Minds losing their minds, but still doing better than Google Plus. A shame we can’t let a thousand flowers bloom, but in some things there can be only the One.
I still don’t have much to do with Minds.com but check the feed from time to time. As I still have no idea what to say with their oft-touted freedom of speech to all these strangers, I make no posts. I’m counting on that to change once the publication of my third and last book in my zombie post-apocalypse adventure series is in sight.
So far, so good. Last week, I almost gave it up.
It turns out that Minds.com somehow won permission to operate within Vietnam. Hooray for everybody, except that my timeline was flooded with posts in Vietnamese, by Vietnamese, and no doubt interesting to the Vietnamese, but nothing but the Vietnamese. I can’t have been the only Anglosphere lurker wondering what on earth happened to the one and only video guy he was following, now buried beneath pages upon pages of posts in Vietnamese I could neither comprehend, nor care to.
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| This is what I like to call a “sacred and profane” scene. A big Colorado sky and those gorgeous Sangre de Cristo Mountains serve as a majestic backdrop for these tokens of human settlement and commerce. No, I’m not using any screenshots from Minds because those Vietnamese posts went on forever. I’d rather look at this. |
This went on for days. I had to scroll for pages before I found anything in English, and, more often than not, it was that same note from Minds congratulating itself on breaking into the Vietnamese market.
One day, I clicked on with the idea of wiping my profile and ghosting out when I see my timeline loaded floor to ceiling with back videos of the one guy I follow. As per usual, the timeline would lead with something by someone else that I find interesting that I’ll instinctively start reading before it disappears seconds in, buried under post after repeated post of something else. Although the Old Stupid is preferable to the Recent Stupid, I’ll call this a draw, because it’s still stupid.
On one hand, I can’t help wondering how many members Minds lost to the Great Vietnamese Timeline Flood. On the other hand, as with everything else about this platform, I can’t work up the drive to find out.
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| I thought this a nice mise en scène de chats. Not that you can stage cats. More like a lucky shot, really. |
All that said, it’s still doing better than Google Plus. Remember that? It’s still around, if barely. It was never so bad as there was simply no real reason for anyone to go there.
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| Another sweet arrangement I was lucky to catch. |
Social media tends towards monopoly for the same reason most people in the world use Windows as an operating system—there are times when everyone needs to be on the same page. It’s easier to network and keep up with people when they’re in one place. And if they’re already in one place, they need a really good reason to move. Most people never get that reason. They don’t post anything more controversial than the mildest political meme among the photos of pets and food and travel locales. Getting “zucc’d,” i.e., banned, isn’t an issue.
If more people are migrating over to Instagram, that’s because most people interface with the Internet via their smartphones, and Instagram is darn convenient for those whose primary camera is their phone. Fortunately, the powers that be at Facebook recognized this early on, and purchased Instagram before it could become a direct threat.
That said, I don’t see Facebook going away anytime soon, or even a few years down the road. From what I’ve observed, younger people and others whose smartphones are an indispensable tool have moved to Instagram. It’s too convenient for smartphone users to ignore. Likewise Still, Facebook is convenient for older folks and those of us who spend their days at regular, honest-to-Babbage computer stations. Instagram users can share their captioned photos to Facebook, so Grandma and Grandpa can still follow their family.
It’s such a rare and wonderful thing to behold something that actually works.
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| Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. |
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All photographs Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.
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