantages to use it.

What are the alternatives?

So, where will my future content be posted? I think there are several possible paths that can be more in line with my ownership philosophy.

1. Moving to other writing platforms, such as Medium, Mirror, Substack or Ghost, have their own advantages and disadvantages, but their compromise solutions are not fundamentally improved compared to Paragraph. In reverse, it is more like a lateral movement than a fundamental optimization.

2. Distributing on X and/or Farcaster and hosting content elsewhere means splitting different aspects of ownership across multiple platforms. One possible best solution is to publish the content on X/Farcaster first to ensure better distribution, and then archive the article on a blog where you can customize CSS to ensure the appearance and quality of the content.

3. Continue to use Paragraph and expect it to improve product positioning. This may be a feasible solution, but if you need to readjust the appearance and other aspects of the content in the future, it will add a lot of extra work. Therefore, I will keep the Paragraph blog in place for now, but not as the main distribution channel unless there are substantial improvements to the product.

Currently, I prefer the second option.

Farcaster in particular provides a nice balance between different aspects of ownership. In addition, Frames may be a solution that allows the release of long-form content and has complete control over appearance and monetization.

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