Colin's Blog

# TOC


1. *Who is Jordan?*
2. *What is The Amphiboly?*
3. *Mirror Analysis*
4. *What is Chainverse?*

## Me, Jordan

**The Amphiboly** is my ([Jordan Olmstead](https://twitter.com/amphib0ly/)) space for exploring ideas at the intersection of political economy and the Web3 data ecosystem.

I am one of the co-creators of [Diamond DAO](https://twitter.com/dmnddao), which is building [Chainverse](https://www.chainverse.diamonds), the most comprehensive collective intelligence platform for understanding Web3 communities. More about Diamond DAO & Chainverse at the end of the post.

## The Amphiboly

I am attached to the phrase “amphiboly”, and chose it as the title for this publication because Immanuel Kant used it describe an error of analytic judgment I see often and work hard to avoid: believing a claim is true because it “is logical” despite empirical data.

> *Concepts can be compared logically without our troubling to which faculty their objects belong, that is, as to whether their objects are noumena for the understanding, or are phenomena for the sensibility. But if we wish to advance to the objects with these concepts, we must first resort to transcendental reflection, in order to determine for which cognitive faculty they are to be objects, whether for pure understanding or for sensibility. **In the absence of such reflection, the use of these concepts is very unsafe**, giving birth to alleged synthetic principles, which the critical reason cannot recognize, and which are **based on nothing better than a transcendental amphiboly, that is, a confounding of an object of pure understanding with appearance**.*

*The Critique of Pure Reason (*A271=B327)

## Mirror, Mirror 

*Mirror, Mirror on the wall -- are good citizens the best customers of all?*

As one of the "instigators" of Diamond DAO I spend a lot of time trying to explain what Chainverse is and why it matters.

Sometimes, the easiest way to explain something to people is simply showing it to them.

So, I decided to explore the intersection of two platforms near and dear to me -- Mirror and Chainverse.

[Mirror](https://mirror.xyz) describes itself as the “essential web3 toolkit for sharing and funding anything.” 

Mirror originally gained prominence through its [“$WRITE Race”,](https://mirror.xyz/race) an innovative launch and token distribution strategy which empowered users to “vote” their favorite writers and creators onto the platform.

As of March 2022, 21,182 writers had written 76,232 articles on Mirror, and issued over 250 NFTs from those articles, according to Chainverse data.

While Web3 builders have also used Mirror to crowdfund companies and sell tickets to concerts, its serving writers is its primary mission, [according to the CTO](https://twitter.com/strangechances/status/1527622291055874049?s=20&t=4zk92PXsBjilbxP-02MnsA).

 ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/b1a32483be1d7ff72fb496796eab79b6)

Which is awesome! The internet (especially its Web3 corner) are starved for quality writing.

So, I thought to myself…

> Hm, Mirror’s initial audience was dominated by “Web3” people. *A lot of Web3 people are fickle, they join stuff and then leave. I wonder if Mirror authors that are active in DAO governance publish more frequently on the platform?* People who are engaged in the communities they belong to, DAOs or otherwise, should be more engaged on Mirror -- Mirror is just another community after all. 

To test this assumption, I fired up the [Chainverse](https://www.chainverse.diamonds) knowledge graph.

Chainverse contains a lot of data that can help us understand authors on Mirror, including each author that has published on Mirror, NFT sales associated with their articles, their Twitter networks, NFTs they’ve purchased, their Twitter graphs, PartyBids they’ve participated in…I didn’t want to go to deep down the rabbit hole so I limited myself to governance data (specifically voting data).    

*Note: This is not a comprehensive analysis. I got a C+ in Algebra 2. The analysis is meant to satisfy my curiosity and illustrate how Chainverse data can be applied to commercial problems. If you think you can do it better, DM me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/amphib0ly) so I can set you up with our data :)*

## Tl;dr 

* Voting activity was not meaningfully correlated with publishing frequency
* Voting activity was a good way to identify bots attempting to farm rewards from Mirror
* More analysis is needed to determine whether other forms of engagement in governance are positively correlated with publishing frequency
* Diamond DAO is using the same data in this analysis to experiment with recommendation systems for Web3 readers and dashboards for Web3 authors to understand their audiences -- [DM me on Twitter](https://www.twitter.com/amphib0ly) or apply to the [Diamond DAO talent network](https://www.notion.so/chainverse/Talent-Network-Invitation-46a27c02fcd740d9adf655dbd765ec38) to learn more.

## Analysis

### Background

As of March 2022, 21,182 writers had written 76,232 articles on Mirror, and issued over 250 NFTs from those articles.

I started by establishing a baseline for publishing frequency.

The median author has published 1 article; authors at the 95th percentile have published 11.

 ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/97f212168597a98e2241ea58bbda55f5)

### Voting Frequency != Publishing Frequency

After that, I identified all Mirror authors who belong to a DAO -- specifically anyone who is a "member" of a DAOhaus DAO or has voted on Snapshot.

There were 5,562 -- about 25%.

Next I labeled "active voters", or wallets in the 75th percentile (completely arbitrary, I know) of all voters using the Snapshot voting platform.

After that, I labeled "active authors", or authors in the 75th percentile (again, completely arbitrary) of authors on Mirror.

Then I queried the intersection of "SuperAuthors" and "ActiveVoters" to see if they wrote more articles than the average Mirror author.

 ![](https://i.imgur.com/0lPMTGn.png)While there's a slight bump at the margins -- active Snapshot voters have written 8 articles at the 90th percentile versus 5 articles for all Mirror authors -- it's nothing to write home about.

\
### Where are the writing DAOs?

Next I looked to see which DAOs had the most writers!
 ![](https://i.imgur.com/YoeMO3I.png)

Unsurprisingly, ENS -- which has many, many holders -- has the most authors.

Next, I tried to account for DAOs with lots of members by sorting the table by the ratio between author members / all members.

When I did that, I noticed something interesting -- the most prolific writing DAOs all contained one member who had written 574 articles!

Smells pretty botty.

 ![](https://i.imgur.com/eXfhpPS.png)While I didn’t go into this analysis expecting to think about sybil detection, it does seem that governance engagement data may be a valuable data source for sybil detection algorithms, contributing to more [efficient airdrops](https://twitter.com/Flynnjamm/status/1529072751482392579). 

In any event, I changed the original query to look for the DAOs that had the most "super authors" -- results were pretty similar.

Last, I queried to see which DAOs had the most "prolific authors", i.e. the DAOs whose members wrote the most on Mirror. Those results were a little different, with Compound Governance, Snapshot Labs, Lido Finance, Seed Club, and PartyDAO creeping up in the rankings.

 ![](https://i.imgur.com/ObxekQ7.png)

### Future research

This analysis raised more questions than answers for me.

First, I only looked at one form of governance engagement, voting. There are many more ways to participate in governance, ranging from forum posts to sending reminders on Discord. 

Second, I didn’t isolate governance activity specific to Mirror -- it’s very possible that people who participate in Mirror governance (on Discord, by attending community calls, etc) are more likely to be writers. 

Fortunately, Chainverse has much, much more data to help organizations like Mirror understand their audiences and make sense of messy and incomplete data.

Our data can also be used to experiment with solutions to other problems, like recommending Web3 writing to readers and helping authors understand their audiences. These problems interest me because all Web3 marketplaces face them, not just Mirror.  

### More on Chainverse

As I said earlier, I’m one of the co-creators of Diamond DAO, which is building Chainverse. I was motivated to start writing again, in large part, as a “bat signal” to attract intellectual fellow travelers to Diamond DAO.

Chainverse brings clarity to the fragmented Web3 data landscape by connecting disparate data sources and incentivizing domain expert contributors to add off-chain relationships and events critical for understanding the communities they participate in.

So far, Chainverse covers 6,000+ communities and nearly 1,000,000 wallets:

* Investors will use Chainverse to perform more thorough due diligence. 
* Infrastructure providers will use Chainverse to understand their users and develop strategies for cultivating their ecosystems.
* Marketplaces will use Chainverse to support product initiatives with comprehensive market research and supercharge recommendation engines.

If you’re interested in learning more about our awesome community of data nerds say hi in our (peaceful) [Discord](https://discord.gg/85R3EQDzFz) or [apply to do research](https://discord.gg/85R3EQDzFz) as part of our talent network.

\


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Welcome to Paragraph!

I came across an interesting webdev bug today.

For some reason, on my site, my cursor was not working correctly. When hovering over links or buttons or elements that set `cursor: pointer`, my cursor did not turn into a pointer hand; instead, it stayed as a regular ol’ cursor.

This was odd. I didn’t change any styling that could affect this. I took to Google, and the first link gave me the right answer:

 ![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/0712ba4d3f727f87811f576071ed1d5c)

I saw that I was indeed running Photoshop at the time. I closed it, and my cursor began acting normally.

How strange!

If anyone can shed light as to why Photshop and other programs do this, please let me know!o

Photoshop Hijacks Your Cursor

### Welcome!

Hi, and welcome to my blog & newsletter.

I’m a **Senior Software Engineer at Google** in Mountain View, since September 2017. I manage the Real-time Communications Abuse team within Counter-Abuse Technology.

Beyond that, in my free time, I write quite a bit of TypeScript and React in a handful of side projects.

In my newsletter, I write about my experiences at Google; working with cutting-edge JS frameworks; and more.