The Unofficial Minds Newsletter Issue #6
Orbo 1.0 makes a return to the banner! Remember to thank our friendly neighborhood @Drawzooka for providing us with our mascot!
The Goings-On of Yestermonth
We Can Now See Who Else Subs to This Page
The first of a couple small new features is the addition of a little blurb on other profiles that tells you if anyone you know is a mutual subscriber. There’s not really much to say about this, but it’s nifty nonetheless. Now we can see if we have any friends subbed to that Dogfarts On Ice page and out them for the weirdos they are >:)
Minds Sent an Email
This was a hot button topic a couple weeks back. I want to start by emphasizing that this idea is not a bad one, it was just executed… not so well. Minds has begun sending out newsletters featuring a variety of accounts that they’ve decided to spotlight. As I said, good in theory, but the problem was that of the six accounts mentioned, five were twitter cross posters accounts who have zero genuine presence on the platform. The only one who wasn’t was a small art account, @nine2five , who is a game dev and a pixel artist, so please go show him some support.
I’ve already done my part shouting in the admin’s ears about this slip up, but “they’re popular” is the main answer. According to sources, it was the most clicked email they’ve ever sent. Which is hilarious because the one guy who wasn’t just a popular kid, didn’t even know he was in the email at all and got very few new subs from it. …Oops, I guess.
But there is some hope to be had, because there is also a place to go to suggest channels for spotlighting in future emails: https://mindsdotcom.typeform.com/channel-noms
The Dance of the Jiggle
I am… way more excited about this that I probably should be, but LET ME HAVE THIS, OKAY? The upvote button now does a happy little jiggle dance when you click on it, and this was a feature I never knew I wanted until it became a thing. That being said… it also completely broke the comments section for a short while, but it looks like everything is back in working order now.
What’s Coming
Superminds
Oh boy.
I would like to preface this by saying that this feature in and of itself is a good one for regular, consistent users of the site, since it could provide an extra, neat little way to earn some tokens. However… cross posting was specifically mentioned.
Y’all know about the cross poster problem, since it’s been the big hot topic to complain about recently. If you’re under a rock, cross posting refers to the ability we all have to sync twitter accounts with Minds and anything posted on birdsite will also be posted to Minds. Good in theory, but in practice, the majority of big name accounts (ie Tulsi Gabbard, The Quartering, Tim Pool, etc) treat Minds like the red-headed stepchild and are all too busy living it up on twitter to even give us the time of day. Not only are these accounts about as interactive as a cardboard cutout, they’re siphoning precious tokens from our pool.
After some very ominous foreshadowing from one of the admins when I gave him an earful about it, I ran across this while researching for this newsletter. They’ve drafted up the concept of “Superminds”, and at the core of it is… drum roll please… boost offers.
No, really. Boost offers. That feature that most of you probably do not know even exists. The gist of how it works is, someone will send over a post that they wanna boost through you. You can either accept or reject it, and that’s about the extent of my knowledge. The devs plan to dust it off and fix it up, and use it as incentive to get those cross posters to actually use the platform: “By giving audiences the option to attach monetary incentives to their questions, they can increase the chances of getting time from the creators, as it enables creators to monetize their time. We can align these incentives with tools that create a unique value prop on Minds for both audiences and creators.”
I can immediately spot several glaring issues, and yes, I will be going over each of them, because giving the devs crap is half the reason this newsletter exists.
- Pay to Win. Seriously? So now instead of just engaging with these accounts, we pay for senpai to notice? Now look, I get it that this is kinda taking on the same vibes as YouTube’s superchat function, and like I said at the start, for normal users, this is kinda nifty. But it completely overlooks the entire core of the problem: *they aren’t on the platform to begin with.* So asking people to pay to increase their chances of being heard is up a mouse’s rectum anyway, and I highly doubt that a few extra token incentives is gonna be attractive enough to pry them away from their twitter addiction.
- No one knows what boost offers are. I had no idea they even existed until just a couple weeks ago when someone else pointed them out, and I still have no clue how it works aside from people send them and I can accept or reject. Minds is gonna need to do some serious educating here. Though to their credit, this is one of the big issues the devs have underlined.
- The core of the cross post problem. I mentioned it already, but this is a truly complex issue. Why do these cross post accounts bother us so much? Because they post on twitter and not Minds. Why are they posting on twitter? Because that’s where the audience is and where the dopamine is. Minds is completely forgotten. And the “well they don’t have time to answer everyone” excuse ain’t gonna work. Why? We aren’t asking them to answer everyone. In fact, them never commenting back or engaging at all is just an example of the behavior of a typical absent cross poster. Not only do they not reply, they also don’t sub to anyone, RM anything, or upvote. Hell, they don’t even block. It’s all radio silence. Zero activity. No signs of life anywhere. The account is more shallow than a puddle of pee. Only a distant echo from the Ghost of Birdsite Present, floating on a breeze of a cyberspace fart. Are a few extra tokens for a boost offer going to be enough to drag them away from birdsite to interact on Minds? Big X.
Boosting
Now that I’ve dumped all over the devs, let’s lighten the mood with some praise. Boosts have been broken for a good while now, and no one is really sure how to address the issue. But it seems like the Minds Team has an idea that could be beneficial: targeted boosts.
The big problem going on is that there are far too many posts waiting in the queue than there are eyeballs to view them. The reason for this exists on both sides. Spam accounts and high ego users love to clog the queue with garbage that no one wants to see, and people just trying to scroll without being inflicted with bleeding-eye syndrome block them. Some have even gone as far as blocking anyone who boosts at all, or using an adblocker to filter out the code.
Obviously we can’t just leap straight to filtering out the crap, since boosting is supposed to be accessible to everyone (except porn, before someone inevitably brings up the “muh porn is free speech” argument, because having porn smeared all over the site would get Minds in SERIOUS trouble with big brothers Apple and Google, and besides, looking at porn makes you big gay anyway), so what might just be a good way to navigate this?
Targeting. Allowing users to select a specific audience to show their posts to who would be more interested as opposed to the general userbase as a whole. This way, certain posts are only going to certain demographics and not cluttering up places they probably don’t need to be.
Multi-Image Post Progress
Well, it’s slow, but it’s there. At the moment it’s really a lot more blank checklists than anything else, but this hasn’t been forgotten by the powers that be. At this point in time it’s likely not gonna look like much is happening on our side because a lot of work has to be done on the backend in order to support the function. In the meantime, we all need to continue shouting at them about it and let them know we want this feature and we want it yesterday.
Community Happenings
Reading challenge
Well the Summer Reading Challenge has come to a close, and big thanks to the two people who took part. Yup. Two. So big thanks to @molly_b and @amyisgreat20 for their contributions. (They’re also Minds Authors workin hard to help fight the culture war and keep us normal people in good, non-woke reading material, so please go support them). …And I guess @shinichihaku…who reviewed his own books… you cheater cheater pumpkin eater.
So F in the chat for the event not going the greatest, but I don’t see this as a defeat, however cursed the whole thing tried to be. It probably won’t be the end of my trying to organize things for the community. I mean… someone has to keep you all rallied, even if I’m about as experienced in event organizing as a labrador piloting a spaceship, and the site these days is quieter than an amoeba toot.
Tomas the Kraken Closes in on the Finish Line
After a long journey, @neutronboar’s art game Tomas the Kraken is closing in on the finish line. Tomas captured many hearts around the Mindscape, and I’m sure also netted Boar a nice bounty of tokens. But it’ll soon be time to bid our deep sea fren farewell as we reach the last leg of his journey. So make sure you get your requests in while you can, and make the story as good as it can be!
Some Fun Weekly Tags
I’m gonna wrap this up by leaving y’all with a small collection of weekly hashtags that have been popping up as time goes on. Aside from the beloved #FridayMemeWar, we’ve also got #WhitePillWednesday and #WholesomeSunday now. And no, they’re not quite the same. While #Wholesome Sunday is more generalized in its theme, allowing a wide variety of feel-good content, #WhitePillWednesday is there specifically to counter some of the blackpilled doomer crap we have to endure with posts meant for restoring our faith in humanity and bringing some hope and good vibes back into our lives. Cuz seriously… nobody likes a Negative Nancy.
Happy posting!