Sapien is a very interesting platform and has a similar feel to Steemit and other Steem dapps. It’s also very different and unique in its own way. Let’s take a look at how it differs from other dapps and dive into the world that is the Sapien Network.
If you’ve read my previous reviews or rankings of social platforms you will know that Sapien has moved around a little bit for me but has always been in my top 10. Over the year that I’ve been on Sapien, I’ve seen them make major UI improvements, improve their loading times, and continue to push for consistent improvements and updates month over month releasing development updates to keep us informed and up to date on things.
Looking at the home newsfeed, you’ll see that it feels pretty similar to Steem allowing you to either upvote or downvote and see the earned SPN tokens from those upvotes as well as to comment and reshare. What they also have is the ability to bookmark posts and save them.
Posting on the platform is fairly simple. You can write an article as I’m doing now, share just a link, embed media, or set up a poll. Above we have the media publisher where you would simply add a title, a video, a thumbnail image, and then set the Tribe (category) you are posting to and post. You can also determine if you want your followers to see your post or just have it shown publicly and whether or not you want to receive rewards (in case you’re doing something for charity etc.).
The publisher has come a long way though it can be a tiny bit confusing when say posting a video and not realizing that you also need a picture for the thumbnail or again if you write an article with no images, it would show up in the newsfeed like the 2nd post in the picture below.
You can see that the first post was formatted correctly whereas the second didn’t have a thumbnail. This isn’t that bad so it’s really my only complaint/concern and I expect it could easily be modified and or once people figure it out, they’ll be good to go moving forward.
Similarly to Steem, you can stake your SPN for better rewards and more functionality. Originally, you’ll need to stake 100 tokens to give you access to perform actions and earn rewards on the network, but you can still use the platform in a read-only fashion without staking. This PDF explains everything about staking on Sapien: https://www.sapien.network/static/pdf/Staking_SPN_Overview.pdf
There are many benefits to staking in the works to come out in the future such as earning from ad revenue, listing products and services on their marketplace, access to premium content, and with ads, you’ll have the option also to pay a small fee to opt-out of ads if you should choose.
You can also earn SPN from interacting on the platform by creating posts, commenting, and voting on other people’s content.
This is what my profile looks like when you’re seeing my first post. You can check my profile out here: https://beta.sapien.network/@Scott_Cunningham/posts.
They also have a great help section I recommend checking out with tons of Q&A here: https://forum.sapien.network/.
Sapien still has some ways to go with their publisher, making profiles more appealing, and building out the Sapien community, but it has a lot of potential and that’s why I previously ranked it 5th on my rankings for top blockchain decentralized social networks when considering it’s feature set, blockchain integration, cryptocurrency monetization, profitability, ease of use, mobile application or lack thereof, design and layout, community, centralized vs decentralized, being fully operational, troubleshooting, user favorability, website load times, and the ability to promote your content or advertise. There isn’t a ton of profitability to the platform in its current state, but with some improvements, and a larger community, I could see Sapien being one of the larger mainstream alternative blockchain social platforms.
Let me know what you think about Sapien and what your experience has been with it. Let me know if you plan to try it out!