Design refresh! Why activity posts look different, and how you can help

Hello, Minds.

You've probably seen the new updated activity post design we just rolled out to the web app. We want to share some information about the changes, what motivated the new design, show off what it enables in the future, and talk about how you can help us continually improve Minds.

Let's start with why – what's the motivation behind this new look? Early this year, we were looking at two major motivations that steered us toward the current new design.

• We get a lot of feedback that posts on Minds are too large and take up a lot of vertical screen space. People commonly want to see a lot at once, and our old post design made that difficult. There were two main culprits: One, redundant padding and borders around posts, and two, media with tall aspect ratios like vertical videos and memes. Unlike some other social sites, Minds doesn't restrict which aspect ratio you can upload, so tall videos and images are welcome here. But with the old designs, that meant activity posts could be tall… Sometimes very tall. Not only did it reduce the ability to have more posts in view, some posts wouldn't even fit onto the screen at all!
   
• Secondly, we want to move toward replacing comments with reply posts. Comments are great, but the current system keeps discussion siloed and hard to find. We think that using reply posts in place of our current comments system will improve discourse on Minds, enabling more virality and monetization with commentary. You could re-mind replies, it'll be easier to find your old comments, you could Supermind from the comments, and a host of other benefits make reply posts an obvious direction we want in the future. But with the infinite height of our old design, it wasn't viable to move in this direction. The new post design enables us to make this move when it's time.

In the background, we've been working on the new design for months, and it's enabled us to build things like multi-image posts and the upcoming Superminds monetization feature. Multi-image posting is a feature the community asked for, and it integrates beautifully with the new compact posts and reduced border clutter. I'll more formally announce multi-image posts in the very near future, when it's available globally. Supermind is also coming shortly, and will enable creators of any size to get paid for their expertise. You can read more about Supermind in this dev blog update, or stay tuned for our launch in the coming weeks.

The new post design has been in Canary for a while, during which time we got feedback and fixed bugs. But as with any big change, there's going to be more discovered when it hits the wider Minds community. That happens this week, and your help and feedback is crucial. If you encounter issues with the new design, or simply want to voice an opinion about how it's better or worse for your personal uses, please share! Make a post with the hashtag #betterminds. We're watching it, and where needed we'll reach out for more information. Big changes like this are never one-and-done – your feedback will help us make it successful.

Cheers,

The Minds Team