Minds.com: The social network that pays you to be social using cryptocurrency, oh, and it's open source.

Having used the site for a week, this blog post summarizes my thoughts so far for Minds.com, an open sourced, and crypto backed social network that pays you to be social. Wonderful. Lets go!

I don’t often post about social networks, actually if you look back through my posts, I have never gone out of my way to recommend one in a dedicated post – until now. Needless to say – I’m excited about this one.

In the light of Google+ shutting down, I have taken to search the seas to see what exists that may be a good alternative investment of my time to fill that void in my life once it goes (I spent a lot of time and effort growing my network on that site). This is a little long but I wanted to leave a thorough review to give people options to consider.

My minimum criteria when looking for a new social home:

Easy to use (once set up)
Friendly community
Little spam and/or good moderation controls
Support for groups
Support for rich content in posts (images, videos)
Secure

So how does it stack up? I can honestly say not only does it meet all of my criteria above, and then some, it feels like the G+ I knew a few years ago but with a tonne of cool features G+ (and other social networks like Facebook etc) never had that they probably should have (more on that in a moment).

Screen shot of my new profile on Minds to get a taste for it:

I have already in my first 5 days met many wonderful people, like the good days on G+, sharing common interests, and it really does pay you for having meaningful conversations and interactions with people. And yes, I said pay.

What does it have that other big players don’t?

It actually pays you to use it. First of all lets talk about the crypto. Every time you have a unique interaction with someone on the site (eg share, like, comment, etc), it keeps track of this. To avoid spammers gaming the system its unique interactions both from and to people. So if I like 20 of person x’s posts, it counts as 1 interaction. That being said with my *tiny* following of about 50 people in my first week, I am getting about 5 tokens a day. Do the maths on that and assuming no growth in following (unlikely), and no growth in my activity on site (I haven’t posted half as much as G+), that works out to be 365 * 5 tokens a year give or take if you are daily active = 1825 tokens. Now tokens are linked to the crypto currency Etherium. Currently on the site you can buy (and convert) tokens at the exchange rate of about 1300 tokens ~= 1 ETH coin. So with this very limited usage I have potential to generate 1.4 ETH coins a year. Currently 1 ETH coin is worth around $200 USD (and in the past has been as high as ~$1000). Now I dont know about you but even at that exchange rate, that is better than anything Facebook has ever paid me for using their site.
You can offer rewards on your profile! Yes, you can offer custom rewards for tokens. Maybe you are willing to jump on a video call to discuss a topic you know about for 30 minutes for 100 tokens… Choice is yours. Love this. Gives your followers a way to get something more from you if they need it and a way to get something back for your time – just like Twitch and such that support real time donations etc.
Spending tokens. Using those tokens you earn you can currently boost your posts (much like paid advertising does on Facebook) to get 1000 views for 1 token. Sweet. This is of course how I assume they make money for people who want to actually pay to do this instead of waiting to accumulate tokens through activity. I have actually tried this and got very reasonable results vs FB etc.
Blogs. Yep, in addition to regular rich posts, they also support more lengthy in depth blog posts. Sure why not! Nice feature and adds to the ways people can interact and find you if you wanna go deep on a subject.
Open source. The thing that was even more epic is that this is all open sourced on GitHub so the people can actually contribute to make the site EVEN BETTER! This is amazing. Massive kudos for doing this and having an active set of founders and engineers who are keen to interact with the community.

Ok Jason, thanks for the cool aid but what’s bad about it?

Fear not my trusty friends. I found some room for improvement too but given its open source nature these things can be fixed or created pretty easily… Here we go:

Setting up your crypto wallet. This can be a bit daunting if you are unfamiliar with crypto. However if you take 5 mins to read it’s actually quite easy (and much friendlier than other crypto based sites I have seen in my years) – you can just install a Chrome / Firefox extension to manage all the tokens you will get one day. Technology these days! Still you have to remember to write down a few passphrases etc to ensure you never get locked out of that, and store it somewhere secure. But that is the only difference vs regular sites sign up. Ask me if confused!
Some features are not quite as mature. You know those things we take for granted now like drag and drop to upload an image to the post you are about to make. Doesn’t work right now, you have to click a button to attach a file much like you would in an email program from the 90’s. However once again, given the open source nature, I am sure this feature will come fairly fast. But just be kind that this is a new network and is constantly getting better.
You have to learn a slightly different UX. This is not a massive bad point, just that it requires a bit of willingness to change. The UX has actually grown on me a lot after giving it a fair chance the last week.

In summary

Overall, I am one very happy bunny, and curious to see where this adventure leads. Maybe it will fizzle out, but maybe it may just become the G+ / Facebook / insert your current social network here, that you always wanted. It has serious potential. Zuckerberg, should not be sleeping well at night, this has potential to be better than FB because it gives back to the people who use it and can be made better by the community through open source. Very very cool.

Let’s connect and try it out!

At the very least grab yourself a username. Feel free to connect with me over there and try it out below, and of course I can help you get started if confused.