A look at alternative social media platforms

Looking for an alternative to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube? We take a look at some of the upcoming alternatives: Minds.com, Bitchute, Gab.com, and others. What does it take to successfully get a new network off the ground?

Why would anyone look for alternative social networks? Most of your friends are already on FB & IG. Social will always be a monopolistic market because of that very fact. The first reason to look elsewhere is because of how Facebook has failed at safeguarding their user’s data. Probably the biggest trigger here was the Cambridge Analytica event. People were (rightly) quite shocked at the Cambridge Analytica event, but really, the shock was mostly due to the fact that the event happened to favor a certain political faction they did not approve of.

Another reason to look for new networks is the political bias and censorship. Sending messages containing words such as ‘Bitcoin’ and FB immediately flagged your conversation as dangerous. This is as annoying as it is alarming — you don’t need a tech company to determine or dictate the contents of my messages. In fact, reading the newsfeed, you can tell that it’s curated with a certain skew. People are waking up to the fact that is it dangerous when corporations dictate the information flows.

An alternative to Facebook is Minds.com. Minds rewards you for your contributions; for what you post. You earn tokens, which you can then use to advertise your content across the social network. There’s also premium subscriptions that gives you access to exclusive content, the ability to become verified, etc. Minds should offer a more organic feed, and incentives more favorable for the user — but beyond this, what else?

For an Alternative to Twitter, there’s Gab.com. They outline themselves as the free speech platform. They have received flak for harboring a lot of fringe people, and, based on my own experiences, yes, you certainly stumble upon dodgy content a fair bit — let’s be honest. There’s bigoted, aggressive content there for sure. Eventually, you’ll get what you follow, so it could still prove to be a decent platform if you really care about absolute freedom of speech.

For an alternative to Youtube, there’s Bitchute. Bitchute uses peer-to-peer WebTorrent technology, so when you are watching videos, you are also helping to seed or share them with other users. It was founded as a way to avoid content rules that are enforced on platforms like YouTube. It’s been criticized for hosting ‘alt-righters’, and yes, there’s definitely ‘alt right’ material on there. While technically, it’s an impressive product, but it’s difficult to see many incentives for the common user to participate there, apart from circumventing tyrannical policies (or getting your fix for non-PC content!). 

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