Minds - First Steps

This blog is intended as a short and snappy introduction into some first steps to take when you sign up to Minds. I have also begun writing a series of blogs that goes beyond the basics to discuss some deeper concepts around Minds, its principles, and how it works. Click here to see the Introductory post and go beyond basics, otherwise, continue on. 

Verify with Phone Number

If you wish to earn Minds tokens, you need to verify your account with a phone number. This allows you to share your content with more users, as well as support content creators you like by "wiring" them your tokens. 

You can use minds without using tokens. But it's not nearly as fun. Please note, giving your number to Minds is not really a security issue as it's treated like a password. It's only stored on the Minds server in "hashed"(read: encrypted) form. Unlike Facebook information, it is not used for advertising or data collection purposes. If you are still worried about giving your phone number to Minds, read this article from another Minds user who explains it well.

To verify your phone number, click the "wallet" icon at the upper right of the screen, this is the button that looks like a kind of simple Roman architecture(I'm not too sure why they use this icon). After you have clicked this icon, you should see a button that says "addresses" in the lower-right, you may have to scroll down screen to find the button. This will lead you to verifying with a phone number. This is a necessary security feature to make the token system more difficult to cheat for bad actors. For ease of reference, you can also follow this link.

Fill out some profile information

Click the circular icon in the upper right, then click "View Channel" in the drop-down menu, this takes you back to your own profile. Look for the pencil icon on the left hand side of the screen to edit information on your profile. You can put whatever you like here: links, hobbies, music, blogs you like, information about yourself that you don't mind being public.

Unlike Facebook you are not required to add things like age, sex, or gender, and you don't get prompts/hints, empty spaces that keep hinting that they want to know more information such as workplace, education, hobbies etc. You can just add anything you like here.

Get Active

Search for channels, videos, images, blogs, and groups that you enjoy. Each of these tabs along with a search bar can be found in the toolbar at the top of the page. Enter your search term there, then click your choice of these tabs to find content that interests you.

When you find some content that you like, "upvote" the content, comment your thoughts on the content, and "remind" the content. The "remind" button is a little icon which has two arrows on it. This is the Minds equivalent of a Facebook "share" or a Twitter "retweet". Doing these things lets users know that you exist and will often result in them also subscribing to you.

Spend Some Tokens

Just to get the idea of how the system works, once you have some tokens, spend them. You will only have tokens once you have received enough upvotes, subscribes, reminds, and wires, from other users. Once you have these tokens, you can either wire them to others to encourage them to create more content, or you can use them to "boost" your own content.

A boost is basically the Facebook equivalent to a paid advertisement and displays your content to more users.This is a nice feature that essentially puts users and businesses on the same level. The ability to "wire" tokens to other users makes Minds a little bit like Patreon. Everybody is a user, everybody is a content creator, and everybody is an advertiser.

Conclusion

That's it! Minds is fun, can be addictive and its privacy model is much better than Facebooks, and it respects its users as content creators. An added bonus is that the tokens should soon be directly tradeable with real cryptocurrency. It really is a social network for the modern world. Please leave comments if you have more questions or you would like me to write about something in the future. ☺

If you have completed all these tasks, consider reading my Minds - In Depth series to go beyond the basics.