Slashdot Mirror
Interviews: Ask Social Network Minds.com CEO and Founder Bill Ottman a Question
As you may have noticed, Facebook is not cool anymore. The social juggernaut has been mired in controversies -- infamous privacy scandals or the company's ruthless "grow fast and break things" approach to gain users, to name a few. Luckily enough, some people are trying to build new social networks and are coming up with interesting original ideas. Minds.com is one such social network.
The open source social network, which has been operational since 2012, works on a point-earning/exchange system to give users full control over the reach of their posts. One of the complaints people have with Facebook and Twitter is that they feel their posts are not being seen by all of their friends. Minds.com lets users earn points and then trade those points to boost their posts on the platform. Users earn tokens by being active on the platform and engaging in uploading, voting, commenting and other similar activities. They can then use these tokens, which can be exchanged within the platform, to boost the reach of their posts. The company last year launched a cryptocurrency reward program based on the ethereum blockchain for all users on the platform. Minds says it does not determine what should be censored. Users are free to post whatever they want. (You can follow us on Minds.)
We are excited to announced that Minds founder and chief executive Bill Ottman has agreed to do an interview with us. If you have a question about Minds.com for him or his take on the current social networking space, feel free to ask it in the comments section below.
The open source social network, which has been operational since 2012, works on a point-earning/exchange system to give users full control over the reach of their posts. One of the complaints people have with Facebook and Twitter is that they feel their posts are not being seen by all of their friends. Minds.com lets users earn points and then trade those points to boost their posts on the platform. Users earn tokens by being active on the platform and engaging in uploading, voting, commenting and other similar activities. They can then use these tokens, which can be exchanged within the platform, to boost the reach of their posts. The company last year launched a cryptocurrency reward program based on the ethereum blockchain for all users on the platform. Minds says it does not determine what should be censored. Users are free to post whatever they want. (You can follow us on Minds.)
We are excited to announced that Minds founder and chief executive Bill Ottman has agreed to do an interview with us. If you have a question about Minds.com for him or his take on the current social networking space, feel free to ask it in the comments section below.
Is anybody here really looking for a new social media site to join, or are they more likely looking for ways to cut it out of their lives?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
users earn points and then trade those points to boost their posts on the platform.
Karma points will have a real effect and people will soon find a way to trade them for real money. People with loadsamoney will then arrive and use this black market to gain influence.
Users earn tokens by being active on the platform and engaging in uploading, voting, commenting and other similar activities
Power Users earn loadsatokens by spamming reposted crap from reddit/4chan/facebook, and then adding a sprinkling of top voted comments from previous reposts and finally brigading the shit out of it with voting bots.
Power Users will then convert tokens into money with sponsorships or just plain old grift.
Question: How are you going to sell a combination of microtransactions (i.e. points) and social media, two least consumer-friendly trends in tech, to users? Do you think we are that stupid?
I have shifted my social media use to nearly only read-only. I keep up on family news, and the various organizations I volunteer for.
Old posts are toxic - ask any politician. Today it's the poorly thought out, poorly worded tweet. In the future, how many of your comments-to-comments and "like" clicks will be mined and used against you?
You can't have an out of context comment used against you if you never post it. [[finger tapping on head meme here]]
How many monthly or daily active users does Minds have?
How does minds make money? Is it hoping the cost of the token will go up?
Does Minds.com use their own token? If so what is the name of it?
Minds.com sounds like a good idea. What kind of reception are you seeing from users? I have one more question: What's the philosophy behind this points based system?
The problem I see with many startups and companies these days is that they have a good idea and strong principles. But eventually the big shark in their category buys them. What would you do if Facebook offered you a billion dollar tomorrow?
What differentiates Minds.com from Steemit?
The philosophy is neoliberalism or "market fetishism". That is to say, believing markets have properties that they don't actually have.
Internet comments don't work according to market dynamics. Money from outside of the ecosystem will flood the system with commercial spam.
Subjectively "good" comments which are insightful, interesting, funny, even subversive or anti-establishment, aren't commercially valuable.
Isn't this basically just Reddit with crypto?
What will prevent Minds.com from becoming the next facebook? I mean do you have things or procedure or guideline in place to prevent your site to become a Capitalist dominated data aggregation tool for those who have money to use as a tool to control/subdue the mass? What will prevent minds of being taken over by a CA or Board that will dictate new rules aimed at making minds the next facebook?
It seems like Minds incentivizes Quantity over Quality, at the end of the day. I can see how Quality can be beneficial, but what de-incentivizes someone from pumping out tons of quantity in order to achieve the same rewards?
I've never heard of you before. Who are you?
Did you know about Slashdot's comment moderation and meta-moderation system? Did it inspire Minds moderation/incentive system at all?
I've noticed that most new social media platforms based on crypto tend to attract crypto people. Steemit for example is so cryptoed up there's almost no one talking about anything else - and that drives people away.
Minds, so far I've liked, it doesn't appear to be a crypto fanatic hangout like other crypto based sites are, but it still has the issue that it's going to confuse grandma and Aunt Postalotacrap. There doesn't seem to be a "friends and family centric" way of doing things, which will prevent it from becoming a Facebook replacement. Is eventually stepping into that slot one of your goals? Or are you happy being the place everyone but Grandma and the crazy aunt goes?
By default I noticed lots and lots of anti-Semitic stuff coming across, in the least expected places. It appears to have lessened, I don't know if it's because I've actually added to what I follow filtering out the default things, or if there was a concerted effort to work that into nearly everything and whoever was funding it gave up, or if you intentionally weeded it out. I don't have a dog in that fight, seeing Jews like I see about anyone else I'm not, but I couldn't help but notice the amount of hate for them that proliferated and I still see a bit of it. I guess what is your answer to the amount of that on the site?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Are you comfortable that your platform has been largely co-opted by and identified as a safe-haven for alt-right and other racist xenophobes and cyptocurrency scam artists looking to make a quick buck?
From the description of your system, it sounds well-intentioned, but... People are not flat one-dimensional objects and it sounds like the point system is flattening people that way. On that basis, I guess I can reduce it to two questions, and then clarify how I wish it would work (in terms of MEPR).
(1) If your points are one-dimensional, then how do you justify reducing people to a single number?
(2) If your points are multidimensional, how do you control the dimensionality?
So now the attempt to clarify the context of my questions... First of all, let me say that there are some aspects of the idea that sound good, even excellent--but ANYTHING sounds good when compared to Facebook.
I think there should be a kind of symmetry between what you do and how you are perceived. MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) is my current handle for this idea. Essentially the people who do things should earn positive or negative ratings on various dimensions based on what they did, and the things they do should start with positive or negative ratings based on the person who did them.
Here are a few simple example: If a public comment is made by a person who has a track record of lying, then that comment should be tainted with a low score on the dimension of honesty. If a person has frequently made comments that people regard as funny, then that person should have a positive score on the dimensions related to humor. If politeness is less important to me than fresh ideas, I should be able to adjust my input weights accordingly.
In visible terms, I imagine a pair of icons. On the personal side, one would be the personal icon linked to the data that the person chooses to share. The second would be the MEPR icon, a standardized (radar?) image linked to the public behaviors and data that defines the MEPR values. (And it should be an opt-in system, too. If you want to disable your MEPR, you should be able to do so--but on Slashdot I am glad to ignore the ACs and I would also discount actions from people who reject or deny accountability for their public behaviors.)
As usual, I have wandered too far and used too much time, so I must again bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I've never heard of you, nor have I ever thought of connecting to you. Is writing cantankerous comments on tech websites as you age and decline the best you can do with regards to spending your time? Maybe take up meditation or work on your physical fitness to find some semblance of fulfillment in your life.
Bill, is that you?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How do you justify reducing people to a score at all?
Personally I reject anything I even suspect might have been motivated by greed, which includes money, tokens or karma points.
Anonymous comments can be trash, or they can be the most genuine expression.
Systems like yours must be annihilated wherever they crop up, so that humanity can live free.
Counterpoint: your comments suck and people are downvoting them
This. This is another case of letting one company decide what is right speech and what is wrong speech.
I'm reminded of this quote from John Adams: "I will not voluntarily put on the chains of France while struggling to throw off those of Great Britain!"
I don't agree. There's an question in the air about whether the social media world needs to slap the hand of one giant bad apple (Facebook), or seriously retrench from a failed, life-destroying technology across the board.
If not Facebook, then what else? And so you interview the "what else" contenders in single file.
Silly response: Who's ever even heard of network x not equal to Facebook?
That's actually a huge part of the problem under discussion here, about what makes the existing landscape quite so toxic and evil.
If you join a "social network" with your friends, isnt it obvious that you want to see everything each other post?
There is no point otherwise. I dont even get this or the knuckleheads that dont put things in chronologial order
Question: Will minds.com have some means of flexible content-filtering of posts I see?
(Background) I have people on my Facebook friends list with utterly obnoxious political opinions they WILL NOT SHUT UP about. I want their non-political stuff, but I want to **NEVER** see anything of theirs which mentions certain political figures. (Actually, I don't want to see any post of any kind that mentions certain political figures.) Likewise, endless "Lost puppy and kitten" alerts by people living 3000 miles away. And other friends with certain ... obsessions I do not share.
With Facebook, all I can do is block the person, which I do not want to do.
Are you going to do anything at all about them? And I mean literally nazis with swastikas and Hitler's portraits everywhere.
The company isn't deciding though, the users are
The chinese are doing it and a bazillion rice eaters can't be wrong.
Or can they?
Is the MINDS token listed on any exchanges?
It sounds like a permanent record of down-/up-votes. How is this different to a credit history or a criminal record? Where's the right to be forgotten, or at least, have historical stupidity discounted?
Leaving aside the 'I will mark everything according to how much I like X' scoring, it's still vulnerable to the 'you give me good scores and I will give you good scores' abuse of current reputation systems.
As Fox news and Facebook stories prove, it's easy to tell people they're victims and they need to fight somebody with guns. What prevents morons punishing people who injure their self importance or justify their self-righteousness? What prevents the ranking system devolving into a Twitter-storm demanding murder and rape?
I know part of the typical business model of social media is selling metadata, have you done away with this because of moving to a crypto-based model or do you use that data for selling as well?
Also, if you do sell that data, what is your data retention policy after a user chooses to leave the platform?
Interesting reply. However I wouldn't have seen it at all if it hadn't been moderated strongly into visibility. It really raises some important questions, though not any questions I have not already considered. I think I have substantive answers for your questions, but first you need to convince me I should make an exception to my policy against responding to ACs.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Who are you and what is Mind.com?
Open Discussion standards are those which protect the user from censorship and deletion of their work on the site. They generally permit removal of illegal material or grossly offensive images and slurs, but do not permit censorship by content type or topic.
Will Minds.com adopt one of these, and if so, will that make it hard for it to become a popular social network since most people "seem" to want a steady stream of inoffensive palaver and kitty pictures instead of substantive issues, debates, articles, discussions, etc.?
Alternative Right.
(AC but not the AC who posed the "interesting reply")
You said the reply was "interesting" therefore it seems that it should merit consideration and reply irrespective of the status of the one who posted it. Else the group mind is left to remember e.g. Microsoft stating "Linux violates some of our patents (but we won't say which ones (neaner neaner neaner!)).
As for "exception to my policy" besides sounding rather pompous it brings to mind the never-to-be sufficiently-condemned "zero-tolerance" ("We grant ourselves licence not to think") policies we hear of so often in authoritarian contexts; -"Our/My way or the highway (and the highway is closed)"
Blockchain and social media integration will be a very excitiing development. using blockchain techcnology / crypto currency for rewards system, anyone? you get paid for liking, sharing or doing comments. I won't be suprised if social rewards website based on a blockchain technology will become a new thing. Like the a new site I stumbled upon just now: https://coincircle.com/l/fLS02...