Maybe at this time, we can revisit Matters' draft project

As a user who has been in Matters for a long time, watching the atmosphere of this platform continue to evolve, and many disputes that are only trivial to the outside world, it is inevitable to have a lot of emotions. Frankly speaking, the time I spend to browse articles and participate in discussions has also decreased compared to before.

When life and social articles gradually became the mainstream of Matters since the end of last year, I was already dissatisfied with this form, but at that time I saw that the site would still try its best to help make in-depth public and knowledgeable articles more People have seen, for example, the support list of the "Golden Motor Fund", the push of e-newsletters, etc., but they have also seen many publicists who have been active here and have not continued to post here. And the e-newsletters received this week, the articles with "the most favorites" and "the most people read", are almost all related to the recent hot Osmosis liquidity mining and NFT, which obviously makes people feel the main tastes of users. what is it like.

I believe that many Matters users have also read the official article announcing the release of NFT. A few days ago, I also saw the website published relevant announcements on Medium . Compared with the official articles on this site, the Medium version has more introductions about Matters, which makes me feel unfamiliar.

So, I think it's also time to reread Matters' draft project from three and a half years ago. You can still find this chapter by searching for Matty's personal account now, but it takes a little more time, so it is not particularly related here.

"Decentralization" has always been the management policy advocated by Matters (but it has also been criticized due to various recent disputes). In the official introduction seen on Medium, the site described Matters as "the largest open source decentralized center in the Web3 world." Publishing platform" to "build a freer and fairer creator ecology, covering decentralized storage, digital rights protection, governance system design and creator economic model"; and in the project draft, "decentralization" is "When the community rules are recognized by the community and the currency logic is running smoothly, the two are migrated to the blockchain, and the content is migrated to the distributed storage system to complete the decentralization of the community." difference.

But in the project draft, there is a more detailed description of Matters' vision:

 The Matters team believes that quality knowledge and content is another key aspect of connecting people, and will play an important role in any society that aspires to progress. Although the production efficiency of traditional media lags behind that of social networks, the professional ability to create content and the credibility of quality monitoring still have important value. If the mechanism for exerting these values can be applied to the "content" or "knowledge" that is also being reconstructed with a new economic model, it is possible to create a positive circular operation mode, which can not only resume public responsibility, but also And also self-sustaining.

At Matters, we hope to promote the realization of a new social platform based on the value of content that is not economically dependent on advertising, interaction is not controlled by a centralized mechanism.

The draft also pointed out various shortcomings of the current media and social platforms, such as the difficulty for creators of serious content to obtain corresponding rewards, and the expulsion of good money by bad money in the public domain, etc., so as to propose a corresponding "CDAR mechanism" to "promote More people and content develop in parallel and connect with each other to form a knowledge social network.”

The current Travelloggers NFT plan also sees the vision of establishing a new creator economic model and exploring public governance with radical market rules. Visions such as a resumption of public responsibility for the way it operates are now invisible to be mentioned (and practiced).

I have mentioned on different occasions in the past that Matters' in-depth articles and (relatively) rational discussion atmosphere, and the ability to gather relatively progressive voices within the wall are what differentiates this from other content and writing platforms. Although the "CDAR mechanism" has been fully integrated into the LikeCoin ecosystem here in October 2019, strictly speaking, it no longer exists, but in the past, when the user base continued to evolve, I still saw that the site was committed to pushing in-depth articles, maintaining In the atmosphere of public discussion, efforts were made to invite many intellectuals to hold salons on public issues. However, recently, from the "Matt Universe Co-construction Plan" to the release of NFT's copywriting, I can't see the site sticking to these concepts.

I think that Matters has definitely gone through a qualitative change when the website no longer mentions some of the original intentions.

For a long time in the past, I still have quite a lot of persistence in the positioning of Matters in this early year. Some articles about easy life will only be placed in Medium and squares, and the criteria for liking articles here are also stricter than those in Medium and squares. But since Matters has reached such a state, it seems irreversible, should this kind of attachment be let go?