Minds.com, a new social media site recently launched its own cryptocurrency on the Ethereum test net. Members of the website can earn tokens in exchange for interacting with the site and creating content. While other social media sites like Facebook jealously hoard your data and give you nothing in return, Minds.com doesn’t track you and even pays you in return for participating and making the website more lively. In this article, we’re going to go over what Minds.com is and how you can join it to earn cryptocurrency for yourself
What is Minds.com?
Minds.com is an exciting new social media platform that aims to provide a real alternative to sites like Twitter and Facebook. The site was created in many ways as a response to the recent bouts of censorship and data mining that other social media websites have been engaged in for years now. Sites like Facebook and Twitter track everything we do, and then sell all of our information to advertisers.
Not only that, but Facebook and especially Twitter have been caught actively engaging in censorship of ideas that are against their strongly left-leaning and politically correct standings. The same is true of YouTube, which has been actively waging a censorship campaign against the conservative right of center educational channel Prager University.
In response to this blatant and overt censorship, Minds.com was created with the intent that no legally protected speech would be censored or subverted. The site itself has no specific political bias and opinions from all sides of the spectrum are welcomed and encouraged. Additionally, Minds.com does not engage in active user tracking or in selling personal data to advertisers. More so, Minds.com is largely immune to the types of major data breaches seen by Facebook with the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Minds.com is joined by a few other new social media pioneers that have an emphasis on or at least a connection to the cryptocurrency world, including Steemit, Yours.org, and Gab.ai. The goals of these websites in many cases are not to outright replace the existing social media networks, but instead to offer an alternative so that if people want to leave, they can do so.
Minds.com is headed by CEO Bill Ottman who recently did a spate of interviews with well-known free speech proponents like Tucker Carlson of Fox News and Dave Cullen of Computing Forever.
Getting started with Minds.com
Minds.com is very easy to use and get started on. It also offers a full mobile experience on both Android and iOS. To begin, all you’ll need to do is create an account on the sign-up page and provide a phone number. According to the site, phone numbers are never kept or shared, and are instead only used as a means of preventing spam bot sign-ups. Only a hash of phone numbers are kept.
Once you set your username and password, you are ready to go to start earning cryptocurrency rewards for using the site, as well as for posting messages, writing blogs, and sharing videos and pictures.
Earning Minds Tokens
To earn tokens on the platform, all you need to do is perform almost any normal action that one would do on a social media site. For instance, you can make a post, like or dislike something, share a photo, upload a video, or write a blog post. You can also “remind” something, which is like re-posting or re-tweeting, that you found on the site to your own feed. Earning tokens on the site is so simple that even just logging into your profile page on a browser or on the mobile app counts as a check in and can earn you cryptocurrency.
Now let’s talk about how the rewards are determined.
Each action that you make on the site is worth a different number of points. These points are then added up to your daily contribution total. Simple actions like checking your feed or uploading something are only worth a small amount of points. Conversely, contributing content like sharing a link or writing a blog post are worth more.
At the end of each day, everyone’s point totals are added up and you are given a percentage based on the total number of points that you earned in comparison to everyone else on the site. Then, you will be given a daily token payout that is equal to the total amount given out to the network each day divided by the percentage of points that you contributed. In other words, if you were to contribute a lot of actions on a slow day, you would get more tokens than you would by contributing the same amount on a busy day. In our tests with the site, we found that doing at least a couple actions each day would get somewhere between 0.1 and 0.03 tokens per day.
Here’s what the last couple days looked like in our test account. Note that there were several days in between where we didn’t use the service at all and thus didn’t get any tokens for the day.
The Minds.com token
So what are these tokens for, and what are they worth? Currently, Minds.com is still running on the Rinkey test net, and so it’s proper ERC-20 tokens have not yet been created. The company plans to announce when they will go live on the main net sometime soon. Further, any tokens earned on the test net should be automatically exchanged one-for-one to the main net tokens once the launch is complete.
Currently, Minds.com tokens can be used to boost any post or content shared to the site. Boosting is basically like promoting or advertising your content with high priority to all users that might be interested in it. One token can be used to boost a post for up to 1000 impressions. In this case, an impression means that your post will appear in the feed of at least 1000 people. This does not, however, mean that 1000 people will click through and read your blog post or link, so keep that in mind.
What’s interesting about this is that if you post interesting enough content and boost it, you can actually earn back the token you spent to boost your post and perhaps even earn a positive net profit if your content was well-received enough. Having more subscribers that like and remind your posts can also increase your earnings on the platform.
The site even offers a Patreon-style feature where fans of yours can unlock premium content by directly sending you tokens through a process called a wire. Additionally, token wires can just be sent as a tip of sorts through the network without needing to pay transaction fees.
As the tokens are currently test net only, it’s difficult to say exactly what their monetary value is or will be. Minds.com was not always using tokens to facilitate its transactions and instead previously relied on a points system. In those days, a single 1000 impression boost would cost 1000 points. Further, 1000 points could be purchased for one dollar. This suggests that the current batch of tokens will possibly be valued at around one dollar each. At least, that is the estimate based on what a Minds.com token can currently be used for. What the open market will think of them once they are available may be another story entirely.
Conclusion
Having used Minds.com for a few months, we can say that the service is indeed highly polished and easy-to-use. It offers essentially all the features of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all together in one neat package. However, we found that without boosting posts, posted content will get only a handful of views at best as it is still difficult for users to discover new content that isn’t boosted. Boosting is quite easy though, and in many cases free (assuming that you use tokens that were earned instead of bought). This does level out the playing field to some degree.
Minds.com is definitely a work in progress, but with its values of free speech put front and center, as well as its innovative integration of cryptocurrency, Minds.com could stand to be an interesting and fully functional alternative to the overly intrusive and highly censorial platforms that we have today.