In a time where digital aesthetics have become increasingly homogenized, Jonny Mack and the Fabric team are flipping the script through Hypersub. Their approach isn't just about making things look different – it's about fundamentally rethinking how creators can thrive in the digital age, while challenging the beige conformity that has come to define our online spaces.
Virtuosic design statements as a necessity
When Hypersub first launched, they had to get creative. "Initially, we needed to do this virtuoso design shit to really flex and make it feel like there was more going on than there really was," Mack shares. Now, with over 120 active creators and tens of thousands of subscribers, they can afford to dial it back a bit.
"The internet had gotten very serious and boring," Mack reflects. "Everything became sort of this beige, vanilla average". This standardization isn't merely an aesthetic choice – it represents a broader cultural homogenization that has made the internet less weird, less interesting, and ultimately less human.
Instead of following crypto's played-out, cringe trends such as noisy radial gradients, tickers, rainbows, and vaporwave aesthetics, Mack drew inspiration from type foundries, music scenes, and record labels, "I want to make design that is beautiful and useful and has its own language. It's not trying to draft off of anybody else."
This approach has earned Hypersub some strong reactions – people either love it or hate it, "I want to go to websites where you're like, 'Whoa, I've never seen this before,'" he says.
As Hypersub matured and attracted tens of thousands of subscribers, the design approach shifted toward simplification and accessibility, while maintaining its core commitment to challenging aesthetic norms. For them, design served different purposes at different stages of growth.
What hasn't changed since the beginning is Hypersub's community-driven design process, with multiple tight feedback loops between creators and users. "You do what you're called to do, like what's in your heart to do and feels right," Mack describes. "The good design stuff is the stuff that gets through".
This collaborative process has led to key design decisions in how creators interact with their communities and how value is distributed such as transparent on-chain mechanisms and shared reward pools.
Hypersub's mission to flip the script on creator economics arose from a desire to reshape the relationship between creators and money-making. Mack references Henry Rollins' observation about punk versus hip-hop: in punk, making money made you a "sell-out", while in hip-hop, success was celebrated.
"Making money in Web2 is this very taboo thing," Mack notes. "Whereas in crypto, wealth creation is celebrated – but it's not about how much money I make, it's about how much money we make".
Cultural and Financial Barriers to Adoption
The big question for Web3 creator adoption now is simple: how is this better? While traditional platforms like Twitch and Patreon take massive cuts (around 50% and 30-40% respectively), onchain creators could be getting better deals.
Despite these promises, Hypersub are sober-minded about the cultural shift required when it comes to funding. While substantial resources flow into infra projects, few large players have the appetite to tackle the challenging application layer. "Being a founder is hard enough," Mack reflects, "but being a founder in a market that's pretty much dead feels like a suicide mission. You need to be extremely high conviction and mission-driven".
The path forward for Web3 creator platforms isn't just about technical infrastructure or token economics – it's about overcoming barriers to adoption. Technical and cultural scaling will be driven by platforms that can sustain their existence in the Web3 space and attract mainstream artists and their audiences.
"At this point, the industry has been talking about itself for years," Mack observes. "The only thing left to do is walk the walk and deliver. We need to scale it 10,000X to make the kind of impact we believe we can".
The resistance against digital blandness goes beyond about making things look cool. In a space dominated by infrastructure plays and token economics, we need courageous platforms like Hypersub to build new models that feel "creator-native".
As Web3 continues to evolve, maybe we'll finally get back to what the internet was supposed to be: weird, wonderful, and full of possibilities ...one design decision at a time.
