Slashdot Mirror
'We Will Never Sell-out or Compromise Our Principles. That Would Be Like Murder': The Slashdot Interview With CEO and Founder of Minds.com Social Network
You asked, he answered!
Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of social networking site Minds.com, has answered more than a dozen questions that Slashdot readers sent his way. Ottman has addressed a wide-range of queries surrounding how Minds.com makes use of tokens; how many users the platform has; and, who is Minds.com aimed for. You can read his answers below. For those of you who are going to give Minds.com a try, you can find Slashdot there. Question, by anonymous reader: So Minds uses karma points. This could potentially have a real consequence where some might find a way to trade these points for real money. People with loads of money might then arrive and use this trick to to gain influence. Have you thought of this? And if so, how are you tackling it?
Bill: Ultimately you have to ask, would you rather the community be rewarded for their contributions or not? We believe people deserve to be rewarded for successfully participating on Minds. Of course certain users will try to game the system, but we have some pretty good tools in place to minimize this such as rate limits and parcel limits on buying tokens.
Tokens can be used on advertising via token and boost. Being able to purchase influence isn't inherently a negative thing, you just don't want it to dominate the network. This is why we also allow users to earn, and we are committed to maintaining balance so that those with money cannot drown others out.
Question by sinij :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?
Bill: Our crypto-token system is extremely popular along with the ability to tip and subscribe to others monthly on recurring bases. People love earning tokens and then boosting posts with them. 1 token gets 1,000 impressions extra.
Social media focused on transparency, privacy, reach, rewards and monetization is becoming very popular as people are disillusioned with the digital rights abuses of big tech.
Question by anonymous reader: How many monthly or daily active users does Minds have?
Bill: Around 250,000 MAU.
Question by anonymous reader: How does minds make money? Is it hoping the cost of the token will go up?
Bill: We sell tokens which are used to buy our products, Minds Plus, Boost, Wire, or even to launch your own social network nodes.
Question by anonymous reader: What coins/tokens does Minds use? Does Minds.com use its own token? If so what is the name of it? Bill: Yes, the Minds token is an ERC-20.
Question by anonymous reader: 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?
Bill: Here are some recent user testimonials -- 1, and 2.
Please check out our whitepaper [PDF] for more philosophy, but it's all about contributionism and giving people a way to have their voices heard.
Question by anonymous reader: 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?
Bill: We will never sell-out our and compromise our principles. It would be like murder.
Question by anonymous reader: What differentiates Minds.com from Steemit?
Bill: Minds has many more features and mobile apps https://minds.com/mobile. Additionally, our reward system doesn't give you more voting power for having more tokens. Everyone's vote is the same worth and your daily rewards are based on the total unique engagement you are receiving from the community, not getting the attention of large token holders. We also don't run everything on a blockchain, which has scaling issues.
Question by anonymous reader: Fundamentally speaking, won't you say Minds is basically just Reddit with crypto?
Bill:It's much more than that. We are entirely free and open source which Reddit is not. https://gitlab.com/minds. We host many more types of content, we have video conferencing, blogs, videos, etc. That being said we do have similarities with ranking feeds, voting and categories, but hashtag categories on Minds aren't moderated by individuals. Groups are.
Question by anonymous reader: 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 from becoming 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 from being taken over by a CA or Board that will dictate new rules aimed at making Minds the next Facebook?
Bill: Good questions. First, we are working on a fully decentralized network at gitlab.com/minds/nomad and gitlab.com/minds/nomad-mobile. We share the goal of putting as much control in the user's hands as possible. We don't require any personal information. We are community-funded via WeFunder and have partial community ownership. The best we can do is be as transparent as possible, share our code and work closely with the community to develop something that is symbiotic.
Question by anonymous reader: It seems like Minds incentivizes quality over quantity, 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?
Bill: We have rate limits to prevent this type of behavior.
Question by anonymous reader: Were you aware of Slashdot's comment moderation and meta-moderation system? Did it inspire Minds moderation/incentive system at all?
Bill: No, but we are about to roll-out a community moderation feature where juries of users can vote on reports and appeals, which is very exciting for digital democracy.
Question by pecosdave : 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 average users. What kind of users are you hoping to see on your platform? Optimistically, how many users are you hoping to see on Minds by end of next year?
Bill: We want as diverse a community as possible, and obviously want to appeal to mainstream. I think the reward system to increase your social reach is something all social app users want. People want to be heard. We also are working on simplifying the crypto system to demystify it and make it feel like a game. It's not really worth throwing out numbers. We want orders of magnitude growth.
Question by anonymous reader: It sounds like a permanent record of down-/up-votes. How is this different from a credit history or a criminal record? Where's the right to be forgotten, or at least, have historical stupidity discounted? Will Minds.com have some means of flexible content-filtering of posts I see?
Bill: I don't really see the connection. We allow users to delete their accounts. And yes, we have filters for NSFW and the ability to subscribe to hashtag feeds.
Question by alternative_right : 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.?
Bill: You can read our Bill of Rights. We allow most anything lawful in the US and want to be as uncensored as possible while obviously not risking user safety at all.
Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of social networking site Minds.com, has answered more than a dozen questions that Slashdot readers sent his way. Ottman has addressed a wide-range of queries surrounding how Minds.com makes use of tokens; how many users the platform has; and, who is Minds.com aimed for. You can read his answers below. For those of you who are going to give Minds.com a try, you can find Slashdot there. Question, by anonymous reader: So Minds uses karma points. This could potentially have a real consequence where some might find a way to trade these points for real money. People with loads of money might then arrive and use this trick to to gain influence. Have you thought of this? And if so, how are you tackling it?
Bill: Ultimately you have to ask, would you rather the community be rewarded for their contributions or not? We believe people deserve to be rewarded for successfully participating on Minds. Of course certain users will try to game the system, but we have some pretty good tools in place to minimize this such as rate limits and parcel limits on buying tokens.
Tokens can be used on advertising via token and boost. Being able to purchase influence isn't inherently a negative thing, you just don't want it to dominate the network. This is why we also allow users to earn, and we are committed to maintaining balance so that those with money cannot drown others out.
Question by sinij :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?
Bill: Our crypto-token system is extremely popular along with the ability to tip and subscribe to others monthly on recurring bases. People love earning tokens and then boosting posts with them. 1 token gets 1,000 impressions extra.
Social media focused on transparency, privacy, reach, rewards and monetization is becoming very popular as people are disillusioned with the digital rights abuses of big tech.
Question by anonymous reader: How many monthly or daily active users does Minds have?
Bill: Around 250,000 MAU.
Question by anonymous reader: How does minds make money? Is it hoping the cost of the token will go up?
Bill: We sell tokens which are used to buy our products, Minds Plus, Boost, Wire, or even to launch your own social network nodes.
Question by anonymous reader: What coins/tokens does Minds use? Does Minds.com use its own token? If so what is the name of it? Bill: Yes, the Minds token is an ERC-20.
Question by anonymous reader: 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?
Bill: Here are some recent user testimonials -- 1, and 2.
Please check out our whitepaper [PDF] for more philosophy, but it's all about contributionism and giving people a way to have their voices heard.
Question by anonymous reader: 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?
Bill: We will never sell-out our and compromise our principles. It would be like murder.
Question by anonymous reader: What differentiates Minds.com from Steemit?
Bill: Minds has many more features and mobile apps https://minds.com/mobile. Additionally, our reward system doesn't give you more voting power for having more tokens. Everyone's vote is the same worth and your daily rewards are based on the total unique engagement you are receiving from the community, not getting the attention of large token holders. We also don't run everything on a blockchain, which has scaling issues.
Question by anonymous reader: Fundamentally speaking, won't you say Minds is basically just Reddit with crypto?
Bill:It's much more than that. We are entirely free and open source which Reddit is not. https://gitlab.com/minds. We host many more types of content, we have video conferencing, blogs, videos, etc. That being said we do have similarities with ranking feeds, voting and categories, but hashtag categories on Minds aren't moderated by individuals. Groups are.
Question by anonymous reader: 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 from becoming 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 from being taken over by a CA or Board that will dictate new rules aimed at making Minds the next Facebook?
Bill: Good questions. First, we are working on a fully decentralized network at gitlab.com/minds/nomad and gitlab.com/minds/nomad-mobile. We share the goal of putting as much control in the user's hands as possible. We don't require any personal information. We are community-funded via WeFunder and have partial community ownership. The best we can do is be as transparent as possible, share our code and work closely with the community to develop something that is symbiotic.
Question by anonymous reader: It seems like Minds incentivizes quality over quantity, 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?
Bill: We have rate limits to prevent this type of behavior.
Question by anonymous reader: Were you aware of Slashdot's comment moderation and meta-moderation system? Did it inspire Minds moderation/incentive system at all?
Bill: No, but we are about to roll-out a community moderation feature where juries of users can vote on reports and appeals, which is very exciting for digital democracy.
Question by pecosdave : 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 average users. What kind of users are you hoping to see on your platform? Optimistically, how many users are you hoping to see on Minds by end of next year?
Bill: We want as diverse a community as possible, and obviously want to appeal to mainstream. I think the reward system to increase your social reach is something all social app users want. People want to be heard. We also are working on simplifying the crypto system to demystify it and make it feel like a game. It's not really worth throwing out numbers. We want orders of magnitude growth.
Question by anonymous reader: It sounds like a permanent record of down-/up-votes. How is this different from a credit history or a criminal record? Where's the right to be forgotten, or at least, have historical stupidity discounted? Will Minds.com have some means of flexible content-filtering of posts I see?
Bill: I don't really see the connection. We allow users to delete their accounts. And yes, we have filters for NSFW and the ability to subscribe to hashtag feeds.
Question by alternative_right : 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.?
Bill: You can read our Bill of Rights. We allow most anything lawful in the US and want to be as uncensored as possible while obviously not risking user safety at all.
This shtick would be far more compelling if the homicide squad ever took a day off in any major urban center that didn't sink without a trace into a vast ocean, 7000 years ago.
The platform means that, just like mainstream media, it's the networks that pay which can spread their message, while the rest of the content is soloed in such a way that even search doesn't help. Google, nor any other engine, indexes the content because of navigation sabotage.
What do expect from someone who worked at VOA...hardly objective and free content.
It's just built into the fabric of the design to mask that it censors content.
of murdering people for money. I could find dozens of examples in the last year (Military Industrial Complex anyone?).
So yeah, you're words are kinda hollow. Bordering on silly really.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It must be good because it uses blockchain, although it's not at all clear why that matters to a social network.
Except blockchain was last year; he needs to figure out how it can use AI this year.
Almost all of the upvoted questions seem to be canned questions. One, maybe 2 sentences with no replies. In most Slashdot Q&As(including this one if you look at the questions posted by logged in users) the truly insightful questions tend to generate multiple child/grandchild responses and tend to be more in depth or detailed.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I read the interview and looked at the web site, and it's too damn complicated. It won't work. It's kind of silly, in fact. Micro credits, crytpo magic money, tokens, votes, etc. Seems like a real mess.
I don't respond to AC's.
Navigating to the Bill of Rights paged mentioned in TFS leads to an essentially empty page. If I can't see my rights without registering, that's a nope. Maybe it's just a broken page? Not very confidence inspiring.
man, I feel like mold.
1. Fremont, CA (Population: 235,881)
2. Vancouver, WA (Population: 174,912)
3. Elk Grove, CA (Population: 169,742)
4. Frisco, TX (Population: 162,917)
5. Naperville, IL (Population: 148,070)
6. Bellevue, WA (Population: 142,238)
7. Roseville, CA (Population: 132,566)
8. Thousand Oaks, CA (Population: 129,853)
9. Norman, OK (Population: 122,143)
10. Round Rock, TX (Population: 119,308)
Some anti-CA anti-border rhetoric falling apart seeing those cities there...
https://www.areavibes.com/library/top-10-largest-cities-no-murders/
This is garbage out of the gate because he who is willing to spend the most dollars wins the eyes and ears of the users. Crapola Capitalism at its latest.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Murder is not that big of a "deterrent" for not selling out.
I'm sorry, but CEOs of social media companies have zero credibility for claims like this.
I'm afraid I'm not really interested in his answers or reading through the huge list of text to figure out what this is or why I care -- it's social media, I simply don't give a damn.
Hopefully we've reached peak social media.
n/t
Given I haven't read anything but literally just this article on Minds... but I have no idea what crypto has to do with this website. I get it may be used to make a near permanent decentralized record of things but it sounds like that may not be that permanent given the answer above? And the other half of crypto I don't understand is the value of the tokens/points/karma or whatever it might be. Tell me if I'm way off, but upvotes/shares/etc will earn crypto? You then use that crypto to buy more sharing or advertising of your posts?
Instead, they'll probably be forced to sell the company's assets after bankruptcy, and the buyer will compromise those principles!
How much money will it take for you to murder someone?
While a business is new, it is often hard for the owner to think of selling their company. However what happens is overtime, it becomes a burden on their life and they will want to sell it.
They are the CEO's who startup the company. Then they are the CEO who will keep the company running. They are really two different types of skill sets needed. Startups need high energy CEO's who can get their hands dirty and push towards growth, once they reach a particular size that CEO is becoming a micromanager, and getting involved in things that he really shouldn't be doing. They are a very few CEOs who can handle the transition well.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Great, another shit ethereum token. Fuck them.
An article about a forum with a mod system on a forum with a mod system. Well done! Now only if any gave a flying...
Doesn't seem to be able to send the verification code to a New Zealand phone number.
We Will Never Sell-out or Compromise Our Principles.
Kinda depends on what your principles are as to whether this is a good or bad thing for the rest of us.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...Yeah bullshit. You'll sell out and compromise on the promise of increasing your own personal wealth and power, just like every other human who ever uttered the words "we will never sell out or compromise our principles."
Money, power, and mutually assured destruction are the only things that motivate you diseased creatures.
I decided to look at their web site and immediately closed the tab. When did having full-screen background animation become an accepted practice? I've seen a couple of other web sites (paypal and one of my utility providers) do that and while it might display OK on a high-end 8-core system with a high-end graphics card, my few-years-old home system comes to a crawl with crap like that. So much so that it's so agonizing attempting to log into it (the utility provider one) that I don't even do that to pay my bill anymore -- I've reverted back to sending my payment via USPS. It's just annoying that web site designers appear to assume that everyone has a high-end system that is less than six months old, or that everyone is viewing their web site on high-end phone.
So no Minds for me.
We will never sell-out our and compromise our principles.
What he really means: Deleting them, or replacing them with profit-driven bonuses, is totally acceptable.
When society rewards wealth and power, it's impossible to protect the common good.
Corporate taxation is more than the indirect payment from the biggest consumer of government services (because they have the most), it's an effort to protect the common good. The US model of winner-takes-all capitalism means politicians now deliberately abandon that effort.
Where do I complain about the fact that when I try to confirm my phone number, the SMS never arrives? As a result, I can't receive the tokens.
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
Failing to post to social media is not like murder. But more importantly, one could reasonably read this as being true no matter what happens. One merely has to understand that whatever the organization does, no matter how contradictory today's choices are given yesterday's statements of uncompromising principles, the organization always acts in line with their current principles.
Consider that organization representatives sometimes lie (or is that "compromise their principles"?). Cloudflare tells the public "Even if it were able to, Cloudflare does not monitor, evaluate, judge or store content appearing on a third party website." and Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said "We're the plumbers of the internet. We make the pipes work but it's not right for us to inspect what is or isn't going through the pipes." even as pro-ISIS websites used Cloudflare's website caching service. It was reported that changing this would be submitting to "mob rule". From the coverage on Gizmodo.com
Rather than post a followup, or use his apparently ready-made access to media to let everyone know that Matthew Prince and Cloudflare do not agree with the Daily Stormer's politics but stand up for free speech and not "inspect[ing] what is or isn't going through the pipes", on August 16, 2017 Prince said he "woke up [one] morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them [the Daily Stormer] off the Internet." (really, he was kicking Daily Stormer off Cloudflare). It seems wise to be prepared for a here-and-gone-again service model even from organizations whose principles once seemed so clear and uncompromised.
Digital Citizen
Why do privacy-centric sites still rely on email addresses for registration? That seems antithetical to the whole premise.
The battle might be lost, but I hit Ctrl+W right after "Get paid in *crypto*".
This was probably one of the best upvoted questions, yet Bill failed to address it:
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?
https://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13413840&cid=58130120
Murder for hire says that he WILL sell out and compromise his principles. It's just a matter of price. His sell price hasn't been reached. YET.
is any of their pledge not to be like murders put into writing, or is it just vague reassurances? if i signed up for this whatever-it-is, also-ran, no-one-ever-heard-of social whatever, would i have, in writing, a legal document saying what they would and would not do with my personal data?
Was to think that we were going to stay around to be insulted and shadow-banned.