I don't think you're going to like Minds. I started on there last Spring and all I see is that it is even worse now that they are an ERC-20 token. (They used to just be a points system.) It is very much a pro-Trump environment. Which isn't to say everyone on there is like that, but trending tags pretty much always include that puerile viewpoint and worse, they have a feature like FB where people basically push their posts at you on the newsfeed. Since you earn tokens by loading your newsfeed, you're at a disadvantage if you don't want to visit that page to avoid all that negativity. Thankfully they have groups, so you could just skip the tokens for loading your feed and just go to groups on spiritual and other positive focus topics. But that brings me to the other issue, which is that now that the token is live and tradeable, the spam problem on there puts Steemit to shame. So now it is also 1000 times as hard to earn a single token. Literally, actions I used to take that earned me 1 token now earn me .001 token. The fact that people can cash out immediately pretty much means that they do. A token introduced at $1 just a month ago is now worth 10 cents. It will likely be a tenth of a cent in a year, though Overstock.com did just invest in the platform and send over one of their execs to help with things, so perhaps meaningful trajectory changes will be made.
Anyway, that's my take on Minds. I share with you disappointment in choices made by STINC about the emphasis on SMTs over new user experience. That's the choice they are making for their work, and that's certainly their right, but it lessens the value of the platform for my intentions. That's why I spend more and more time on Whaleshares these days, where I got my upvote up to $2 in just 2 weeks without investing a dime, while here on steemit I'm less than 50 cents after 8 months after investing $14k!
I don't necessarily recommend the platform to you though, because it is even more extreme than steem in the power down. It is a year!
That won't always be the case, but it is only 2 months old, so it is requiring you stay invested for at least a year to help the community get a base of people in it for the long haul. I pretty much have been posting to whaleshares, then later that day posting the same post here to steemit. Occasionally I make different posts for each, but I find even the markup works, because WLS is a fork of STEEM. (Like LTC is a fork of BTC)
Lastly, I was really invested in Tron until Justin Sun was caught in yet another lie. I finally decided to sell all my Tron and just hold that money as BTC, because I just can't know that anything that company says is true anymore. They may do very well, but it will have to be without me, because I just don't trust them. If you think STINC acts with total disregard for the welfare of its users, I can only imagine what such a lying company will be like as social platform host.
In the end, this may be the best of the lot for an idea that's difficult to execute on in the real world. Anyway, I'm glad you still post here! I would so miss you if you left entirely.
Thanks a lot for your perspective on this topic @indigooecean!
I guess you are right about Minds. I see it changed a lot over the past weeks and I really like their filter/sorting feature, but the content there is quite shallow. Also ERC20 is not my sauce anyway...
I haven't experienced Justin Sun as lying yet, maybe just exaggerating stuff for PR reasons - I was more astonished, that Tron is one of the few companies in cryptospace that has followed with real results on their promises - not only with the acquisition of Bittorrent, but also concerning speed and functionality of the blockchain. This and all the SEED projects really excite me. Maybe I was lucky and missed the lying part until now 😉
On the other hand, I have many experiences with way worse business behaviour in this space. When I think back a year ago, how excited I was about Substratum and they did 0 of what they promised. So my expectations may be very low... 😀
Yes, there may be no real alternative to Seemit at the moment - I'll give Sapien a chance, but it seems as if they are very slow in development.
Oh... and about the investment in a platform: I'm surely open to show my longterm investment, /but/ you have always to consider the space we are operating in and it is very fast paced. Staking for 13 weeks or even a year makes no sense to me, since chances are low, that most of these projects will even exist that long 😄
Thanks for writing your experiences - I really appreciate it very much! ❤️
I got fed up with SUB last Winter and sold it before the overall market contraction started. It became clear to me that not only had they not done anything, but the tech doesn't even exist yet for them to even begin building their solution upon!
With TRON I can't even remember all the lies. The most recent one that made me sell though was his announcing their partnership with some company whose name I forget (I think starts with a B). Turns out they had simply bought a bunch of their servers. That would be like my saying I have a partnership with Microsoft because I'm running Windows 10 on my business's computer. I don't know what they are really going to do, but I just can't hang in there with the lack of trustworthiness regardless. I don't have the nerves of steel needed for that.
Yes, it is very risky to stake locked coins for 13-52 weeks. It's a huge bet of faith in those platforms. I can only justify it by the fact that I enjoy writing and getting to discourse about my writing with the people in the communities MORE than I like doing so in places like Facebook. I won't be further investing my actual cash, but investing my time pays off immediately in relationships. If I also wind up having it pay big in money someday, so much the better.
I totally understand your frustration with Substratum - it was the same for me. I even got kicked from their Telegram chat by their "CEO" because I dared to question their roadmap and asked for real information instead of hype.
About the cooperation between Tron and Baidu (that's the chines ebay), I also read this metaphor about renting servers space being like buying a windows pc and saying you got a cooperation with Microsoft. It made me laugh though...
The truth is somewhere in the middle. It's not a huge cooperation, but it's actually more than just renting server space. AFAIK it is a cooperation about blockchain technology on the server level. Maybe Justin shouldn't have promoted it as a huge thing - on the other hand this whole industry is so loud, that you have to scream over it to be heard.
I didn't consider this a lie, but just a PR stunt with too much expectation attached to it.
Same with Oracle - there is a meeting between some Oracle reps and Tron and everyone is talking about a potential big thing behind it. It may not be big, but it is also not nothing behind it.
Maybe I got better nerves than you 😄Mine are made out of TRONSTEEL - I'm sure someone has already made a token out of it 😄