Minds | Flaws | Improvement ideas?
I have been using Minds almost a month now and although at first glance I was amazed how perfect the site seemed, I have started to notice some things I feel it lacks of. One of the major reasons why I am writing this post is the lack of a place for the community to share feedback or ideas.
More official help & support?
Luckily I havent had problems with my Minds account or anything that I needed help with, but then again there have been a bunch of questions about Minds that I would like to get an answer to. But where? From who? If you click on your profile image upper right, it holds a Help & Support link which leads you to a Minds Group with the same name.
I honestly haven't understood if that group is official or not. It should be, because it is listed and linked to from an official place, but I have never seen any "staff" members help people there. It's just a group where people can ask for help, but they need to wait for answers from regular community members like me who officially couldn't know whether their answer is correct or not. There are so many answers based on "what I have figured" or "how I've understood," but it seriously lacks of getting answers from someone who should know 100% what the answer is.
There is also a way to send an to [email protected], but I don't know if someone will answer support questions by mailing it. If the Help & Support link is found under your profile image menu, I think it's the place where you should be able to get help and support from official Minds team members (or their support team).
Who's on the team?
That leads us to team members overall. Who's in it? Who helps run and develop Minds? I doubt that Bill Ottman does it alone. I agree that I don't have to know all the members, but there is zero transparency over who helps to manage this awesome site. Top 10 team members (managers) are almost always listed on such company pages and for me specifically it's good to know that sort of information. Best if you can find information about all the members of the company.
If Minds lacks a team member, they could easily recruit those from the community itself. Maybe even get someone to work on the Help & Support group or a standalone Support page.
Community get-together / team?
Maybe it's just me, but I like to get together with the communities, especially on the blockchain dApps. Almost every dApp has a community chatting somewhere, be it Discord, Telegram or someplace else (Steemit has an official Steem.chat for example). I get that Minds groups could be used for such gatherings, but lets be honest, you just cant compare posting and commenting with real-time chatting.
You see what I mean? Just some place where people can chat, ask for help, advice, meet others etc without promoting posts or anything. It would be awesome if such a place was ran by an official team member, but I have also given a thought of starting such a thing up myself.
Who would like this idea to get real? Should I do it?
Homepage
One more thing I'd like to see is a better homepage holding all the information. I feel that Minds absolutely lacks such a thing right now. I know it's supposed to be like Twitter, where you enter the site and you get tossed right into the posts and stuff that's going on, but it has official information pages still. Like About, Team, Careers, Documentation, etc.
Where is about.minds.com? Where is blog.minds.com? I don't know, ANYTHING. Give me anything! Make your information stand out better. I know Minds has a looooong FAQ list, but let's be honest, information that is held in there could be used way more comfortably for the user to observe.
More blog catecories
As a blogger who just likes to ramble and not write about any specific topic I feel the blog categories lack of Lifestyle, Entertainment and Personal options. I consider myself as a personal blogger for example, because I write about my thougts about whatever comes to mind and I have never been able to categorize my blog posts well into given categories. Am I currently writing about Animals? Or is it Politics? Am I Educating someone right now? No.. I am just someone expressing my opinions and thoughts and therefore I feel there should be some category where this post could fit it... Help me!
AND
What's with the founder Bill Ottman reminding completely random posts though? No offence to anyone who's post has been reminded, but I personally would expect more professional behaviour from the founder. I would expect him to share his improvement ideas or update notes or anything interesting, new and upcoming features about the site. He is the man who should be interesting to subscribe to, but I don't really follow the stability in the content he reminds. It's just too random.
BUT THEN AGAIN I understand that he is just a human too who is allowed to share all sorts of content he finds amusing, entertaining or interesting to him. It's his feed. So maybe he should still open up an official Minds account instead? There is an account @minds for example, but it isn't very active. It should be way more active then and post all sorts of updates and interesting articles from all around the web about Minds.
My five cents.
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Let me know your thoughts on those things!
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