I’ve been praising a few platforms a lot, but I’d like to ensure there is a balance as I know there are flaws to these platforms too so let’s take a very analytical look at Steemit, Minds, Publish0x, and Uptrend. Keep in mind Steemit is only one of many interfaces on Steem and if you were to accurately represent the Steem network you would have to look at hundreds of sites, but instead, we are looking at the most prominent platform.
The thing I’m most concerned about right now is the appeal to blockchain platforms and censorship-resistant solutions. I don’t know if that’s the case and it’s hard to tell anymore. Everything is way better than legacy platforms no doubt, but the degree of anti-censorship may be exaggerated, and I admittedly may have been a part of that exaggeration in the past. A lot of this will be pointing out some criticisms and flaws and then fairly comparing their stats to each other and to legacy platforms to look at the difference and the hype versus the reality of it.
Below is a table with all the information I’ve gathered shared throughout this stored here as an overview. It has the mean average of statistics grabbed from Alexa web rankings and SimialrWeb.
https://www.similarweb.com
https://www.alexa.com
Total page visits last month are the total visits to their website, daily pageviews per visitor refer to how many pages they clicked through while on the site, daily duration simply means how long they stayed on, and the bounce rate refers to the rate of people who leave after they finish with the first page they went to. I also added the information from https://gtmetrix.com on load speeds.

Below I’ll share some pictures of the average statistics grabbed from Similarweb and Alexa Web rankings as a baseline comparison.

Facebook

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com

The main issue with Alexa vs SimilarWeb is there is a huge discrepancy sometimes in the data they have collected, but I wanted to have at least two sources to refer to. The durations longer across the board so that makes sense, but the pages per visit and bounce rate are drastically different. We will try to use the mean of the two in reference so a daily average duration of 10 minutes and 19 seconds, 7.2 pages per visit, and a bounce rate of 40.32%. They also have 21.18 billion total visits.

https://www.similarweb.com/website/facebook.com#overview

Below we have speed test performance for Facebook that we will compare for each platform. Though considering they only got ranked with 2 Bs I was surprised. Though they have had issues going down a lot. Their load time was 2.4 seconds, their total page size was 1.30 MB and they made 68 requests

Twitter

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com

Again the data here is pretty drastically different between the two ranking sites so we will use the mean of the two. They had 4 billion total visits, an average duration stay of 7 minutes and 52 seconds, 5.32 daily pages per visit, and a bounce rate of 42.39%.
https://www.similarweb.com/website/twitter.com#overview

Twitter leads the pack with a nearly perfect score of A (100%) from PageSpeed and A (96%) from YSlow. Their page loads in 1.5 seconds, only loading 16 requests, with a page size of just 657 KB. This is the ideal to aim for.

New Platforms

Uptrennd

Uptrennd is unique and has a lot to offer as a very new platform. They are growing at a very steady rate and are the smallest of the bunch but have a very strong and engaged community. Mind you when compared to the majority of other blockchain socials outside this review, it does better than most. Some of the best features are the gamified approach, earning potential, ease of use, effectiveness of boosting and organic reach. The biggest thing that Uptrennd is missing right now is the ability to withdraw which I’ve been assured is coming very soon so I am very excited and anticipative of that. The other big gripe I had was that is that you must pay to create communities and they can only be related to the crypto niche currently which is essentially their tags/topics/categories or whatever you want to call it, their post filtering system. They will be coming out with the ability to create free ones eventually and will open community creation for all topics. They are still very much in beta, testing, and developing. I think the issues I’ve listed all have had plans in place to be dealt with soon so I am very hopeful that this platform will be huge. Their coin is supposed to be worth $0.05 per 100 points on the platform, but again we can’t be fully in until we know we have the ability to withdraw our points and they are truly utilizing the power of crypto and not just like DLive with their Lino points.

Uptrennd is doing well as a new platform and given that when I talked with Jeff the founder, he said they currently aren’t deploying a marketing budget. SimilarWeb wasn’t even able to collect enough data, but Alexa Rankings had some decent insights. Their daily page views were 5.2 per visitor. They do have a long average daily time spent on the site at 6 minutes and 33 seconds so at least the people who are using the site are spending a fair amount of time there. They also had a drastically lower bounce rate than Facebook and Twitter at 31.9%. Now when comparing daily pagesviews per visitor and daily duration time they have lower numbers than Twitter and Facebook according to their mixed statistics, but if we look at only Alexa which is the only place we have in-depth results for it has better daily pageviews per visitor than Facebook and Twitter, and a better duration than Twitter, but not Facebook. It doesn’t have enough data to show its total visits and it may have the lowest rank, but for its small community, the users have shown to be more involved with higher numbers across most metrics compared to Twitter and Facebook.

Lastly, we have the load speed of their page which was 7.1 seconds, their scores were F from PageSpeed and D from YSlow. They had to load 158 requests, and their total page size was 1.72 MB. I’ve really enjoyed Uptrennd, but it has always been one of the slower sites to navigate. Interestingly it was similar if not better than Minds and Steemit, but the actual experience using it, it was the slowest.

Publish0x

Right now, Publish0x, despite they don't have a fully working notifications system, they hit a lot of the checks on my checklist. They do have some faults. However, I think their faults are the least critical. Of course, we need better comment threads and notifications, but it's only a couple months old and it will come out soon with tons of other amazing features. Their withdraw is only once a week, but I had no issues with it and it's for security reasons. Again, though it's hard to rag on them considering they had no ICO, they are crypto-agnostic, and I've already earned $25 of crypto in just this month which shows me there is a lot of potential even for someone new. Unlike many new platforms where when they start off their token isn't withdrawable or is not really being sold or listed on exchanges and thus traps you in hoping that it eventually will. However, we have examples like SOLA where yes, it made it to exchanges and the platform shut down making everyone holding their token lose all the value like myself. With Publish0x that can't happen as they use well-known coins that are already listed, and I can't stress how important that is. Now, time to look at their Alexa and SimilarWeb traffic statistics.

As you can see, they are in a huge growth period having just recently launched and are starting to build a bigger userbase worldwide. In the images above and below you can see its rank has been rapidly increasing and they have an average visit mean of 6 minutes and 23 seconds. The average daily pageview per visitor was 5.24, the bounce rate was 45.77%, and the total page visits are 201.30k which is a 212% increase from the previous month. It’s a little bit below Twitter and a lot less than Facebook, but very impressive, nonetheless. For such a new platform to be able to compare to these is phenomenal.

For their load speed, they received a D score from PageSpeed and YSlow. Their load time was 4.1 seconds with 77 requests and a total page of 2.67 MB. Publish0x is by far the fastest compared to all others by a large margin.

You can get more information on all their internally collected statistics from their website: https://www.publish0x.com/stats

Major Main Platforms

Minds

I know they are undergoing a lot of changes, and with those changes has been an upgrade to the e-tagging system. Many people have claimed that their channel was falsely flagged after posting too many reported posts that weren't e-tagged that should have been. E-tagging refers to marking a post explicit if it may have nudity, pornography, profanity, violence and gore, posts about race and religion, and other. I think a lot of these make sense for NSWF and family-friendly sections of the site (if we want mass adoption) will have to filter out all of these things and if it can be done via filtering, then no one has to be punished in terms of being limited or censored. On Minds, you may get an e-tag for something that would be bannable on any legacy platforms and generally constituted as hate speech. Minds is pro-free speech when it comes to censorship and banning people, but they still have to meet the basic standards so that people will want to use that platform so their current way of moderation is the e-tagging system. Now it can get a bit dicey when we have race and religion as explicit tags and other because then we could end up throttling content that may be considered hate speech, but if we claim Minds is a free speech platform we have to include hate speech in that bubble. It does become a challenge though to work within bounds of what is acceptable and what they have to mark explicitly. The main issue that seems to happen is someone won't mark any of their posts and thus Minds will have to mark their whole channel to ensure it's correctly managed unless they then go back and mark the right posts explicit then they can appeal. Again this may not be perfect, but on Twitter, they suspend you or ban you then let you attempt an appeal, so at least here you have the power and means to go through an appeal and mark content accurately. On the flipside, if you aren't marking content accurately, you will be punished with a full channel explicit marking. It's hard to know where to stand with this because I understand both sides' frustration however there are many bad actors who have full channel e-tags for fairly explicit content and then cry foul around their "safe" content to play up Minds as the bad guy. To be fair, a lot of people I told to check out Minds from Linkedin were a bit hesitant when seeing the open hateful rhetoric sometimes espoused on the platform and platforms like it, but I always explain that they have tools to filter this and you as the user are in control. Most people can’t be bothered to be honest, so if we don’t have these filters, we may risk never getting mass adoption. However, if we overuse these and have too many false flags then people will also not want to use this platform and leave it for something else. They do plan to make this moderation process a public one and it's already in testing, but currently, there is a way to abuse the explicit tagging moderation and I see both sides of this dispute. I have praised it as my best platform, but also note over the past few weeks I have seen a sharp decrease in my own engagement and I’m very confused as to what may have changed given I've been spending generally the same amount on boosts, writing a lot of content that I found to be extremely relevant to this audience and I am gaining subscribers every day. Maybe it’s just that the new newsfeed that makes it harder to discover a lot of content going from showing many different channels and posts to one at a time in a scrollable newsfeed. It takes much longer to browse through and you may not find as much content. This isn't an issue, rather just a natural consequence of the change. I’ve also seen my boosts working very inefficiently lately too, but again these are both anecdotal to my own experience. My boosts run through so quickly, typically in less than a couple hours now and I absolutely do not get even a fraction of the results I used to. It may simply be because way more people are boosting, but it seems like a very sharp decrease that just recently happened. Someone also posted a great review talking about how they were concerned they could only buy Minds tokens and not sell them and while yes it is a utility token, newcomers who lack the full understanding usually don't know this. They also typically are unaware that they can buy this on say ForkDelta for those who know to look there on the unlisted URL: https://forkdelta.app/#!/trade/0xb26631c6dda06ad89b93c71400d25692de89c068-ETH

Though they really lack a presence on any exchange, even the link above is unlisted on the website’s search. This has caused some suspicion and distrust and it doesn’t help when lately I’ve been questioning the effectiveness of boosts and wonder if I should hold my tokens until things change.

SimilarWeb shows a gradual decrease which ends up being from 4 million to just under 2.95 million a month which is what we are left with right now. The Alexa ranking for Minds has fallen quite a bit since the 4th quarter of 2018, but its traffic hasn’t suffered too extremely and is generally rising. The average visit duration was 4 minutes and 49 seconds, the average pages visited were 3.34, and the average bounce rate was 49.76% which puts it as the second worst platform statistically across the board, however it has a pretty great Alexa rank and has quite a large chunk of the blockchain social space web traffic, its users aren’t as active right now. It seems that as you get a bigger userbase it’s harder to appease all your users and that these major blockchain platforms haven’t been able to crack that yet. They still all have issues of their own to work on.

Minds has a fairly decent grade from YSlow of B and an awful score from PageSpeed of F. It took 7.1 seconds to load and the page was 8.78 MB which is quite a bit with 78 requests made. It’s odd that is has the same time as Uptrennd, but when using Minds I don’t really experience delayed navigation.

Steemit

I would cover Steem as a whole, but there are too many interfaces with different traffic and if we used all of them, it would obliterate everything, and it would be super random and varied so we will use the main go-to platform on the Steem network; Steemit. This report gives a lot of insight as to why its Alexa ranking has dropped so much lately for example and it's doing so poorly comparatively: https://cryptobriefing.com/steem-digital-asset-report-token-review/

They discuss things like the issue with the centralized control of 40% of Steem power in accounts that work together and that there is a sense of centralization of Steem power supported and perpetuated by bid bots making the bot owners hold the power and require the users to invest in them to be able to get awareness and potentially earn on top of or lose a lot of their investment since any posts can be promoted. In their 4th quarter, they also were forced to lay off about 70% of their staff which is huge and it was just in Q4 of 2018, so very recent.

The image above from that report also shows how author activity and post activity has drastically declined from over 60,000 posts and 30,000 active authors to just over 10,000 posts and 8,000 active authors which is a decrease of 86% and 79%. Mind you with all of this, I’ve said once and I’ll say it a million times, even with all these issues you still have the most ability to make a profitable amount of money through Steem based on upvotes you get. Whether or not you have to appeal to some contest or whale or whatever it may be, it still has easily 10x the potential for a big payout compared to any other platform. Interestingly now though Publish0x seems to change this paradigm. You see, people who don’t understand these mechanics on Steem and new users typically struggle, and many don’t get past that obstacle or don’t want to invest money quite reasonably. Now that we have a platform like Publish0x, we are creating more profitable platforms that with easy withdraw options and profit potential without a platform bias. I mention Publish0x a lot here because it’s the first time we have an effective platform rivaling Steem’s profitability. For a long time, Steem was in the lead mainly due to that monetization appeal, but Minds’ robust feature set started to pull it ahead. Now that we have a bit of a clash on Minds, SOLA.ai shutting down, and many other platforms falling into the background, these new platforms have an opportunity and space to fill. With all that being said they seem to be making leeway in a better direction by adopting an update log like Minds has as well as other initiatives to better support and work with the community.

As you can see from the total visits, it’s by far the most popular blockchain social platform with over 4 times the amount from the next largest platform; Minds. Though they do have the most views, they also have the lowest pages per visit at 2.7, the lowest duration visits at 3 minutes and 32 seconds, and the by far highest bounce rate at 65.6%. So, it appears that while they have the awareness and traffic, they lack the community and engagement in comparison to the rest. The had less than every other platform for the metrics we compared. I wonder if it is telling of their issues with bid bots and everything else.

Steemit unsurprisingly did the worst due to their decentralized infrastructure. They had a PageSpeed score of F and a YSlow score of E which I’ve never even seen. It loaded in 8 seconds, the page size was 3.16 MB with 178 requests. Interestingly enough, like Minds, Steem hasn’t been slow for me in my browsing experience even though it reports such poor results.

Conclusion

So, there you have it, folks. I felt like I ended up convincing myself that Publish0x may be the best solution if the upgrades are made as planned, more development continues and the community strengthens because I’m realizing its potential more and more and seeing the slight declines in the more prominent platforms that have some issues that haven’t been fixed or even addressed. Publish0x had the best load times, almost tied for the best duration spent, had the highest pageviews, and had the second lowest bounce rate. I think Uptrennd could have that potential too if it follows through as planned and speeds up their site load times a bit, but the simple fact that Publish0x is already using tokens you can readily sell and exchange with ease as well as is crypto agnostic gives it a huge advantage and monetary lead on every platform except Steemit. However, since Steemit isn’t crypto-agnostic it is affected more drastically, and we’ve seen it when their crypto value drops and they lose more than 75% of their active user base. All the platform have their issues and they all have the potential and capacity to fix them though I think Steemit is far too set on its path now, so it’s really in the hands of the other platforms to ensure that doesn’t happen on theirs and to provide solutions where it failed and they could easily overtake it. Let me know what you think about all of this. Let me know which platforms you prefer and what you use as well as feel free to drop your links to your accounts on each of the platforms.

Check out all my social platforms and relevant links

Feel free to donate to me to help keep me going:

• ETH: 0xE0d930a0aa8e57e037D749a868ade5682a34e88e
• BTC: 3MWhAo2pbrKLmhkRGj8WuTo2VzLVeuimTs
• LTC: MJMYVTL5iL9GvyQJcn7w7uiyUFMuSFDHke