Ethereum-Based Social Network Minds Uses Blockchain to Make Itself Uncensorable

Ethereum-Based Social Network Minds Uses Blockchain to Make Itself Uncensorable

Published: October 24th, 2020

Minds, the Blockchain social network that runs on Ethereum and claims more than three million users, announced this week a partnership with decentralised startup Arweave that lets Minds users save their social posts forever in a blockchain-based perma-web.

Taking advantage of the furore around Twitter and Facebook’s censorship of the Hunter Biden story, the move against potential censorship by mainstream, regulated social media platforms aims to attract users put off by the possibility of having their posts banned. The new feature lets users choose to save their posts to blockchain storage from Airweave. The new functionality will be available at the beginning of November.

“The integration with Arweave gives Minds users the freedom to post with confidence and have immutable, invaluable, and censorship-resistant backup of their content,” Minds CEO Bill Ottman said in a statement.

“With the uncertainty we see on mainstream social networks with regards to surveillance, algorithmic manipulation, and censorship, users can benefit from a more decentralised and resilient infrastructure to create their digital content.”

Ottman leaked the feature implementation last week with a post that used a quote from George Orwell’s 1984: “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

Arweave’s blockchain storage platform requires lets Minds users prepay for what could be potentially unlimited storage. The concept assumes data costs will continuously drop in the coming decades and brings node operators and miners into the picture with a new token-based economy.

Both Minds and Arweave have drawn the attention of major investors. After an equity crowdfunding campaign, Minds won a $6 million Series A investment from Medici Ventures in 2018. Earlier this year, Arweave said it had secured $8.2 million in funding from a consortium including Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Coinbase Ventures.

Minds positions itself as a refuge for people turned off by the questionable practices of the big social networks, whether its de-platformed conspiracy theorists or misuse of data for mainstream political advertising.

Ottman has said Minds’ objective is to build a next-generation social network where users control their digital lives. He wants Minds to be as decentralised as possible, and the partnership with Arweave appears to bring the service a step closer to realising the vision.

More on Minds

After its successful Series A round, Minds launched its own cryptocurrency on the Ethereum test-net back in 2018. Since then, users have been able to earn tokens in exchange for creating and interacting with content.

While social media sites like Facebook hoard user data and track everything users share or view, Minds promises zero tracking and even pays you for making the site’s content more lively.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been accused of censoring of non-mainstream ideas. The same is true of YouTube. Minds aims to attract people concerned about having their views suppressed online and promises that no legally protected content will be censored or subverted.

The site claims no specific political bias and encourages posts from across the political spectrum. User activity isn't tracked, and personal data isn't sold to advertisers. It claims that its decentralised nature and Ethereum-based infrastructure makes it mostly immune from the major breaches that have happened repeatedly to Facebook.

Minds is one of a few social media challengers that seeks to strengthen its position by leveraging blockchain and crypto. It joins a roster that includes Steemit and Yours.org. All of the new social services say they don’t seek to replace the big social media networks, just to offer an alternative.

How it works

To earn tokens on Minds, users simply have to do the things they would do on any social media platform. Create a post, share another post, like a post or comment. Users can use Minds’ remind function to re-post content found on the site. Earning tokens appears to be a straightforward matter. Every login on any device counts adds incrementally to rewards that are doled out in crypto.

Every action is assigned a different point value. Points are then tallied for a daily contribution total. Simple actions like viewing a feed or posting something in text will bag users a small number of points. Contributing visual rich or long-form content like images, videos, and blog posts are worth more.

At the end of each day, point totals are summed, and each user wins a percentage of what they generated in proportion to the total number of points earned by everyone else on the site.

Users then get a daily token payout equal to the percentage of points they contributed against the total. If a user was particularly active on a slow day for the full Minds network, he or she would merit more tokens. If a user was less active on a day that the network was active and busy, the user would receive fewer points.

Tests conducted by tech journalists have found that performing 2-3 basic actions a day on Minds would win somewhere between 0.25 and 0.035 tokens.

Minds tokens can be used to promote site content and give other users a ‘boost’. Boosting works as a social signal on the site indicating high priority for the boosted content so that more users see it. A single token can boost a post up to a limit of 1000 impressions. Impressions on Minds are defined on the network by users, meaning any boosted post would turn up in the news feed of at least 1000 users.

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