Meandering Musings: Minds as a platform for creative content

This is just going to be an off the cuff little rant, just to air some grievances I have. It's not anything serious where I'm threatening to leave the platform, nor do I expect much to be done about these issues in the short term. It's just these things affect my ability to create content on Minds, and thus should be at the very least mentioned so others can weigh in.

So, I'm an amateur author with a couple self published novels on Amazon, and a fair amount of free content published both on Minds and Steemit. I've been posting content regularly over on Steemit. In fact, for a while I've been posting a post just about every weekday, all while still working a full time job. This is thanks to an application using the Steemit blockchain called Steempeak. It allows scheduled posts as well as templates, meaning creating content can be done all on the weekend and automatically released through the week. Minds doesn't have this, which means I need to create a draft post, completely finish it, and then manually publish it when I want to release it. But this is just the start of the problems.

Templates are incredibly useful if you are writing a series like I have done a couple times. You can add the latest link the previous chapter to the template, and keep any images, headers, and footers for each installment. Minds has nothing like this that I'm  aware of except for copy/paste, and even that doesn't work as good as Steemit's wysiwyg(what you see is what you get) editor. A wysiwyg editor means you can enter markup code that behaves consistently and preview your post. Minds requires SEVERAL clicks to add a SINGLE link which cannot be simply copied and pasted all at once from another page, and, to put more emphasis on this, has no template capabilities to reduce the need for this. If you want to include a full up to date table of contents for each entry in a series on each post, then new entries require a steadily increasing amount of work to create. It's frustrating, since a basic template capability would make things far easier without requiring more special functionality.

Of course, that's not even the biggest problem with Minds. No, the biggest reason I have throttled my content on Minds is because the BASIC FUNCTIONALITY BARELY WORKS. Several times, I try adding an image and publishing, only to have the image not display. I've had blogs randomly switch to being published as only me instead of public, which has gotten me into the habit of opening an incognito tab just to verify that people other than me can see a blog I just published. I used to pay gate some content for a couple tokens so I could offer something special to those actively supporting my work, but even that is hyper glitchy, showing null tokens required to see the content, and requiring multiple attempts to actually remove the gate on content. I previously tried setting up this pay gate on pre-release content, then actually releasing by removing the gate after awhile, but it became such a hassle on top of all these other issues.

Steemit, overall, I have mixed feelings about. They have a dollar amount associated with every post, and it makes the whole thing feel like a rat race when all I want is a platform to post free content and advertise my novels while I'm at it. But one thing Steemit does seem to have is a far more active curation scene, with manual reviewers offering incentives to people who produce quality content. The actual dollar amounts associated with these things is always a bit fuzzy, as all posts are actually payed out in Steem, and thus when the value of Steem plummets so does your actual account value(assuming you haven't cashed out), but it does still provide a nice little incentive. I've seen barely anything similar on Minds, despite a couple attempts to create curation efforts. It makes the whole experience feel less exciting, as a couple votes or reminds have an even more nebulous actual value. It might be worth noting that despite having fewer followers on Steemit, I have had far more engagement on individual posts. It makes me wonder how much those thousand views from a spent token are actually worth when compared to another system that allows me rewards that can be exchanged for other currencies.

I have an entire backlog of content I could migrate over to Minds, and I hope to do so at some point. But at the moment, even starting feels like such a daunting task because of how frustrating posting a blog on Minds is compared to Steempeak. Don't get me wrong, they have their own problems, but overall, their site feels more functional than Minds. I don't want either site to lose, I want both to get better because, from a purely selfish perspective, that gives me the largest reach. Anyway... rant over, I guess. Anyone who got this far, please offer your own thoughts in the comments if you wish.