In case you haven’t heard—Minus is a new social network where you are allowed only 100 posts—for life. Once you reached 100 posts, you are not allowed to make any more posts.
As with any creative act, when you put restraints on the act of creativity, you get some interesting results. In fact, my second Minus post was about this phenomenon.
(My first post was accidentally about croquet)
Here are a few examples of the thoughtful posts on Minus:
Because of these philosophical posts, I enjoy checking out the homepage minus.social once a day. It’s been interesting getting a feel for the site.
Discover more curated Minus posts curated by me
I’m curating Minus posts on Hypothes.is, saving them under the tag “Minus“.
Three types of users on minus.social
There are more than three types of users, but these three come to mind repeatedly when I visit the site
1. The thoughtful
There are the thoughtful posts. Which are fantastic.
2. The quick flame: ignored and burns out
The only way to browse through posts on Minus is either through the homepage, or by search. You cannot “follow” specific people. There is no algorithm to sort the “best” posts to the top. The homepage is a literal chronological stream of all the posts. Simply sorted by time. Yup, you see it all. No filter.
You might think that there would be a bunch of junk. There is some, yes. But it’s actually not too bad. As you scroll through the homepage of Minus, sometimes you’ll see a ton of posts by one person. They throw caution to the wind, and just burn through their allotment of lifetime posts. Given the quantity of this quick posts, the quality is not great. Since Minus doesn’t have a bajillion users and posts,
Those posts occasionally dominate the homepage. You scroll and scroll seeing multiple posts by the same person. It’s almost like this person gets their very VERY brief moment of fame, and then burns out quickly. I haven’t clicked on any of their posts to see if there is any engagement. I’m assuming when readers see a ton of posts published in quick succession, that all the posts get ignored.
3. The pointless
Then you have the people who neither post a ton, but they don’t really post anything interesting either. Not all posts are going to be deep introspective ponderings. Some are just quick random thoughts—a little bit of the feeling of Twitter in the early days. Answers to the question “What are you doing now”.
This goes in contrast against the more thoughtful posts. So then it makes me wonder… how some people post something thoughtful and others just something kinda pointless. Of course, that’s the nature of humanity. You’ll get a wide spectrum of everything. But how does this happen? Why some good and some bland?
Who shapes the type of user on the site?
Whomever brings traffic to the site, is the people who end up shaping the site.
Who is talking on minus? Who is getting people to come to the site? If you have a thoughtful publication writing about Minus, then of course, you’ll probably get people who will be more likely to write something thoughtful.
Or if someone on Facebook who has a crowd that’s… well, not as thoughtful, then Minus gets a brief burst of unthoughtful posts.
The registration form shapes the type of user
There’s still the barrier of signing up for the site. So you have to have some motivation to sign up. The signing up serves as a sort of filter for what gets posted on the site.
Currently there is no “easy” sign up by using Facebook or Google. You have to enter an actual email address. Which sounds simple, but in comparison to just clicking a Facebook verification button, the email sign up takes a bit more time. You have enter in your First Name, Last Name, Username, a password.
Screenshot of the registration form:
Maybe even the “website (optional)” field detracts some people from signing up. Probably not, most people will just likely skip over that field. Especially since it’s labeled “options”. But for those who don’t have their own website, this field might signals that maybe this Minus site isn’t quite for you.
If you enjoy contemplative places online, give Minus a try
If you sign up, let me know. I’ll follow you through your RSS feed. Yeah, even though you can’t officially “follow” anyone on the site, you can still subscribe to their RSS feed.
My page on Minus: minus.social/members/spudart/activity
My RSS feed on Minus: minus.social/members/spudart/activity/feed (don’t get thrown off by the browser error when loading the feed. There’s just a couple extra line returns at the start of the feed)
Image credit: The hero image of this blog post has a background with a pattern. This Open Access image is a napkin from the Art Institute of Chicago. From the Northern Netherlands of 1655–1675, this napkin was used for children as it gave them a maze to figure their way through.
I’ve written about the 11 napkins in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection
In the early days of this social network, the remaining post count by a person’s name is often indicative of the types of posts made by that particular user. If you have a remaining post count under 80, then typically, this user is posting a bunch of content relatively quickly. Thus, most likely, not quality content. Usually either: repurposed content from somewhere or just one-line quick things.
This general metric becomes helpful when viewing comments. Every time someone leaves a comment somewhere, that post count is stuck alongside their name. Although, now that I think of it… a user who has a 80 or below number… that type of user isn’t usually commenting on other people’s posts. Most people commenting have a remaining post count of 92 or above.
I guess this number comes in more handy when viewing the homepage stream. See a user with a low number, you can generally just skip over their post. Not a fair thing to do. But a lot of the content on the homepage now is becoming more just quick garbage posted by people, so you need some sort of quick mental filtering methods to browse through the content.
Can a post on minus be deleted, so that a user stays below the 100-post threshold?
Yes! Posts can be deleted. You can also edit your posts.
You can delete posts, but doing so doesn’t return that post to your posts remaining count. IOW, there’s no going back.