Announcing Hashtags 2.0 and Rate Limits

Minds,

We have been listening carefully to all of your feedback and are excited to announce two updates that will improve the experience here even more!

1. Hashtags

One of the most requested features that Minds has been missing is the ability to filter through your feeds by tags or interests. We had the Trending Hashtags on the newsfeed, but we were not enabling people to use hashtags on their content, channels and groups as we should have been, so the results were limited to newsfeed posts only.

With the new update, you can now use hashtags for all of your posts, videos, images, blogs, and even your group or channel. This is a key step for us because it will now allow you to all discover content, channels or groups much faster based on specific hashtags. We highly recommend tagging your channel, groups and content to ensure that users can discover you faster based on the tags.

Once enough content is tagged properly, you will be able to filter through everything much easier. For example, you will now be allowed to quickly filter your feed so that you only see top videos about #technology, top channels about #art, and so on. Additionally, these tags will be able to be leveraged for Boost so that you can target your content to the right crowd. You can even filter your feed by multiple hashtags, such as viewing all images about #photography, #nature and #trees.

To personalize your top feeds, go to your newsfeed and click on “Top” in the upper left corner. Then you will be prompted to select which hashtags you would like to see more of. You can change these hashtags at any time, and your feed will pull only posts that have those tags. If you do not wish to use this, you can select #all and you will be given an unfiltered top feed.

The hashtags that you select will be displayed on your top bar, and your feed will be filled only with content from the hashtags that are highlighted. In the image above, the feed would contain only posts that are tagged with #art, #minds, #music, #myphoto and #nature. If you wish to view the feed for just one hashtag, make sure that you only have that specific hashtag highlighted. If you wish to view an unfiltered feed, click on #ALL.

Once enough content is tagged, we will apply this same tool for the top channels, videos, images, blogs and groups so you can quickly filter the feeds to view content specific to a hashtag (or hashtags) you are interested in.

It is likely that some users will try to abuse the hashtag system and will attempt to spam the feeds and mistag their content. We encourage all users to please report any users who are using the tags improperly so we can review. To prevent spam, you are only allowed a maximum of five tags per post.

2. Rate Limits

Many of you have noticed that there has been a large influx in spam accounts who are attempting to abuse the site’s features for personal gain. The strategy of these spam accounts has been to create bots and scripts so that their channel can vote, subscribe, comment and remind thousands of times per day. This allows them to infiltrate other user’s notifications, and many times results in a subscribe or vote back, which gives them token rewards.

We are introducing a new concept called “rate limits” in an attempt to slow down this type of behavior. What this means is that all user actions now have a time-based limit on them. When the limit is reached, the user is no longer allowed to perform that action for a set period of time. These limits should disincentivize the behavior we have been noticing as it will punish the accounts who are multiple offenders. Please provide feedback if you feel that any of the limits are too strict and are unfairly punishing the wrong people. It is a tough line to draw, so we are open to changing them as necessary.

The current rate limits are as follows:

Subscribe

- 50 per five minutes

- 200 per hour

- 400 per day

Upvote

- 150 per five minutes

- 1,000 per day

Downvote

- 10 per five minutes

- 100 per day

Comment

- 75 per five minutes

- 500 per day

When the rate limits are reached, the result is that the user will be restricted from doing that specific action for the respective time window. For example, if a user subscribes to 50 channels in 5 minutes, then they will be restricted from subscribing to anyone for 5 minutes. If a user downvotes 100 times in 24 hours, then they will be restricted from downvoting anyone for 24 hours.

We hope that you will share your feedback on these changes so that we ensure that they are benefiting the Minds community at large!

The Minds Team