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March 30, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
14:27
1,000,000 Minds.com Views - Interview with Bill Ottman
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Hey everyone, so this is a quick update from minds.com's founder Bill Otsman.
I'm a big fan of Mines and I'm strongly in support of it because Bill has on many occasions shown that he's very available to talk to and he's very concerned about pro-free speech, obviously, within the rule of what the laws dictate.
And there have been some recent interesting updates to mines.
I just want to give the quick ones I care about.
I recently passed a million views on mines, which is pretty good.
I've only been on a few months and I've got 40,000 subscribers and a million views.
That's a lot bigger than I was expecting.
And they've just put in the trending hashtags.
And I notice that PewDiePie Did Nothing Wrong is trending.
I thought, well, that's interesting.
Why is that?
And it's because when it loads, as far as I understand, it's literally just come in.
But it's because I included the hashtag in the description of the video I did called the natural enemies of YouTube.
And that's being shared widely.
And the number of times that that's been shared has caused this to trend.
And it's not even in the title.
It's actually just in the description, which is very interesting that it picks that up.
And I actually really like it.
I think it's very cool.
And there are other it basically, it's awesome because the sort of rational anti-SJW centrist positions are being well represented here.
And we're not, I'm not seeing like the extreme neo-Nazi stuff or the SJW stuff.
So this is actually a platform where we have the dominant voice, which is really interesting.
It's the first time ever, really, isn't it?
But Bill, sorry about that.
Yeah, how's it going, man?
Great.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me on.
Oh, anytime.
And I'm a big fan of what you're doing with the site.
So what other updates have there been that I'm not seeing here?
So we just dropped a huge upgrade to the mobile apps in the app stores for Android and iOS.
So I definitely recommend people grab that because it is just user experience is way better, way faster.
There's a really cool exclusive mobile feature there where there's a lightning.
It's not on desktop, so you won't be able to see it here, but there's a lightning bolt in the center of every newsfeed post so that you can actually direct deposit points, money, or Bitcoin directly into people's posts that you support.
Yeah, I was just going to say, I just got my phone up.
I'm just going to just post something.
Hello from mobile.
So people can see that I am actually using my phone.
it'll come up in my feed there we go Yeah, and I can see the lightning bolt in the middle.
That's a good idea.
Really good idea.
Right.
So because the other way to send points between users right now is what's called a peer-to-peer boost, meaning that I can send any channel an offer of, say, you know, 1,000, 10,000 points, or, you know, $1, $10.
And then that other channel will get a notification saying, hey, Bill is offering you X to share this post to your audience.
So now there's actually two ways to exchange points.
People were asking for the direct deposit feature, which is nice, so you don't have to do a share.
Do you want to give a quick description of the purpose of the sharing posts between feeds and things like that?
Because just because we seem to have jumped in in the middle and assumed a lot of things.
Right, yeah.
People know what's going on.
So basically, the peer-to-peer boost system allows channels to directly promote between each other.
So on most social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google, they force promotion to go through them.
So you have to pay Facebook or Twitter to promote your post and feed it around.
We decided to take ourselves out of the equation so that we're not acting as a middleman and channels can directly pay each other to advertise between each other.
Because, I mean, realistically, you know what audience you want to reach.
So why do we even necessarily have to be involved?
Now, you can involve us, which is if you do a full network boost, which is where you use the points that you earn just by using the app, and you can boost your post to the full network.
It'll show up in people's news feeds.
And in that system, one point equals one view.
So if you boost something for 1,000 points, then we're going to distribute your post for 1,000 views between people who are using the network.
Cool.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, I just boosted one of Bering's posts for 1,000 points to test out.
It just went through fine, obviously.
I've got to say, I like the new mobile app more than I like the desktop so far.
The new mobile app, it's like a cross between Twitter and Facebook, which is actually, I'd much prefer it.
It's a lot easier to just browse the content, which is cool.
And browse your feed, which is great.
Yeah, it's much faster, much smoother in the newsfeed.
It's more readable as well.
It's definitely good.
But I mean, the desktop one's fine, but the mobile app just looks more slick.
Good to hear.
We just released it last week.
So that's good.
Can you click on it?
No, no, no, you go ahead.
I just wanted to mention the monetization a little bit.
Could you click on monetize your channel?
I can.
So we have a handful of monetization options so that creators can make money.
And we're really focused on this because we think that rewarding creators is the most important thing.
And so right now, when you monetize your channel, there's a few things that that does for you.
One, you can accept subscriptions, monthly subscriptions, at a price that you set so that your supporters can access your exclusive content.
So when people support you, they can see all your special videos or photos or whatever you want.
So in your case, Sargon, if you monetize your channel, you'll see a little dollar sign on your status post.
So if you want to mark something exclusive for your supporters, then that's how you do that.
The other thing that monetizing allows you to do is accept money for peer-to-peer boosts.
By default, it's only points.
But once you monetize, people could send you, you know, five or ten bucks or a hundred bucks.
I don't know.
Whatever.
Whatever they want so that you share their content and their channel to your channel.
The other one that we just released is now you can monetize your blogs so you will receive the ad revenue generated on the blogs that you create.
And we're working on video ads and we're working on really expanding the boost system so that channels can run boosts on their channel and all of their content and get paid for it.
So what we're seeing with the censorship on all the third-party ad networks like AdSense and everything that's happening on YouTube is that we really can't trust these third-party ad networks, which would sort of be the easy solution for us to just tie into them and let everybody run those third-party ads over their stuff.
But that's just destined for failure.
So we're going to really try to.
With the way things are going for YouTube at the moment, it might be worth having your own independent one, mightn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, having an independent ad network where people understand that just because content is running on other content doesn't mean that the ad supports that content.
Like everybody.
That's their theory.
How does that make any sense?
Nobody thinks that.
Nobody thinks that.
Everyone knows it's automatically served by various algorithms.
I mean, it's funny when it happens.
Oh, look, on this ridiculous video, you've got a mismatched ad.
I mean, I get like feminist ads on my anti-feminist videos.
No one thinks that they're endorsing my anti-feminist videos.
It's so stupid.
Yeah.
I think that they're probably going to retract at some point because they're going to realize how much money they're losing by not running ads over more content.
But who knows?
And the advertisers as well, I mean, they want to reach the audiences.
If they're not reaching their audiences, eventually that's going to hurt their sales in the long run.
Yeah, I mean, if you're selling computers, everybody buys computers.
So, like, yeah.
But whatever.
No, no, I'm totally with you.
I think this is childish hysteria that is drummed up out of nothing.
I mean, they've got no evidence that anyone is connecting these brands to like, you know, Holocaust denial videos or anything.
There's nothing.
No one thinks they are.
It's so infantile.
But anyway, sorry, what else is there?
What else is there?
I mean, I just really encourage everyone to play around with the boost system because what we're finding is that it's easier to gain a following on minds, even though we're so much smaller than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.
People are finding it's easier to gain an audience on mines because of this reward system where you earn points and you can boost your content to more people.
So it's just crazy.
I mean, it shows that as we scale, it's going to be even better for gaining an audience.
So everyone out there who's listening, you know, you earn points just for checking in every hour.
You get essentially 50 views every hour just for checking in.
And for getting votes, you get points.
And you can also buy them commenting and subscribing.
I mean, like, I'm sure that people watching can see the cutoff on the right-hand side of the screen where I'm getting notifications where people are interacting with my content.
I mean, I get a lot of user interaction on mines.
And I'm just going to do a boost thing so people can see.
Basically, you can put in a number of points up at 5,000 points in for this one.
I think people find Justin Trudeau funny, and I'm boosting it to the entire network.
And then that's approved manually, isn't it?
By a team.
Yeah, we have to go through them because illegal stuff can get boosted.
And we obviously want to approve as much as we possibly can.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
You could build something like that, you know.
Right.
It's just the algorithms.
Oh, please.
Oh, no, no, no.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
I was interrupting.
Just saying that the algorithms on Facebook and now Instagram is starting to do it, Twitter, YouTube.
The newsfeed algorithms are so destructive.
I mean, people, if you have however many followers you have on Facebook, you're only reaching 2% to 3% of your followers organically now.
And it's up to the algorithm to dictate who you reach beyond that based on interaction and who Facebook determines they want to see your content.
So it's really just unbelievable because people spend so much time and energy building up these followings on Facebook and then they just pull the rug out from everyone and you can't even reach your own followers.
They want you to pay to reach your own followers.
It's just unbelievable that they think that they can keep behaving like this.
I mean, it's not just that.
It's the surveillance.
It's the algorithms.
It's the selling everybody's data.
It's just, it's a huge mess.
So we're just trying to flip everything that they're doing by having free and open source software, by having encrypted chat, by not having these ridiculous news feed algorithms and actually rewarding creators.
See, I mean, that's why I'm promoting Minds now.
Bill has been entirely consistent on these points.
And we've had several conversations now, and he's been entirely consistent on these points.
And it makes me think of Minds as like, it's going to be when everything else is going to shit, I feel like I can rely on this site.
And as someone who does this professionally, that's good to know, you know, because at least if everything else goes, if they crack down completely on dissenting views, then at least we have some home to go to.
But I mean, I'm really liking the way things are shaping up actually, because people, you know, I'm sure they understand that it's in development, you know, which is why you keep getting.
Yeah, it's in development.
And your feedback is awesome.
I mean, you were the one who emphasized that we really need trending hashtags.
Trending hashtags is now live.
I mean, we're listening to what people are saying.
And actually, one important thing to know is that our code is free and open source.
So anyone out there who is a software developer and works with PHP and Angular and mobile, check out our code on minds.org.
And if you have features that you want to build, I mean, this is how we're so different from all of the mainstream establishment and networks, is that anyone can build features and contribute to our code.
Those platforms are all proprietary and they don't allow the community to contribute features.
So we have a handful of developers working full-time, trying to get through as much as possible.
But really, developers and designers are so important to rapidly evolving this network.
And if we can increase our development team, then there's really no limitation to the features that we can implement.
Okay, that's really cool.
How can people contact you?
What's the best way, if they need to?
Yeah, just hit me up on Minds.
I mean, I'm very accessible.
So at Ottman on Minds.
Let me just get that up so people can see it.
There we go.
I've surpassed you in subscribers.
Oh, shit.
Ah, shit.
I'm coming for you.
How dare you?
All right.
Well, right, is there anything else we need to add?
Or is that just a little bit?
No, but let's keep doing this.
I mean, I'm happy to keep talking.
Yeah, great, man.
Yeah.
Okay, well, there we go, guys.
I'll leave a link in the description to Mines.
Recommend you sign up for an account.
I'm on there.
I post regularly.
Everyone's there.
It's the best one I've seen so far and it's not even finished yet.
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