Minds: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

First, a bit about me (for credibility's sake)

Since I'm a semi-private intellectual, a lot of folks might not have an idea of who I am and hence why they should bother reading this. As for educational background, I graduated high school valedictorian from a private school and got a high magna cum laude for my B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication with a concentration in electronic media (though also with plenty of philosophy and theology and some Spanish). I also tinkered with coding while in high school, working in Visual Basic to try to make a turn-based videogame run off of Microsoft Excel.

I have been on social media under one profile or another at least as far back as 2009 (unless you count traditional-style internet forums or video hosting sites as "social media," in which case, it goes back further), and I have been a fairly active member of Minds for about three and a half years at the time of producing this blog post, entering the Minds community in the second major additive wave of Minds users on the site. (You can learn more about me in the blog post here.)

Second, a bit about competition

I think it's time we had a chat, perhaps in context of a bit of Minds history. The tale of Minds has seemed to me to be one of "two steps forward, one step back" as well as perhaps some missed opportunities. Here I am thinking largely in terms of the competitive edge of a website or company.

And let's be clear about the core competition here. About three years ago, some folks were still pitching the idea that YouTube was a competitor to Minds. After all, Minds allowed video uploading in a hosting sort of manner, and some YouTubers (e.g., Dave Cullen, Stefan Molyneux, Carl Benjamin, and so on) were also giving Minds a try and bringing some of their viewing audiences in along with them. However, the design-type of YouTube isn't really a match for what Minds has been. So it's not really a direct competitor.

A few others from time to time suggested that the other blogging sites (e.g., Wordpress and Blogger) would have been competitors. After all, Minds has for quite a while now had a overall fairly decent blog post function. But that wasn't quite the nature of the site.

The host of core features that Minds has or has tended to have make it a direct competitor to sites like Facebook, MeWe, VK, etc. These are integrationist newsfeed social media sites with a wide variety of uploading options for formats for primary original posts, ease of group creation, high or no character limits for posts and comments and "thread" formation, quick cross-posting capabilities, and no substantial playlist function. (Admittedly, Facebook has gotten into a minor playlist function in more recent months with its "add to your story" feature; and LinkedIn has over time become more like Facebook than the form of social media it once was, so a blending of types has tended to occur over time for at least some sites.)

With Minds's status as a direct competitor to Facebook, it is little wonder that Facebook tried to claim that links to articles and posts made on Minds were insecure, and that in some circumstances at some point, were not even allowed to be posted on Facebook, and in other circumstances, a demand to complete a captcha was required. Interestingly enough, Minds in its more recent form has added a captcha requirement to posting a blog post. Is this a bot problem?

Anyway, Minds needs to keep in mind their actual competition here. If Minds truly wants to challenge Facebook or gain a substantial portion of marketshare, it may need to do more and be more than merely a more pro-freedom of speech platform.

Now, Tony Seba is known for his lectures about technological and marketplace disruption. He has been on record about how those advances or innovations that are about ten times better than the previous thing tend to become disruptive in the marketplace. Examples of disruptive technologies that he prefers to point out include the internal combustion engine gas automobile (which replaced the horse and buggy for all but tourism and groups like the Amish) and the digital photography through DSLRs and smartphones (which have replaced the old analog photography that folks before Gen Z knew of and used quite a bit until the end of the 1990s). Despite my quibble about something needing to be "ten times better" to be disruptive (really, folks, three times better will do), the examples that Tony gives have practical functional superiority, increased efficiency, and or fewer negatives related to their use.

So the question comes: how can Minds have fewer negatives and such a practical functional superiority to its larger competitors that it truly begins to present itself as a serious challenge to them? It must take three steps forward without looking back.

Third, a bit about Minds

Once upon a time, users were rewarded on the site for uploading media, including photos and videos, under the points system that was in place. While this system might not have been the most profitable business model for Minds, it did genuinely incentivize the posting of images to the site. Having come onto Minds with an extensive user history already on Facebook, I was pleasantly surprised at the wide variety of quality photos that people were sharing on the site, including their own photos, and not too long after, I started uploading and boosting some of my own. (Thanks everyone who upvoted my popular flower and butterfly photos, by the way.) This rewarding for uploading feature that Minds had was something that its major competition did not have at the time (and most of which still do not have three years later). The sharing of such high quality photos was also something that I was not used to seeing from my Facebook friends at the time, though a couple of years later, there are a few who now do.

But where is that feature now? We get rewarded still for reminds and upvotes, but not for actually contributing media content to the site as such. While it is understandable why one might want to get rid of such a feature (as presumably owners of bot accounts could try to take advantage of it), the feature also served as one of those "virtuous circle" sort of activities that re-enforced the image-sharing communities on the platform. Of course, there are ways of mitigating the manipulation while still rewarding media content contribution as such: simply limit the quantity of media content uploads per day that actually contribute to one's points/token score. Say, if you exceed three image uploads in a day (or whatever the number may be that's most reasonably effective), you only get the points/tokens for three image uploads.

Once upon a time (and maybe still for you all not using canary as I post this), a user could put on his own personal channel at least eight (if not more--it's hard for me to remember at the moment) images that transitioned between each other, functioning as multiple simultaneous banners. But as I am using this updated layout on Minds, it looks like a step backward has occurred, with the lack of transitioning banners. The ability to upload multiple banners on one's own channel and have them transition in a timely manner was a feature of Minds superior to Facebook. Years later, Facebook still does not have this feature, instead allowing only one banner up at the top at any one given time.

Once upon a time, we had a strong influx of Vietnamese users into Minds. Then a disgruntled user (who also supported me on the site a bit) got fed up with reading posts in Vietnamese and started being rather vocal about it in such a way that it discouraged them from joining Minds. Rather than simply learn the lesson about such users creating chilling effects, Minds had an opportunity to take things to the next level and stopped short of actually doing it.

So then, what was the alternative solution to asking the person to quit creating the chilling effect? Minds could have increased the customization capability of the site, enabling users to turn on automatic translations of all posts in all foreign languages simultaneously, in such a manner as that the original text would simply read as though in the person's native language.

Now, obviously, this might not work so well with images that have texts in foreign languages, so there may be some limits to this. (However, Facebook itself stores metadata on popular memes that have texts in different languages, and that metadata can be in English and sometimes does include the wording that appears in the meme image. This brings to mind another option for increasing the customization capability for the site. Minds could have a closed captioning sort of option, in which users could submit their own metadata to go with their image uploads as a sort of closed captioning for the wording in those images or memes. Minds could then apply the automatic translation feature to that metadata and show that part of the metadata, so that even those who cannot read the memes in those foreign languages could still see or read the closed captioning of those meme images in their own native language.)

Once upon a time, Minds had some sort of targeted boosting system. This targeted boosting system was set up at the time by general topic.

Now, targeted boosting systems are features well within the domain of YouTube, Facebook, and other major interaction websites. They are a core feature for assisting advertisers of all stripes and sizes (from single entrepreneurs to chain restaurants to large corporations to political candidates and their supporters). It is a feature that the competition against Minds has that Minds (at the time I am reading this) does not have.

Once upon a time, Minds had analytics that its users could look at to get a good idea of how many interactions or impressions that they were having in the past five days and so forth. But for a while, that feature seemed like it was missing. Fortunately, Minds has brought back at least some version of analytics feature. In light of the analytics features of websites like YouTube Lexis Nexis, and Alexa, Minds should try to make that analytics section as robust and detailed as reasonably possible (while keeping user privacy intact as much as possible). Analytics must support advertising.

I have been a staunch supporter of a detailed customizable targeted boosting system for Minds that also respects the privacy wishes of its user base. If Minds set up a robust system that adhered to that, then it could be at least on par with if not superior to Facebook (since we all know Facebook doesn't give a rat's tail about the privacy of its user base). Minds can protect the privacy of its user base by being transparent with the way that the targeted boosting system works and then operating along those same lines in fact.

In other words, each individual user should be responsible for the level of anonymity and privacy of his own accounts on Minds (and should be responsible for whatever degree that he voluntarily submits actionable metadata directly to Minds that can be used for targeted boosting purposes.

For example, if I as a regular user am interested in nature photography as an interest, then I should be able to select that as an interest, and targeted boosting posts that are labelled (tagged) according to that interest should be prioritized as going to people like me. We had that sort of thing in place already when Minds experimented with targeted boosting as a result of me (and perhaps others) advocating for targeted boosting. It needed to get more specific with the details (i.e., have more options for interests), but it seemed like Minds was on the right track.

However, if I am doing an advertising function, I will likely want better targeting capability than simply by interest. Geography (the current city of residence of the potential customer), demography (age, gender, and maybe even race of the potential customer), political party affiliation, and stance on religion might also be important. But in order to maintain the degree of anonymity and privacy of the user base, all of those details (geography, demography, political party affiliation, stance on religion, and interests) must be OPTIONAL for submission, not required, and Minds must be transparent for how it will handle the information submitted.

Now, for an example, say someone is a small business owner, owning a small chain local restaurant like a couple of pizza chain restaurants in St. Louis, Missouri and Louisville, Kentucky that I have eaten in before. If that person wants to advertise through social media, that person is going to want geographically based targeted boosting. It makes little sense to advertise to someone in Cambodia about the best pizza in St. Louis.

And then there's restaurants like Cracker Barrel or Tim Horton's, which have traditionally been in certain regions of countries. If memory serves, back when I attended university, the southernmost Tim Horton's used to be around the Fort Knox area, while Cracker Barrel was known for its presence mainly south of there in the United States. So some businesses might want geographical targeted boosting based on states or regions of countries, not simply cities.

Wrapping It Up

Minds staff have been willing to experiment with a lot of layout and features changes in the site over the past three and a half years, more so than Facebook has and way, way more than what Twitter has. Minds even beat Facebook to the punch concerning multiple transitioning banners as well as a genuine dark mode for those using the social media site via PC.

But in the course of experimentation, it seems to me like a tail of "two steps forward, one step back." Some good ideas have come out of the staff themselves, as well as out of some of the feedback from its user base (and this goes beyond simply the suggestions that I have made). For at least a time, some of those good ideas seem to have been dropped.

But to truly challenge the competition, you've got to go toe-to-toe, and that means taking three steps forward (and not looking back). User interface customization capability can be a pain to code and may be expensive to do, but it is absolutely essential to being competitive in the social media marketplace.

Offering multiple layouts to users (even without a special status like Minds Plus) would be another way to increase the user interface customization capability. A handful or two of layout options should be sufficient here, aside from the option of color customized backgrounds, which should be its own feature for everyone. (Maybe one man's dark mode is a black background, while another man's is a deep purple, dark green, or navy blue.) Some users might like a more streamlined layout look or a simple one, while others might be fine with laying it all out there. (Keep in mind here, that I come from a PC perspective, not a smartphone one. But all layouts should be beta-tested.)

Thanks for reading,

Take care but not worry,

Sincerely,

StalemateIB (Z. E. Kendall)

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