tylerinternet@tylerinternet
Zora isn’t for art anymore. And that makes me sad.
Zora used to feel less like a platform and more like a flexible, unopinionated tool. More like Manifold, less like OpenSea. Creators could structure mints however they wanted, with full control over price, quantity, and duration, and could even customize the fonts, colors, and other minute details of collection pages.
Zora wasn’t just a home for art, but an extension of it.
But once they introduced a feed as the dedicated UX feature, and replaced the custom mint settings with infinite low cost mints, it became something different.
This isn’t a Zora hit piece, and these changes aren’t unlike your usual monetization curve of the dIGiTaL aGe. But I know I’m not alone here, and it’s become really hard to ignore the exodus of artists from what was once a darling of the onchain creative world.
More than that, these changes reflect a larger trend—the loss of digital places that are specifically not for content.
Let’s look at how Zora has changed and what those changes suggest about the broader world of art, content, and digital platforms.
🎨 CONTENT IS KINDA TRASH LMAO
My favorite works of art hit for me in a way that feel like they were made for me. Like the artist created something based on a thought or feeling that I thought only I had. Something so deeply seeded and personal to me that, to see it exist outside of myself, makes me feel more connected to the world and people around me. That shit’s awesome.
Content does not do this.
Content is designed to connect easily and briefly with as many people as possible, or at least as many people as possible within a target audience. Maybe it’s a little funny, or slightly insightful, a riff on something you’re already familiar with, sexual, triggering, whatever. You know what content is. The majority of digital platforms today are filled with these regurgitated thoughts and images that we’ve already seen in some way before, slightly more optimized for a given platform’s algorithm or a set of vanity metrics than their previous iterations.
Zora isn’t necessarily included in this group of platforms yet, but it feels like it’s headed in that direction.
I’m not even saying that content is bad. It certainly has its places and purposes. But content is starting to show up everywhere, and that is bad. Like it’s escaped the baseline of social media and is now working its way further into our movies, our music, our art, and our lives.
Let’s poorly define art and content real quick.
⬅️—ADS—CONTENT—MEDIA—ART—➡️
Distinguishing between ads, content, art, slop, and everything else in between is getting more difficult for both creators and audiences. For the sake of simplicity, I’m gonna refer to these as buckets. I look at these buckets on a spectrum.
On the left we have the ad, which is created with the explicit goal of selling something to a specific target audience. On the opposite end of the spectrum we have art, which in its purest form is something someone creates purely because they feel like they need to create it. In an ideal world, it’s someone trying to express something as authentically as possible, with little to no thought about how it will be perceived or valued by others.
Content and media fall somewhere in between. I tend to view content as more organic than ads, but still on that left side and made mostly from the outside in. Like “I think people in X audience would like a video on Y topic.” Finally, I place media closer to art on the right. It has a higher level of creative intentionality than content, but is still made with factors like monetization, distribution, and maybe a loose target audience in mind. I’d say this article is closer to media, though I wouldn’t fault you for calling it content.
This isn’t a perfect system, but it helps me structure how I look at the things I create and consume. There’s no good or bad end of the spectrum, they’re just different things with different processes and purposes.
And I can’t stress that enough—content and art are different. Assuming they should be made in the same way and live in the same places is silly.
But that’s where we’re at now.
📳 EVERYTHING IN ONE PLACE ALL AT ONCE
All of these buckets now live on the same few platforms and devices. Most people watch most movies at home, on the same TV where they watch the Netflix-suggested soap opera of the month or on the same computer where they work and click through YouTube ads. We see art on Twitter and IG between shitposts and shillposts. We sift through all the music ever made, from Bach to Bhad Bhabie, across the same ~5 services.
Dedicated places for digital things that aren’t content are disappearing. The lines between our buckets are growing thin.
By putting our art and creative media in the same place as everything else, we put it in direct competition with everything else. Art is learning bad habits from ads to IncReASe EnGagEmeNt. Ads and content are getting better at capitalizing on the appearance of being something creative but, at the end of the day, are still focused on hitting specific KPIs and “outperforming” the other trending topics of the day. They’re disguising themselves as art but failing to add the soul and substance (and those are kinda important).
And as viewers, consuming substanceless content that “looks like it should be good” leaves us confused and disappointed. This is slop. I don’t feel like talking more about slop.
Let’s get back to Zora.
Like many onchain creative platforms circa the early 2020s, Zora used to exist largely outside of all this shit. At least, it felt like it did. The onchain creative world (I know that term sucks but idk what else to call it) as a whole felt like a conscious move away from web2’s captured platforms and cobbled together monetization systems that were never created for digital assets, let alone art.
NFTs and blockchain felt like a new way forward for creators, and Zora was a mainstay in that movement. They stood for so many things that brought artists onchain in the first place, and played a large role in the early onchain days of rethinking ownership, provenance, monetization, and collaboration for a digital-first world.
But that era feels like it’s come to an end.
🌜🌞🌛 WHAT IS ZORA?
Today, Zora feels more like Instagram + pumpdotfun. And that’s fine.
But this method of explicitly correlating the financial success of a piece with its volume of engagement (number of likes/mints) pushes the incentives heavily towards chasing trending themes and memetic content cycles.
With everyone trying to compress and refine the “current thing,” the air that artists need to create and share something new gets sucked out. The internet is already a cultural accelerant, and a system like this throws it into overdrive.
It’s not that you can’t post original art on Zora, and I’m always happy to see creators get paid for their creations regardless of what they are. But these changes have undeniably pushed away artists and continue to do so.
So what is Zora now? That’s actually a really good question that, despite all the shit I just talked, I don’t really have an answer to.
It’s possible that Zora has all but abandoned the core user base that held them in such high regard through multiple cycles and iterations in search of attracting the existing realm of traders and the ever elusive “next billion users.”
But maybe this is the wrong way to look at it.
Maybe Zora has created a revolutionary new tool for creators that I’m simply too smoothbrained to grasp the positive potential of just yet. Maybe it’s exactly the type of platform we need to push coins and NFTs into emerging as a wholly new bucket, one that is deeply connected with the internet and better suited to engage with creators and audiences in the age of social media, four hour news cycles, AI, and whatever comes next.
And maybe that won’t kill art in the process, but instead, reshape how we think about creativity itself.
I hope that’s the case <3
