Revamping Reminds & The Momentum of Conversations

Today (11/16/20) we have begun to roll-out an overhaul of how the “Remind” tool functions on Minds. The purpose of this blog is to explain the changes and gather feedback from the community. We originally announced this plan back in July, and are psyched to finally bring it to fruition.

So what is a "Remind"?

For those who do not know what a Remind is, it is the feature on Minds for you to share what someone else has already posted. You may choose to add commentary or not. 

Now, with this update, all Reminds with no additional text added will carry over ALL of the engagement from the original post, including votes, views, comments and Remind counts. The channel that created the original post will receive 100% of the rewards for engagement on this type of Remind. This has been a highly requested feature for over 5 years and we believe this change will propel conversations with a new level of momentum.

In the prior system many conversations were limited in their ability to grow. The creator of the post could be totally unaware of others commenting on their content reminded by someone else. We didn't necessarily do this deliberately. It was more-so one of those quirks in the way the development happened. Additionally, we noticed a trend of people "remind hijacking" original content in order to gain tokens. This update solves both issues.

What is "Quote Post"?

Conversely, now, all Reminds with added commentary will be treated as an entirely new post, called a "Quote Post", and will not carry over any engagement from the original post. These types of Reminds will not be eligible to earn any token rewards in order to prevent remind hijacking. The original creator will earn rewards for both Reminds and Quote Posts of their content. 

Because of the way Reminds have functioned up to this point, the simplest and most effective way to handle legacy Reminds is to treat them as Quote Posts. This means that there will be no rewards for these in any scenario.

Other updates:

- You can now schedule Quote Posts to be posted at a later date

- We now utilize nested links to account for multiple layers of Quote Posts

- You can now remind Minds+ posts

Conclusion

We envision many benefits arising from this updated system. The end result in theory will be much more discussion on viral posts in the comment threads, the ability to ‘Quote Post', more rewards for the people who deserve them, and no more post hijacking.

Please feel free to share any feedback in the comment section below!

The Minds Team

Note: The updates are currently live on minds.com, but won't be available on the mobile app until version 4.6. Until then, Reminds done on minds.com will not appear on mobile at all (we know it is slightly awkward). Reminds initiated on mobile will be treated as a "Quote Post". 

We will soon be adding a new metric on posts to track Quote Posts as distinct from Reminds, so don't worry you are being credited and the metrics will update once this goes live. Additionally, a feed will be available to display a list of all the Quote Posts of your content. 

Also, we still need to update the Remind function WITHIN blogs to mirror these changes. So, if you are reading this, we recommend you Remind the post from the feed as opposed to the blog itself. 

Banner image credit to Elton Yung