BITLANDERS REVIEW: SOCIAL MEDIA THAT PAYS BITCOIN
BitLanders, formerly known as the Film Annex, is a social media site that pays its users in Bitcoin. It first came to my attention earlier this year when I was planning to write a profile on Roya Mahboob and Fereshteh Forough, co-founders of the Women's Annex (At the time, it was still named the Film Annex).
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The Film Annex was started in 2006 by Italian entrepreneur Francesco Rulli with the aims of providing film makers a site to promote their work and help fund their projects with a shared advertising model. This model would soon inspire Mahboob and Forough in 2012 when they founded the Women's Annex to promote online and digital literacy for women and children in their area of Central Asia.
It would be later that they would incorporate Bitcoin as their method of paying users because it would be able to provide a safe, quick and global way to send funds to users around the world.
Social media that pays... but how?
BitLanders works by calculating your social engagement into a 'BuzzScore.' The BuzzScore is a competitive ranking from 0 to 100 that reflects your ability to involve users on your posts, blogs, videos, pictures, content, you name it. This takes into account how many people subscribe to your content, 'buzz' (which is like a facebook 'like') your content as well as comment.
After your BuzzScore is calculated at the end of every day, you are given a certain amount of Bitcoin as reflected by your BuzzScore and the current Bitcoin price. This money comes from a shared advertisement model. (At the moment, BitLanders does not have any ads; they are anticipating returning to advertisements with a native advertisement model as well.)
Now that I've gotten the basics out of the way, let's review the site.
Usability
You can use BitLanders similarly to how you use Facebook, WordPress, Twitter and Tumblr making the site versatile and easy to use. There is a slight hitch - in order to keep the site fruitful to positive social media and creative content, the BitLanders team monitors what is posted so that it doesn't land the site in hot water; It's a good thing and a bad thing. Ultimately, because you have access to other social networking sites, BitLanders itself provides a unique experience aimed at the content creator.
The site is slow, however. With more and more users joining, the site gets bogged down with requests and many times keeping the site from loading. The BitLanders team is working hard to address this issue, but being a centralized organization over the content being shared, it's not always that easy.
Usability: 3.5/5
Content
BitLanders has its own unique experience. Instead of a profile picture, you have an avatar that you can edit to reflect you physically, metaphorically, or in any way you want. Personally, I like that more than having to judge someone on profile picture alone. It removes the personal face from your content and makes the site much more content-based.
Unlike Facebook, you're not going to see a lot of angry political banter or inflammatory. Unlike Tumblr, you're not going to see sexually explicit content. The closest platform I would compare it to is Twitter, given that BitLanders allows you post in 160 characters 'microblogs,' however you can post full blog posts which emulate Tumblr's format. You can also post 'Galleries' which remind me of Facebook's albums and you can upload your films which is pretty straight forward.
Content 4/5
