Why people like me won't feel welcomed here
Most people on Minds subscribe to the ideology of privacy, uncensored posts and crypto-based monetary exchanges.
Steem (now Hive) shared the same principles and failed to conquer big market shares due to the extreme complexity of its blockchain and rewards system.
Minds is doing things better. They started to realize that locking out Minds from social gathering platforms and stores (like the Google Play Store) was a bad move, since it hurted our growth too much at this point in time.
But there's something else that blocks people like me to move here. Let me explain by sharing my personal story on decentralized networks.
About Me
I'm a 21 years old LGBT activist. I've been involved in LGBT associations since I was 14, I participated in 20+ pride parades, and I'm married to a chinese boy. We've been happily married for 2 years thanks to civil unions in Italy, my country.
Giant social medias like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Linkedin always stood up to defend minorities, including gay and trans people that constantly feel left out in work spaces and family gatherings.
That's why platforms like TikTok, even if centralized, give birth to amazing talents, great communities and diverse ideologies.
Now... I have thick skin. I can read all the hateful comments on Minds about LGBT people, about our agenda, and other nonsense about how trans people will ruin America.
But most people can't. Because they've been discriminated against all life long, and they subsribe to social media to feel accepted - not rejected (again).
Content Distribution on Minds
We can't pretend people like me (often called "leftists crybaby" or something like that here) subscribe here and spend 5+ days blocking people, subscribing to interesting channels and commenting on great stuff in order to let their feeds shape their interest.
I get it: Minds does not collect data to give people a privacy-focused network with no filter bubble. But we need to give people a way to quickly find what they're looking for, whether it is racist stuff or LGBT loving groups.
At the moment, the only supported channels on my right sidebar are people that subscribed to Minds because their hateful content would be banned from any other platform. And that's bad if we want to reach mass migration.
What I would do is create an introductory survey asking people what type of content they would like to see. Then, they should have 2 tabs on the main feed "your world" and "outside world".
By doing this, people can DECIDE when they want to expose themselves to criticism and when they want to relax a bit.
Sharing thoughts is amazing and deep conversations should happen all day long. But we have to defend the right to laziness and relax. Everyone needs a break sometimes, and Minds should have a way to obtain that peace of mind.
Content Monetization on Minds
There's two reason why people distribute their videos on Youtube instead of LBRY or Minds.com.
People and ads. I'll talk about people in the next paragraph, but give me a minute of your time to talk about ads.
We all hate them.
I'm a Marketer, and I'd love to do ad-less marketing. It would feel more genuine, interesting and deep.
But Ads are simple to understand. If someone subscribes to Youtube to make money, he/she will understand the retribution model of the platform in 1 hour or less.
People watch your videos. You get paid. Arrive at 70$ or more and we'll send you a check.
While Minds work on the blockchain, and the documentation is very, very, technical.
I consider myself a fairly nerdy guy. I know a bit about programming, my favourite thing about marketing is data analysis and content creation and I always supported new decentralized platforms because I crave to find a way to remunerate people to learn.
It's always been my dream.
In order to do this, we NEED to have a simple documentation for newbies. It seems like most decentralized platforms have never seen a medium social network user. YOUR definition of "simple" is way different than a 45-years old Facebook user's definition.
Mass Migration
People don't join a new Social Network because there's more privacy in it. 90% of the World clearly don't care about it.
People join new socials because:
1) They want to explore new content types (TikTok)
2) They want to chat with their friends (Messenger, WhatsApp)
3) Their friends are in it sharing personal stuff (Facebook, Twitter)
4) They want to find new opportunities (Linkedin)
5) They give quick ways to reach new audience (Pinterest)
Minds can give users new content types (monetization) and a beatiful way to reach new people with tokens you can earn on the platform or buy for pennies on the dollar.
But we need more. Most times social networks attract mass migrations because teenagers use them, and there's nothing on Minds that would attract teenagers.
Teenagers have way more time than any adult and they share stuff everyday. Minds doesn't have fun content types and it doesn't have their friends.
So, what should we do in my opinion?
First of all, I don't think Minds can become the next Facebook. We will likely never reach 2 billions users - and that's not important.
What we should reach is a critical mass that enables us to sustain ourselves, let great creators earn a decent wage from Minds alone and create amazing communities.
I think a great number of users to achieve all of that would be 200 to 500 millions. Pinterest is doing great with 350 millions.
In order to achieve that result, we need to solve all the problems listed on this article:
- we need more types of innovative content
- we need a simpler documentation on how to monetize content
- we need a relax zone where people like me don't feel constantly angry or discriminated, without censorship
- we need more support staff (I applied but they didn't answer! :P)
- we need to create case studies on succesful Minds users
- we need to create more groups to gather similar minds
- we need to promote Minds on other social networks and rewards people that share blog articles wrote on Minds
BONUS: we need to create a recurrent affiliate program to let people earn when someone purchase a plus or pro plan. This would mean earning 5-10$ per month for each users, and marketing will run here to claim this opportunity.
Conclusion
I'm an outsider here. But I like the concept and I'm surely going to stay here with you exploring Minds.
But please, take into consideration what I just said. I'm young but I've seen Yours, Bitlanders, Steemit, CamTV, dTube, ecc fail to gather a critical mass of users, and I think the reasons mentioned in this article are the problems they ignored.
Let's build a better Social Network for all of us!