• Among its first three games to be released are: Queens, Inference, and Crossclimb. These games are based on puzzle nature. LinkedIn claims the approach to integrating games into its platform will help to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations.
• The company has not announced the launch date yet, but confirmed that the project is in progress. The spokesperson confirmed the development to the news portal but did not comment on Microsoft’s involvement in it. He also added that the images shared by the researcher on X are not the latest versions.

We’re playing with adding puzzle-based games within the LinkedIn experience to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships, and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations. Stay tuned for more!

the spokesperson said in a comment to TechCrunch.

About LinkedIn

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which has its own gaming division, including Xbox, Activision Blizzard, and ZeniMax. In 2023, the company’s earnings in the games sector reached $7.1 billion, more than Microsoft made from Windows.

Earlier, LinkedIn tried out several different new features to boost the engagement of people in use of its platform. These features depended on efforts in online education and professional development, through to a publishing and news operation, bringing in more video tools and courting creators and influencers.

How long have you been working as a TikTok moderator? How did you get the job? Do you work for an outsourcing company or directly for ByteDance?

Currently, I am in Poland, and since September this year, I have been working in an international outsourcing company as a content moderator. ByteDance is our client, so I have no direct contact with them, the dialogue between the company and the client is taking place at the highest level, and we – content moderators – just do our job. 

What exactly are your responsibilities? Tell us how do you work? What regions does your team cover?

I work in the Ukrainian team, and our responsibilities include the moderation of Ukraine and Russia because, unfortunately, we still have joint moderation. I work in the first line of moderation, our task is to monitor videos, profiles, audio, and comments. 

As for the moderation of videos, profiles, and comments, we moderate reported materials or materials that AI suspects of violating the rules of the social platform. Audio is moderated by absolutely everyone. 

What is your work and rest schedule? Is it regulated, or do you decide it yourself?

Moderation takes place 24/7, so according to the regulations, we have three shifts, 9 hours each, which includes 8 hours of work, a one-hour break, half an hour for various activities organized by the company (it can be a light workout, interactive games, literature discussions, various discussions, short lectures, etc.) 

The working time is fully organized to perform all the work evenly, that is, at a certain time, there is a certain number of moderators on a certain line (for example, video or profiles, audio or comments) depending on the volume of work. 

How stressful is your job? What are the pros and cons?

The content can be absolutely different, and every so often it can be frankly unpleasant or difficult, but it is worth noting that each moderator, if necessary, can immediately seek help from a psychologist or just take a break during work. The company really cares about our well-being. 

Among the pros, I would name good corporate communication. Due to COVID-19, we can work online, but at the same time there is always contact with our managers during the shift, you can always ask for help with difficult cases, etc. I have not yet encountered any cons in the workflow during this short period. 

Tell us, what content do you have to deal with?

The content is very diverse: from innocent dancing or singing, which is quite popular on the platform, to pornographic images, abuse, and outright violence. It should be understood that we mostly receive content that someone has complained about, so these are sometimes low-quality, meaningless cases. 

The most common cases are children under the age of 13, who are automatically deleted according to the age policy of the social platform. There is quite a lot of content with teenagers drinking alcohol or smoking, or dancing in a somewhat explicit manner – the policy on minors is quite strict. Perhaps an integral part is an erotic content for adults, which in most cases is also prohibited. And one of the biggest parts is the Russian-Ukrainian war, which has its own rules that are supplemented to reflect the situation on the ground. 

What were the weirdest, most interesting, most horrible, or funny cases?

Hundreds of different cases go through me every day, so it’s hard to single out one thing, but some of the oddest for me are the new trends like “you are my enemy”, where frankly strange content is published ranging from sexual fetishes to animal abuse. 

The most interesting thing for me and what impressed me is some content from ORDLO [Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine] and occupied Crimea. From time to time, there are videos of teenagers who actually grew up in the occupation and do not remember what it is like to live in Ukraine, but despite the constant Russian propaganda, they still try to convey the truth about the war in their videos, to convince other victims of the occupation since 2014 where the truth is and where the lies are.  

The most horrible for me so far are Russian videos of our captured and killed military. They publish such things with even greater cruelty, so it always hurts to see it. 

The funniest and cutest are probably videos where parents film their children singing Ukrainian songs, and of course, a ton of content with cute dogs and cats.

How do you handle fakes and outright propaganda in the context of the war in Ukraine unleashed by Russia? Share some examples.

The topic of war is monitored very closely. Almost every statement, fake, and propaganda is vigorously challenged by our management. Generally speaking, the rules of the social platform adhere to the official position of Ukraine and internationally recognized statements. For example, the Russian fake that allegedly Bucha was staged by Ukraine is a violation, the official position of the social platform is on the side of Ukraine. Russian accusations that there are Nazis in Ukraine and that Ukraine is governed from the outside also fall into the category of “dangerous disinformation”.

In fact, behind every fake and statement is the hard work of our team members. 

It is also worth mentioning the discussion on Russian insignia and the promotion of the “Z” sign, which is already perceived by many as a modern Russian swastika. During all these 8 months, many discussions were held and finally recently it was recognized that the image of the symbol with the aim of glorifying the Russian military or threatening Ukraine or Ukrainians in social media falls under the category of “threat of violence”. 

Also, in my opinion, the most painful moment for our entire team is the interpretation of our Azov as international terrorists. Any mention or image of Azov is blocked, we are working to remove them from this category, but so far to no avail, unfortunately. 

What struck you the most when you got this job? What would you advise TikTok users as a moderator?

Perhaps what struck me the most was the absolutely diverse amount of content, downright disgusting and unpleasant. People post absolutely everything, from ordinary everyday things to completely different perversions and cruelty. 

I would advise users – especially parents – to supervise their children and what they post. Children and teenagers want to look like adults, so they often try to emulate adult trends. 

And for most users, I would advise the following: if you don’t want your videos to be deleted, learn what slurs are and don’t use them. This is probably one of the most popular reasons for a ban. Unfortunately, such popular expressions as “Rusnia”, “Moskal”, “Katsap” are also slurs and are prohibited. Also, be tolerant – you cannot openly wish death to Russians, no matter how much we would like it, because bullying is prohibited on TikTok. 

If your video has been deleted, do not re-post it because it will be deleted anyway, but your account may also be banned for repeated violations. 

I would also like to wish everyone: create more content, diverse content, whatever you like, and enjoy the process. And perhaps a small request from a person who looks at all the content from Ukrainians and Russians from the side: think carefully whether it is worth dancing to another popular Russian song because the Russians publish a tortured and murdered Ukrainian to the same song.

Pinterest has long-standing problems with Crimea

The annexation of Crimea to Russian in Pinterest analytics was noticed by Twitter user @Denia_Gar_.

“Greetings, if you didn’t have anything to do, then it’s time to knock some sense in Pinterest. I wanted to check the analytics of my audience and just look at that bullshit. Crimea is marked as Russia. I already wrote to them about it and put one star in the pm (ed. Play Market). Crimea is Ukraine,” she wrote on August 29.

This tweet went viral and Ukrainians had many questions for the company. However, in fact, problems with Crimea’s annexation in Pinterest have been around for quite some time. There are posts from November 2021 at least, when users also noticed the same problem, but only few people paid attention.

Pinterest’s rating dropped to 1.0, but only in Ukraine

Since the publication on August 29, the so-called review bombing began, when users massively give low ratings to a product because of the company’s unsuccessful political position. This campaign was successful only in Google Play, where it managed to lower Pinterest’s rating from 4.1 to 1.0. In App Store, the rating is still 4.8.

But there are some nuances worth knowing:

• The rating on Google Play is calculated “based on recent ratings from users in your region.” That is why the rating really dropped only in the Ukrainian Google Play. But, if you log in with a VPN and look from other countries, the rating is still 4.6.
• App Store has a different system for calculating the rating. Due to a significant drop, the app can simply be removed from the store. Therefore, it will not be so easy to lower it, but the drop will be visible in all countries.
• Both Apple and Google strongly dislike review bombing, even when it’s related to the app’s direct functionality rather than the company’s political stance. There have already been situations when Google Play massively removed negative reviews and returned the rating to apps. This can happen to Pinterest as well.

Why is it important?

For more than 8 years, Ukrainians prevented the world from forgetting and accepting the Crimea’s occupation. We recognise inconsistencies in maps, photo captions, and geolocations and ask companies to correct the “inaccuracies” and “errors”.

At Pinterest, instead of promptly answering users’ questions and promising to correct the wrong map, there is still no word to hear. Sometimes they even hide replies with a message about the problem. In such a situation, review bombing is almost the only tool available to ordinary users. And hopefully it will work this time.

About blocking

Ukrainian activists faced a massive blocking wave in 2013-2014 during the Maidan for the first time. It was so remarkable that in 2015, Ukrainian users brought it to trends by asking Mark Zuckerberg about this issue during his Q&A session (unfortunately, without a definite answer from the Facebook founder).

With the full-fledged Russian invasion, this issue became more acute again: Ukrainian activists can be banned several times within a single week, some for a limited period, and some “forever.” Denis Dovgopoliy, the coordinator of the initiative of the economic ban of the Russian Federation, had multiple bans on Facebook for sharp words toward Russians. Notably, the Facebook support reacts to hate speech cases (that’s how Russian bots with various fun names mark and report posts). So, he switched to Telegram because of the high risk of being blocked on Facebook.

A famous journalist and volunteer, Yana Suporovska, is one of the oldies of the Ukrainian Twitter segment and has received no claim for the last 13 years. But it changed with the full-scale war. She told AIN.Capital that during the first few weeks, Russian bots ignored Twitter. But then several aggressive waves arose: for example, bots could comment on posts of Ukrainian activists to provoke them for showing emotions and report them after that. A bit later, they focused on people who collect funds for our army.

“My story started after I collected significant amounts. We collected money for a drone for a National Guard Special Forces unit. It was expensive, 800.000 UAH, but we succeeded. The first 12-hour ban was for my ironic reply. I sent an appeal, but it was declined. Then they targeted my old tweets, all of them. They even reported a tweet with a picture of me hugging my son on Mother’s Day. Finally, claims reached the reply with the number of a credit card I used to collect money for the drone. Twitter assessed it as publishing personal information. So, I got three strikes, and my account was banned ‘forever,’” she said.

The stories of Yana and Denis, unfortunately, are few of many. And not always Ukrainian Twitter Community can help unban a profile. Anonymous activists who work on this issue informed AIN.Capital that massive blocking on Facebook started with the full-fledged invasion. Then Meta reps announced that they would not block accounts for sharing information about war crimes. But it was exactly the case: blocked accounts and hidden hashtags: just remember the story with hashtags about the Bucha massacre.

“Now I see less blocking, but it goes on. For example, popular Twitter accounts can be banned for hate speech or sharing personal data (credit card numbers, photos of bills, etc.) because the volunteers publish reports about spending funds they raised. Now Instagram and Facebook bans are rare to see, but they can delete posts and comments for hate speech and make warnings,” the activists added.

And it always costs us undelivered drones and vests for the frontline or meds and food for Ukrainian cities destroyed by Russian invaders. So what do users do to help in such cases?

What to do?

The activists who deal with unblocking accounts give recommendations to people providing volunteer aid, informational fighters, or other activists — create a backup channel.

“The first recommendation is to have a backup in case of blocking. If we recommended ‘just not to provoke them,’ it would sound like a pure cynicism. Sometimes the support service can help. I don’t know if public appeals have some influence on the Twitter Support, but at least somebody can see it and connect them directly.”

Ukrainian users initiate Twitter storms to force specific posts and hashtags in English into the trends and mention the Twitter Support, the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine that also works on this issue, Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey, and others.

According to the Ministry of Digital Transformation, the agency maintains contact with the Meta and Twitter teams to address issues related to the Ukrainian activists’ blocking. You can also report blocking of such accounts to the ministry at pr@thedigital.gov.ua.

To do this, Ukrainian Twitter users are asked to write such tweets themselves, as well as encourage their friends to join the tweetstorm, especially those from the USA.

“Biden and his administration are in no hurry to provide Ukraine with all the powerful weapons that we need (heavy weapons, heavy artillery, tanks, air defense systems, etc.). That is why we ask you to voice the phrase Arm Ukraine Now through the #ArmUkraineNow hashtag to spread the idea, and the people there would understand that Ukraine must be armed,” the action group said in support of the tweetstorm idea.

A link to the statement by President Zelenskyi, in which he addresses the world leaders with the same plea, can also be added to tweets.

• However, this wave was different because many famous Ukrainian activists’ accounts with many thousands of followers were blocked: for example, Melaniya Podolyak, the volunteer, Valerii Agieiev, one of the founders of the Pravonapoplavu podcast and journalist, etc.
• People negotiating with Twitter about deblocking the Ukrainian users (and wanted to keep their anonymity) said that at least ten famous Ukrainians with many thousands of followers were banned on Twitter. During the war, Twitter and other social media are used for coordination and notification; such bans might have a very negative effect.

“We know that at least ten Ukrainian bloggers with a couple of thousand followers got banned, suspended, or got content warnings. Other bloggers noticed some claims from Germany (because Twitter always informs of the source of a claim),” affected users said.

• Some of the accounts were already released from the ban. And reasons for that were very different: from messages falsely interpreted as threats to screenshots from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
• Twitter and other social media often have teams that control and cancel coordinated or wrongful bans. “In our opinion, in this situation, it is reasonable to create a special team for the Russian-Ukrainian war with a good understanding of the context and the ability to react quickly to its changes,” the activists say.

According to the Ukrainian users, LinkedIn blocks posts containing information about Russia’s aggression and links for making donations to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

LinkedIn says the reason for the blocking is a violation of the Terms of Service and asks users to verify their identity by sending a photo of their documents. It is important to note that after verification, LinkedIn urges banned users to admit their faults and agree to follow the rules in the future.

The users whose accounts were banned noted that the information they posted contained photos or stories related to atrocities committed by Russians in Ukraine. Taras Dumych, the Managing Partner of Wolf Theiss, sent a letter to the US Financial Times in which he described LinkedIn’s position in detail:

“In my LinkedIn posts, I have been focusing on the truth, although, that truth does not necessarily sound nice to Russians and those who support them. <…> However, it appears that LinkedIn was not happy with my activity. After a post, which featured a cartoon of a Ukrainian soldier cradling a baby, and a Russian conscript pillaging food off locals, LinkedIn decided to restrict my account completely, arguing that my behavior was in breach of their terms of service.”

At the same time, LinkedIn does not restrict Russian users from posting symbols called the new swastika now. According to other comments, the social media site does not support Ukraine’s integrity and welcomes Russian propaganda.

We have previously reported that Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, announced that it would continue its business in Russia despite calls to boycott the aggressor country, which is committing genocide against peaceful Ukrainians. Now we can also see the company’s support of Russia in blocking Ukrainian users and their posts on the war.

The Verge has published an article about Ukrainian Tiktokers, who were called “war correspondents” for users from other countries, about how they influence the image of Ukrainians, collect charitable donations, and how many fakes they spread. AIN.Capital shares the highlights of the article.

Until February 24, Kristina Korban from Kyiv had an English-language blog about sports motivation and personal finances. Today her videos are about the events in the capital of Ukraine. Kristina goes live daily, regularly posts videos about air-raid sirens, her family’s food inventory, and grocery store lines in Kyiv.

She has over 600,000 followers, and one of her posts has been viewed by 9.6 million people. The blogger’s audience is people from different countries who knew practically nothing about Ukraine until the recent events.

Sometimes TikTok removes Kristina’s posts. For example, a video of her crying in the dark to the sound of explosions has been removed for “graphic content.” And the clip where Korban jokingly says that everything Ukrainian women do want for International Women’s Day are tanks, bullets, and fighter jets, has also been removed without an explanation.

Once her page was even banned for several days for inappropriate content, but she continued to post videos on her backup account. “I believe there is a lot of chaos when people receive wrong information, so I do my best to be as honest and factual as I can with the knowledge that I possess and learn as we go through this day by day. I aim to provide at least a little bit of clarity for those that trust in me. I feel it is my duty,” Kristina says.

The blogger also raises funds for charity. She has sold over 2,500 T-shirts, the earnings from which will go to Ukrainians affected by the war. Kristina has also launched a fundraising campaign called Help Ukrainians in Need Impacted by War with a $1 million goal. So far, she’s already managed to raise $29,000. In the comments under the video announcing the donation, there are a lot of skeptics who do not trust Kristina.

Pages like Kristina Korban’s have become another source of information for foreigners about the war in Ukraine. Sometimes people follow events only on TikTok, ignoring media reports. However, along with personal blogs of Ukrainians, misinformation began to spread on social media.

According to a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Russian state-controlled accounts have successfully used the platform to spread Kremlin propaganda. As per the ISD, organized disinformation presenting Ukraine as an aggressor and its soldiers and politicians as Nazis garnered millions of views on TikTok before March 4, when the report was published.

Individual bloggers have also posted TikTok videos justifying the Russian invasion. A viral compilation shows that Influencers spread content made using the same script, saying that “Russia wants to bring peace.” An investigation by Vice News revealed that some Russian TikTok influencers were offered money in exchange for posting pro-Russian propaganda, though it is unclear who funded and organized it.

TikTok has responded that it would begin adding labels to videos from Russian-controlled media. On March 6, the company announced that it would suspend live streams and new uploads in Russia.

Unfortunately, Ukrainian users also spread misinformation. An example is the “Ghost of Kyiv” character, whose existence is questioned. Currently, the #Ghostofkyiv has over 435 million views on TikTok. Ukrainians have also been sharing videos unrelated to the war in Ukraine, claiming them as such. For example, videos from games or fighting in other parts of the world.

• The solution consists of a Chrome extension and an administrative panel available at app.dooozen.io.
• Users of the first version can automatically send invitations to add new contacts as friends, create chains of messages and follow-ups in automated mode, and track the effectiveness of their online activities with the statistics module.
• Dooozen.io works with contacts that can be found using LinkedIn search tools. Users will also be able to download contact lists.
• Dooozen.io has filters. For example, you can filter and interact with Premium LinkedIn users only or sort your contacts by their interaction history.
• The first version of the program is free. The new versions will be enriched with several new features, including tools for multiple users and the ability to work with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Also, you will be able to connect Dooozen to your other online marketing tools, including email marketing systems, CRMs, etc.
• The project received a $25,000 grant from the Ukrainian Startup Fund. The first public version of the app appeared on the Chrome Store in late December 2021. To register and become a user of Dooozen.io, you need to have a Google account and specify your LinkedIn profile at the registration stage.

Influencer cat Stepan: the beginning

Stepan is 13 years old. He lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine, with his owner Hanna, who rescued him from the street when he was a month old.

Hanna created a TikTok account for the cat in 2019 to “show him off to the world.” In the summer of 2021, Stepan’s videos went viral — at the time, he had over 400,000 followers. Social media users were captivated by bored Stepan sitting with a glass of wine listening to cheerful music. Commenters said they understood the cat, remembering similar boring parties and sad birthdays.

Actually, Stepan is not bored — he just takes a nap. According to Hanna, the cat always looks like he is slowly falling asleep at the dinner table, so all she needs to do to produce content is to swap the glasses.

Hanna started posting videos with cocktails after a video showing “sad” Stepan looking at the pizza. It has gotten 4.5 million views.

A video of Stepan mulling over a glass of wine while listening to Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” had garnered 27.3 million views as of July 2021. Over time, the glass of red wine has become Stepan’s signature accessory.

Today, the cat’s TikTok videos are getting millions of views and likes. He already has almost a million followers.

In August 2020, Influencer cat Stepan also got an Instagram page. He now has almost 800,000 followers. And exactly Stepan’s Instagram account helped him become world-famous. On November 24, American singer Britney Spears shared his photo on her Instagram. At the time of writing, the post garnered nearly 1.3 million likes and over 10,000 comments.

According to Hanna, Britney is not the first celebrity who has noticed Stepan. Previously, model Hailey Bieber and actress Diane Kruger tagged the cat on their social media accounts. However, only Britney Spears, who is experiencing a new wave of popularity, has made the cat a superstar. Within 24 hours after making the post, 15,000 users from all over the world had started following Stepan. And a few days later, Valentino offered to collaborate.

Stepan’s career and earnings

The contract with Valentino was not the first advertisement on Stepan’s account – earlier users also ordered birthday greetings and other small ads. Besides, as Anna told vogue.ua, Stepan was mentioned on Discovery Channel. Also, MTV bought the rights to one of his videos.

The cat is also expected to soon appear on the official pages of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Ukrainian TV channel STB has recently made a video about Stepan. In this video, Hanna said that despite her contract with Valentino and other collaborations, she is not earning crazy money now. She said she spends more on props for the new videos.

She also tries to remain anonymous. Only her closest family members and friends know who is behind Stepan’s profile.

Why it is interesting

Animal blogs on social media can also turn into a business for their owners, just like Lifestyle blogs. The only condition is to make your pet famous. And after that, just wait for cooperation offers.

Perhaps the most interesting example of such a case is Grumpy Cat. A cat named Tartar Sauce became famous all over the world because of malocclusion and brought her owner millions of dollars.

Grumpy Cat has become the most popular cat meme after her photo first appeared on Reddit in 2012. According to the Daily Express, Grumpy Cat earned about $100 million in her lifetime (Tartar passed away in 2019), though her owner Tabatha Bundesen denies it. She does not disclose the actual amount of her pet’s earnings. However, just a few days after Grumpy Cat appeared in the media, Tabatha could quit the restaurant where she worked as a waitress and start a new life.

Grampy used to make money from product advertising, participating in a huge number of events, as well as selling her own merch. She even has her own line of pet products. Grumpy Cat’s trademark is protected by US law, which allowed Tabatha in 2018 to sue the owners of a US coffee company for using Grumpy’s image for commercial purposes without permission for $700,000.

Will Stepan repeat the success of the famous Grumpy Cat? Time will tell, but we sincerely wish him success!

• As Instagram says, the new feature is “a new tool to discover and support small businesses.” It will show popular locations tagged by users. Among them are parks, restaurants, supermarkets, as well as other places mentioned on Instagram.
• You can open Map Search by clicking the new icon in the Explore section in the upper right corner. Also, you can use the in-feature search button to look for specific hashtags, for example, #takeaway.

• Currently, the new feature is running in test mode in Australia and New Zealand. According to Lifehacker Australia, Instagram plans to roll out the new feature to users in other parts of the world; however, the exact deadline is not yet known.
• Interestingly, a similar map search feature was previously integrated by Snapchat. It works on the same principle and helps users to find popular places. Snap Inc. said that 250 million people would use Snap Map in the second quarter of 2021.

• The case of Sanchez v. France, in which the court rendered this decision, relates to the events dated October 2011. Then Julien Sanchez, the mayor of Beaucaire, a town in the south of France, during the parliamentary elections, has published a Facebook post about his political opponent. His supporters published offensive comments about Muslim residents of the city.
• In 2013, Sanchez and others responsible for writing the comments were accused of inciting inter-ethnic, religious, and racial hatred. The case went to court and all were found guilty and fined 4,000 euros (this amount was reduced at a later date).
• After losing his appeal in the French courts, Sanchez appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming a violation of the right to freedom of expression. His case was heard there in September 2015.
• After reviewing the case, the ECHR did not agree that the decisions of previous courts violated the right to freedom of speech. So, it decided to leave them unchanged. According to the court, Sanchez is responsible for other users’ comments promoting hatred against a group of people. After all, he did not remove these comments from his post for six weeks, and his Facebook page is publicly available. Which means he is responsible for the content of those comments.

“The applicant had knowingly made the wall of his Facebook account public, thereby allowing his friends to post comments there. He had thus been under a duty to monitor the content of the statements published. In addition, the Criminal Court had emphasized that the applicant could not have been unaware that his account was likely to attract comments of a political nature, which by definition were polemical and should therefore have been monitored even more carefully by him. The Court of Appeal had held, along similar lines, that his status as a political figure required even greater vigilance on his part,” the court decision reads.

You can read the decision on the case here:

How to temporarily disable your account

You can delete an Instagram profile only in the web version or via your phone browser.

1. To temporarily disable your account, open the profile page in the browser and click Edit profile.
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and select Temporarily disable my account.
3. Instagram will ask you to indicate the reason for disabling your account – please select from the drop-down list and confirm the action by entering a password.

The temporarily deleted profile will be hidden from other users. To reactivate the page, you need to log in again using the Instagram app or web version. Please note that you can disable an account no more than once a week.

How to permanently delete an Instagram account

It’s a bit more complicated to delete the page permanently. You can go to the Deletion page by clicking this link or using the following instructions:

Using your phone:

1. On the Instagram app, go to the Settings menu and click Help.
2. Go to the Help Center and click Manage Your Account (or type ‘Delete Account’ in the search bar).
3. Select Delete Your Account and open the ‘How do I delete my Instagram account?’ tab.
4. Instagram will prompt you to go to the deletion page in the ‘To request the permanent deletion of your account‘ instruction block.
5. Indicate the reason for deleting your account by selecting the appropriate option from the drop-down list and clicking Finish.
6. Confirm the action by entering your password.
7. Your Instagram account has been deleted.

Through the web version:

1. On the Instagram.com website, in the lower horizontal menu click Help.
2. In the Help Center menu, go to Manage Your Account and then click Delete Your Account.
3. Instagram will prompt you to go to the deletion page in the ‘To request the permanent deletion of your account‘ instruction block.
4. Indicate the reason for deleting your account by selecting the appropriate option from the drop-down list and clicking the finish button.
5. Confirm the action by entering your password.
6. Your Instagram account has been deleted.

It should be noted that after you have confirmed the deletion of the page, the profile will still be visible on Instagram for another month. Thus, the data can be restored by re-logging into the system. To do this, just enter the profile name and password. If you do not do it within a month, your account will be automatically permanently deleted.

In 2021, Instagram announced that it was taking the LIKE hiding experiment to a global level. AIN.UA noticed the option in its personal Instagram profile and shared how to hide the likes counter. Read more about this in our article.

How to hide Like counts on Instagram

In a nutshell:

• Select the photo where you want to hide the likes
• Click on the triple dot icon at the top of the photo
• Tap “Hide like count”
• If it is a video, the user hides not only the number of likes but also the number of views

Details

Users have two new options: to hide the number of likes on personal photos and disable the counter on the posts of other users. It’s noteworthy that the user can’t hide all the likes on personal photos at once – they can enable the feature in the settings of each image. Here’s how to do it:

• Open your Instafram prifile
• Click on the photo where you want to hide likes
• Click the triple dot icon at the top of the photo
• Tap “Hide like count”

You can also hide the counter while posting a photo. To do this, go to “Settings” and enable the option “Hide Like and View Counts.”

Besides, you can hide the number of likes of other users in Instagram settings. In this case, the user won’t be able to see the number of likes, while the feed will still be generated based on potentially interesting posts for a particular person.

• Go to Settings and select Privacy
• Click on Posts
• Enable the option “Hide Like and View Counts”

Why it’s interesting

Facebook, which owns Instagram, says the feature of hiding the likes will help focus users on the content rather than studying its popularity. For this reason, the company is actively working on its implementation, particularly on Facebook. The preliminary testing showed that not all users need such a feature – for example, some of them use data to determine the popularity or relevance of their content. Therefore the company decided to provide some variants of settings.

It is also interesting that Instagram has not announced the official launch of this feature. In April 2021, it became known only about the start of global testing. Users who received access to this option were promised to send a notification, but our journalist has not received any notifications.

How it works

The service analyzes 32 indicators from the moment when a page was created: the number of posts, friends` activity, the ratio of followers to active page visitors, and other qualitative and quantitative engagement metrics. The result is calculated individually based on 100% performance capabilities, and the user is ranked from 1 to 100.

If the score is less than 60, it is early days to talk about influence. Obtained 90 points shows that a person has all chances to become an ambassador of a well-known brand.

The project aims to show that everyone has influence and can monetize their social media. The company explains: “It is not necessary to have a million followers to get a high ranking. It is enough to be active in a social media and make interesting content which readers like.”

How can you find out your ranking

Follow the link and log in to your account. In a few seconds, the algorithm will calculate all the indicators and give you the result.

Here you can also see your level of activity in social media over the past 30 days.

Besides obtaining the statistics, the user can see the ranking of friends and which place among them they occupy.

About the Project

Myscore was created as part of the Publicfast influence marketing platform and was launched in 2014. Back then, only Facebook was taken for calculation of scores with only a couple of parameters: the number of friends and followers, likes, comments, and reposts, together with the number of publications done over the last 30 days.

Therefore, the platform was closed for updating and later relaunched after advancement of the following indicators: the AI was improved, the number of analyzed indicators was increased (there are now 32 of them) and Instagram was added.

Dynamics of growth of audiences of social media:

The Ukrainian Facebook ad-reachable audience now totals 22 million.

Ukrainian users are googling Facebook less and less, but the authors of the research attribute this to the fact that most already have the application:

The compilers of the research report that over the past six months, the number of Facebook-users has decreased in six regional centers, but social media continues to grow in smaller cities.

Facebook is more popular than Instagram in almost all regions.

The highest Instagram penetration is in Kyiv region (51%), Odesa region (42%) and Dnipropetrovsk region (41%). The lowest – in Kirovohrad region (25%):

Instagram is ahead of Facebook among Ukrainian users of 29 years old and younger.

Among the 18-23 age group, the penetration rate can be higher than 100% (because young users may have several accounts).

Femail users continue to make the most of Facebook’s Ukrainian audience.

Most Ukrainian users visit Facebook via their mobile phones. Only 600,000 users access the social media from desktops, and 11.55 million only via mobile devices (and this number is up slightly compared to last July).

The World Intellectual Property Organization is one of the specialized agencies of the United Nations that deals with the protection of intellectual property.

What’s happened?

On June 4, 2020, the organization received a complaint from ByteDance about the disputed domain name. The domain name <tiktok.com.ua> was (and still is) registered on the individual Alexey Dubinin. In the Ukrainian registers, the company “ЦПК Онлайн” is registered on the entrepreneur with the same name, whose main activity is an organization of conventions and trade shows, including online ones.

According to Whois verification services, the domain was created on May 17, 2019, and registered with a hosting provider Hosting Ukraine. TikTok became available to users outside China also in 2019.

The WIPO noted that the rights to the TikTok trademark belong to the complainant and that the latter has invested a lot of money in the promotion of this trademark, including on the Internet. This trademark is known worldwide and was known before the registration of the domain in Ukraine. The domain name is identical to the trademark name, which belongs to ByteDance. Therefore, the Chinese company stated that Dubinin had no right to register such a domain name. However, the respondent did not respond to the requests of the WIPO.

Decision

In the end, the WIPO decided that the rights to the disputed domain should be transferred to the owner of TikTok. There is no claim or decision in the Ukrainian registry of court decisions that would challenge Dubinin’s rights to this domain.

Why was the dispute about the domain name not heard in the Ukrainian court? According to Hostmaster, starting from December 19, 2019, in the Ukrainian public domain <com.ua> there is a procedure of pre-trial settlement of domain disputes according to the UDRP (Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy).

Under this procedure, domain disputes are considered by the WIPO arbitrators (including Ukrainian citizens among them) at the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center. This process does not affect the transfer of the case to court (in this case, the consideration by the WIPO stops). This procedure is mandatory for many top-level domains (.com, .org, .net).

Let us recall that there was a similar case in Ukrainian jurisprudence. Google challenged the right to own the top-level domain google.ua. The Ukrainian company that registered it was called “ГОУ ОГЛЕ” (GO OGLE LLC), it received the rights to the domain in 2007, and in 2010 the court decided to transfer the domain to Google.

AIN.UA’s editor has contacted the meme’s author (who chose to remain unnamed) administering the @in_ukraine_we_dont_say accounts on Instagram and Twitter and asked her about how she came up with the idea, how fast the community grows, and where she gets new ideas for her posts.

How the @in_ukraine_we_dont_say was born

I am an active Twitter user, that is my favourite social network. As for the “we don’t say” meme, it has been around on Twitter in different variations since long ago; it has had various flavors, ideas – some funny, some beautiful, curious, whatever – but there has been nothing about Ukraine there.

On the Independence Day of Ukraine, I tried to think up some cool tweet about the Ukrainian language; I fancied something beautiful and patriotic, but nothing occured to me except for funny things, because, as my friends say, funny things are all I can do. This is how the first joking tweets came to be; and there were so many ideas, but I did not want to post 10 tweets to my account, and so, I created a separate page.

Of course, no one suspected that this would succeed – I rather did it for fun. I came up with an idea, and I just wanted to express it. This is microbloggers’ common trouble – it is not enough for them to tell the joke to their friends – they have to tell it to all on Twitter!

In the first three hours, the Twitter account gained about 500 followers. My friends advised me to create an Instagram account. This was just what they said, “There are few people on Twitter, and you will write it all just for fun. On the Gram, you can enable at least some sort of monetization, if the account becomes popular, you can promote something helpful, etc.”

Where the ideas come from

I receive 30% of the ideas from my followers (those on Twitter are tagged in the publications). The other 70% are just quotes, words, songs, and situations from my life, the life of my friends and family. I mean, essentially, this is all that floats around any ordinary Ukrainian; but here it is written down, that is why it must have stricken a chord for many people – because it is lifelike – or not so. I don’t know 🙂

Now, I am far from Ukraine and my loved ones, and I feel a 70 lvl yearning. A typical Ukrainian heartache. I miss my granddad, my grandma and her phrases, those situations, songs, that lifestyle – Ukraine in general. So, this page was rather created with that kind of emotions.

The time that I put into @in_ukraine_we_dont_say does not count, because this is all being done on inspiration. I am an ordinary person; I am young; I work at the office, marketing department; I have a Twitter blog; I love Ukrainian music, my homeland – Dnieper Ukraine, and cute animals. Nothing extraordinary, totally like everyone else.

How the community has grown

I created the Twitter and Instagram accounts on August 24. The one on Twitter grew quite rapidly, gathering about 2,000 followers in one day. Now it has 9,000 followers.

The InThe Instagram account gathered about a thousand followers on the very first day, and in 8 days, there were 51,000 of them.

The average post reach is approximately 50,000 views. The top post has almost 100,000 views. The second most popular one, 70,000.

It is like a miracle. But I would not say this has happened by a stroke of luck. From the very beginning my friends, microbloggers, helped the idea to survive and come to fruition. A casual phrase, “Hi, I’m creating a page. Please RT something, if you like it” to the four Ukrainian Twitter “thousanders” – @almost_bergman, @zhlobiha, @hromtastic, @womansadevil – and we set the ball rolling.

Every day there were 4,000 to 7,000 new followers on Instagram, as well as constant reposts, reposts, reposts… A whole lot of pleasant things in direct messages, but some negative stuff also. People were indignant about “ukraine” with no initial capital, against the backdrop of the war with Russia. I got some really emotional messages saying that I was “waging a war on my own country.”

The reality is, by contrast, that the page aims to promote everything Ukrainian, as something cool, cute, something really unique and funny (in a good way). Our nation has a wonderful sense of humor, which we have retained throughout our sad history. In my opinion, this is truly a gem, one of the top Ukrainian strengths – the ability to endure everything with a humorous attitude.

Anyway, there were, of course, more pleasant things and gratitude than negativity.

Monetization

We have already had one advertising collaboration with a pizza chain. I made a mistake in the post, writing “піцца” instead of “піца” (Ukr. pizza), which was pointed out by some 300 people. Well, now all of our readers will know how to write “pizza” in Ukrainian ??

We have also had a collab with Book Forum Lviv, but on a “post for post” basis.

There are many advertising offers, but we do not want to stray away from the concept, and not every ad fits it. And I do not want to advertize everything.

Now, we are preparing another collaboration, with a stronger cultural aspect. It is awesome to have an opportunity to do good and promote some cool Ukrainian stuff.

If people lose interest in the page, we will be glad that at least there has been such a chance, so now we are trying to make the most of it.

How to create a Facebook Avatar

• Open the Facebook application on your smartphone and tap the menu (three horizontal lines at the bottom of the screen).
• Scroll down and tap “See More.”
• Tap on “Avatars.”

• Create a character: choose your skin tone, face and eye shape, hairstyle, clothes, and other details.
• Tap the checkbox and save your avatar.

Facebook is considering extending the capabilities of Avatars to be used as a profile or group pictures.

At the end of September 2019, it became known that Nimses, one of the most sensational and mysterious Ukrainian startups, is having financial troubles. Since January 2019, Nimses began to delay payment of salaries, as several employees reported to AIN.UA. The startup itself confirms that there are delays, but all financial obligations will be fulfilled after raising a new round of financing.

Despite financial troubles, the management encourages developers to do overtime and kicks off expensive advertising campaigns. “Surrealism, manipulation, and laundering of investors’ money,” this is how one of the startup’s former employees who wished to remain anonymous describes the atmosphere prevailing in Nimses. Not only employees were left without the promised money, but also startup partners, in particular, sellers on the Goods platform. However, the project is not officially closed, they continue hiring people.

AIN.UA editor explains who stands behind Nimses, where the money came from, and why the mysterious startup has not yet become a big story.

On hype

In the summer of 2017, Uanet and Runet were teeming with discussions about the unusual Nimses App. It suddenly blew up the top charts of the App Store and Play Market as either a social network, or a dating app, or maybe a crypto startup. Fancy black interface, evangelists like Ivan Dorn and Onuka, articles in popular magazines. Social networks were filled with referral links, and the SMS verification gateway was collapsing from all the verifications by phone number.

Everyone used Nimses in their own way. Some used it as an Instagram and just posted photos, some used it as a dating app, like Tinder, and others enthusiastically collected nims as a game currency.

In fact, the startup was trying to offer users a ‘multi-use superlike.’ This super like was represented by ‘nims’ – the in-app currency, which was accrued to each user every minute from the moment of registration in the application. It was planned that users would be able to buy real goods and services in exchange for nims and likes expressed in nims would become a more tangible manifestation of sympathy. In addition, thanks to the geolocation component, it would be easier for users to get acquainted with people who are physically close to them.

In August 2017, Nimses representative Yegor Okhotnikov in an interview with AIN.UA said that the service had over 3 million users in 13 countries. Also, 20,000 partners expressed their willingness to partner up with the company. The startup paraded across Ukraine and the CIS and was preparing to meet a wave of traffic from 70 countries around the globe, including the United States.

Digital Utopia

All those Nimses users needed to do is simply live their lives and accumulate nims. Over time, the startup promised that it would be possible to buy anything for nims, and at a fixed rate: 1 dollar = 1,000 nimes. The goods and services were to be provided by partners who in exchange received data on the whereabouts of users and could trap them with their advertisements directly in front of their stores.

The business came to Nimses even before they launched the Goods platform. Shops began to sell fancy clothes, accessories, coffee and muffins, and even marketing services offline in exchange for nims. Having a couple of thousand nims “in your pocket” could buy a fashionable sweatshirt from FINCH and a fanny pack from Vsi. Svoi, have a coffee in KavaBulki or order pizza in PizzaPlace. You just need to simply come to the place and transfer the required amount to the seller’s account.

Real money was excluded from this scheme. The question was how will Nimses earn money? And the company had the answer: over time, the nims were supposed to turn into a fiat currency, which could be cashed. And it looked like the team was going to deliver.

But something went wrong.

Marketing Tool and the Human Factor

Like any other popular social network, Nimses was filled with spam accounts, the only task of which was mining nims and fraud. Of course, such accounts were of no value to advertisers, moreover, nims value began to drop, jeopardizing the entire startup model. To tackle this problem the team introduced a verification system, giving permission to use nims only to those users who could confirm their existence in reality: for this, it was necessary to get the support of 10 other users who have already received verification.

But selfish miners invented more and more ways to accumulate nims. Soon, they began to sell verifications. Social networks were flooded with ads like “Verification for nims, all details in PM.” For a couple of thousand nims, any bot could be approved by a user with the status of “Human”.

The idea of ​​making talented people rich was also unsuccessful. The “Angels” in Nimses were getting fewer super likes than ordinary hotties who were ready to share photos of their body curves and selling even more revealing photos in exchange for nims. Millions of users eventually abandoned the service.

Nimses partners were initially satisfied with the collaboration. This social network became a good marketing tool: brands received impressive coverage and targeted “barter” actions. As a spillover effect, they got media references about Nimses.

“We presented almost all the basic goods from the store at the Central Department Store, and at that time it was the most effective advertising of our brand,” said Kateryna Byakova, founder of FINCH. According to her, the campaign in Nimses paid off better than those on Facebook or Instagram and got a long tail. The FINCH significantly increased brand awareness and customers continued to call and come to the store long after they stopped selling goods for nims.

Other companies also told AIN.UA about their fruitful cooperation with Nimses.

But there were some subtle nuances. The sellers’ nim exchange rate was different from the official one. Small items that cost a couple of bucks, like a USB cable, could cost hundreds of thousands of nims. A branded T-shirt would cost a million. Several times the company tried to adjust the rate to the originally declared 1,000 nims per dollar, but in response, sellers simply removed their goods from the Goods platform, provoking user dissatisfaction. The administration of the service was forced to give up and allow the trading platform to set its own rules.

Soon the sellers decided that the benefits in the form of advertising weren’t enough for them – they wanted real money. In response, Nimses launched the Exchange where you could exchange nims for money, but the amount had to be not less than 80 million nims (for which they promised 15,000 euros).

New mechanics

At first, Nimses regularly delighted users with announcements, but each time it greatly delayed its releases.

The team promised to launch the Goods platform in June 2017, but it only started working in Kyiv in September. The delay was justified by technical modifications, which were needed to be done due to the unexpectedly rapid growth of the Nimses user base. Only in December, the Goods section was launched in other big Ukrainian cities.

In June 2017, the administration of the service promised to launch a legal music service, where you could make payments in nims. The launch took place indeed, but almost a year later – in April 2018.

The team became more careful and stopped making further announcements, notifying about the changes only after the launch. All in all, in 2018, there was little information from Nimses. The members of the initial team – SMO Andrey Sirchenko, speaker Yegor Okhotnikov, and others – that AIN.UA previously communicated with were one by one leaving the company.

By that time, the hype wave settled down. However, the platform itself was constantly changing. Nimses tested more and more new mechanics that appeared and disappeared suddenly, without warning, which completely perplexed users and partners.

The triumph of the human ego

In February 2019, the company introduced a major update, and the initial goals have changed dramatically. Earlier they dreamed at Nimses of giving users the opportunity to show each other that they care, but now the service decided to switch to the good old self-absorption. “All eyes are on you. You are in the center. The world is shocked. And life really will never be the same,” said the newsletter describing the update.

Now, the status of an angel could be acquired not only by talented users who were making the world a better place with their creativity but anyone who collected 1,000+ nominations from other users (by the way, the nominations quickly turned into the same scheme as verification in its time). The “Angels” were becoming curved girls and sociable guys, rather than representatives of the creative class.

Despite the fact that this version was supposed to be final, Nimses continues to change every month. If you remove the application from your smartphone, and after some time download it again, you won’t be able to immediately find out what is happening here. One thing is obvious – it is still alive and still has users.

So Secret, Much NDA

Сompanies in Ukraine prefer to keep things private. The owners usually don’t like to go public about anything so as not to attract the attention of tax and other inspection authorities.

At Nimses, privacy is part of the corporate code. Owners and top management created an aura of mystery around the startup, which performs two functions simultaneously. The first function is purely marketing. The more they hide something from people, the stronger the intrigue: though people are not that interested in Nimses, the intrigue has not disappeared completely.

The second function of secrecy is protection. The less they know about the company, the less vulnerable the company is. Therefore, any collaboration with Nimses begins with the signing of a non-disclosure agreement. This applies to everyone: partners, employees, and even candidates (they are allowed to be interviewed only after signing an NDA). AIN.UA learned it from the company’s ex-employee Andrey (the names of respondents are changed hereinafter).

“Product Company. Secret Startup. NDA project. These are the nicknames that the company’s recruiters chose for their headhunting, ” describes the hiring process Andrey.

Employees are not allowed to specify Nimses as their place of work. You can work only through the corporate network or using a VPN. Everyone had an MDM profile installed on their working computers.

Ukrainian businesses that sold their goods on the Goods platform for nims also signed the NDA. “We have a non-disclosure agreement [with Nimses], so I can’t comment. I can say anonymously that we, as well as others, are waiting for payment,” one of the sellers told AIN.UA. According to him, they have been waiting since January 2019.

One cannot enter Nimses office from the street. Those few people who turned out to be privileged enough to get inside were met by company employees in the courtyard and then led inside. The office itself is spacious, modern, expensively equipped and decorated with artificial plants. The employees feel comfortable there and get delicious and healthy free food. However, according to Andrey, recently there have been problems with all that.

But this wasn’t their biggest disappointment. According to Andrey, the processes at Nimses turned out to be the worst of all in his career: the developers were constantly given unrealistic deadlines without clear justification, and if they failed, the management would put pressure on them and demanded to work faster, sometimes in a boorish manner.

Deadlines were given names like “Martial Law scope” to emphasize importance and urgency. And all of this in face of constant product pivot when the application had to be rewritten almost from scratch. As a result, the team was forced to work overtime, and, according to Andrey, they weren’t paid for that.

And employees’ reward for their efforts was supposed to be the awareness of being on “top of the product development chain” and being a part of the company’s ambitious mission: victory over the banking system, cryptocurrencies, and social networks. In the end, the most persistent employees were to find themselves as a part of a “billion-dollar company that has received worldwide recognition and changed the lives of people.”

C-level and investments

Information about the owners and investors of the project is also classified. This is all we could get from the sources:

• David Mironovsky – co-founder, CEO and chief ideologist of the project;
• Victor Strelbitsky – СОО;
• Vladimir Milman – CFO.

Andrey Boborykin, who replaced Yegor Okhotnikov, is responsible for communications in the company. Six months ago, he quit and launched his own business. Okhotnikov refused to comment on the situation and climate in Nimses that prevailed during his time at the startup.

The representative of the company in matters of intellectual property – Yulia Skochilo. The startup itself is registered in the U.S., in the state of Delaware, but the rights to the trademark are also registered in Ukraine. Today, according to YouControl, in Ukraine Mironovsky owns only the company named “Big Caps”, which sells tea, coffee, and hot drinks wholesale and retail. Another beneficiary is Strelbitsky. (Update: in the first version of the article we mentioned that the rights to TM Nimses were transferred to Yulia Skochilo from MIronovsky. It is a mistake: Skochilo is the representative of the company in matters of intellectual property.

We couldn’t find out who were the investors in the company that has been working on a startup for several years. As AIN.UA came to know, one of the investors is a Ukrainian investor and entrepreneur, director of Kvazar-Micro Evgeny Utkin. He confirmed to AIN.UA the reliability of this information: Utkin has been investing in the startup since 2017.

“I’ve been a shareholder, angel investor, and strategic advisor to the company since 2017. Almost half of my time is spent developing the company, but not its operations. Nimses is a very innovative, modern company that has presented a number of completely pioneering ideas to the world in two years. “Time is money,” unconditional basic income, impeccable design, innovative blockchain, temples, showcases. All this came to the market at once, there were mistakes and failures. Such a turbulent agile that is possible only in Ukraine. The company has been developing on a scale surprising even for Silicon Valley, but still from Kyiv with very limited access to any financing,” Utkin answers the question of why he invested in the company.

AIN.UA found out that Russian investors are also involved, as well as an employee of Ukrainian ICU fund: this is his private investment (Updated: the first version of the article indicated that one of the investors was the ICU fund. In fact, this is a private investment of one of the ICU fund employees, but not the fund itself).

According to former employees, they promise to pay the unpaid salary at Nimses after attracting a new round of investment. Representatives of the social network confirmed that they are working on attracting investments, but there are no details: “Wait for the press releases,” Nimses responded shortly. Utkin assured that the startup will also pay off all employees and partners, and the startup itself is busy right now attracting new investments.

The editors of AIN.UA couldn’t find anybody in the market who heard about Nimses looking for financing right now: local business angels and investors are not aware of such a request. “There is no upcoming funding, these are empty promises (“at the final stage”, “there will be news next Tuesday”, etc.) last since January and never stopped,” commented a former employee Roman. According to one of the Ukrainian investors in an interview with AIN.UA, no one will publicly give them another round: this is a closed company without a clear monetization model. And Nimses, in turn, will not take a public round, as it has not done it before.

When the problems started

According to AIN.UA sources, salary delays began in January 2019. At first, they paid in full or partially, but by the summer payments to employees had ceased.

Vladimir hasn’t been paid for two months; Andrey says that the average debt is for 3-4 months of work. “The remaining employees have not yet been paid. Debt repayments do not occur either,” he says. Nimses confirmed the existence of debts and added that they have a plan in place to repay them.

Partners are also waiting for the repayment. In one of the intermediate versions of the product (if you can call them that), merchants were promised 15,000 euros for the “infinim” (about 80 million nims as of October 2018). Then Boborykin told AIN.UA that some merchants had successfully converted their infinims. In order to do that it was necessary to go through the verification procedure – in other words, to verify that the nims were earned in accordance with the rules of the platform.

One of the merchants at Goods, who wished to remain anonymous, said that, like many others, he was still expecting payment from Nimses.

“We went through all the “honesty verifications” of the earned nims in February and March. The last time we talked about payments with support was in May when we were asked to be patient. Recently we wrote to support again. There hasn’t been an answer yet,” he said. His page managed to collect two infinims, that is, about 160 million nims. He still didn’t get the promised 15,000 euros for the first infinim from Nimses. The merchant was no longer applying for the conversion of the second since he didn’t see the point in doing so. Since May 2019, his page has suspended work at Goods. During the time of cooperation with the service, he sold for nims about UAH 100,000 worth of goods. Nimses said that all payments are in line and the startup will pay off all debts in the future.

The editor of AIN.UA also contacted the company Zvuk, provider of streaming music for Nimses (the parties haven’t disclosed the terms of their cooperation) and asked to confirm or deny the existence of Nimses debts to Zvuk. “We have no problem with Nimses. We don’t comment on other issues/questions,” answered the Head of Partnerships at Zvuk Edward Davydov.

Despite financial problems, in June 2019, Nimses paid for expensive advertising integration with the most popular blogger on YouTube: a video with Nimses advertising was released on the PewDiePie channel. Felix Chelberg devoted more than a minute at the beginning of his video to the Ukrainian service. Also, a link to the application can be found in the description under the video. The video collected 6 million views.

Nobody knows the exact rates for Chelberg’s ad placements, but earlier he confirmed in one of the podcasts that he makes about $ 3,400 per hour off his videos. A post in PewDiePie’s Instagram costs $70,000. According to Nimses ex-employees, they paid for the marketing campaign involving the famous streamer with a loan from a private person. By that time, Nimses was already experiencing problems with paying salaries and affiliate conversions through the Nimses Exchange.

(Non)massive layoffs

Nimses refutes the fact of massive layoffs, “The employee turnover within the company is no different from the average on the market both in terms of quantitative indicators and in terms of reasons,” Nimses noted.

However, according to one of the interlocutors, the layoffs did take place. “A few people were fired from the development and product management teams (one of the first people on the project), because they were considered “ineffective” according to the freshly hired “vice president of engineering,” the source said.

“David, CEO of the company, has a very strange idea of ​​how to do business. It feels like he’s just trying to melt human resources into a product’s popularity without thinking about anything that might be common sense,” says Vladimir.

The exact number of employees in the company is not disclosed, so it is difficult to conclude how massive this case is. Nevertheless, according to Andrey, the company’s staff has shrunk by more than half. Those who demand their salary are offered to leave and sign a non-disclosure agreement and a completion deed, promising to pay money in the near future. And the rest are told to embrace for the next tremendous amount of work that needs to be done “yesterday.”

“At the same time, people were still hired even with a hole in the budget, and they continue to hire people,” emphasizes Andrey.

While employees suffer from overtime and lack of money, top management of Nimses, according to Roman, “does not suffer from any lack of finances. But maybe it’s just a coincidence, and they have income on the side,” he says.

According to employee observations, Nimses lacks a product strategy and monetization model: supposedly no one understood the company’s product from the very beginning. Four years passed, but nobody can still understand. It is not surprising, given the number of pivots (since the last major update, the interface has changed dramatically again). But if in 2016 the misunderstanding caused mystical delight among users, whereas in 2019 it caused more of a confusion. The promises laid out in the description of the application, “recognition, glory, success, influence, and power” sound unconvincing.

Nimses still has a “tail” of user activity following the end of the hype wave: according to SimilarWeb, the average DAU for Android in the second half of 2018 in Ukraine is 8,500, and in Russia – 10,500, and MAU, according to a former employee, for the same period amounted to about 200,000. But if the company’s past successes in PR are unconditional, then the future of the “multi-use superlike ” is now in question.

Together, they decided to build a social network for neighbors. There you can get to know those who live in the neighborhood and join groups.

“This way it’s easier for neighbors to work towards common goals, whether they want to get better services from local managing company or to warn neighbors about the theft of parcels or other things. The neighbors immediately send each other pictures of the suspects and keep watch together. It’s the so-called ‘distributed electronic watchdog’ that knows everything about everyone,” Andrii explains.

Currently, their product is at the preseed stage, and they already have their first users. Programmers in Ukraine, London, and Kazakhstan are engaged in the development, but so far the application doesn’t generate income. The team plans to invest money raised from the angels in marketing and development.

In 2018, the team also participated in the Y Combinator Startup School program. In January 2019, they raised the first round of investments and began attracting users in one of the districts of London. The startup’s office is also located in London, but they are planning to open a representative office in Ukraine. According to Andrii, at this time the startup has an agreement with a British non-profit network boasting 2.8 million users according to which their product would be used by neighbors that are members of this organization.

According to him, Kateryna is the media space expert, the speaker of all conferences on disinformation in recent years.

“We believe that this is the best choice that Facebook could make. This choice has been known for some time from unofficial sources… We hope that after this appointment, the rude and unprofessional attitude of Facebook to Ukraine and Ukrainians will finally stop,” he wrote.

Editors of AIN.UA awaiting Kateryna’s comment on her appointment and new responsibilities.

What’s new?

On February 13, the team made an official release and presented new Nimses for the first time in a year and a half. It is reported that in the new release, Nimses economy locked in a full cycle.

More nims = more coverage

The basic concept of the project remains unchanged: from the moment of registration, for each minute of life, the user receives 1 “nim”. However, the influence of the “nims” balance on everything that the user does has changed. Now the number of nims on the account determines the coverage of the user’s posts.

In simple words, the more nims – the wider the scope.

Each user now sees the ratio of his/her balance of nims with the number of people who see his/her next post.

Dominim

In Nimses, a new unit of value appears, or, as it is called in the social network itself “dominim”. One dominim is equal to one year of life in nims, and anyone who has accumulated 683,748 nims can buy it. Also, the possibility of buying dominims for “fiat” money inside the application starts.

What is dominim needed for? Dominim adds coverage to the user’s records, and also visually identifies those who have one, but the main attraction of the dominim is that this is the only way to own the Temple (you can read about what is Temple in our previous article).

How to become a Master of the Temple?

As explained in the project, Temples are the basis of the Nimses economy. Millions of nims are made at Temple every day, a significant proportion of which is contributions from Temple residents. Now each user has the opportunity to become a Master of the Temple and take all the contributions for him/herself.

The cost of the occupation of the Temple around the world will start with one dominim. The user will be able to remain a Master until no one offers more dominims for possession of the Temple. Depending on the number of inhabitants, some Temples will be much more attractive than others, because the cost of densely populated Temples will increase.

Communities

In the new version of Nimses, a Community appeared. This is about the same as in other social networks, but with the proviso: the founders of the communities earn nims. After all, each new subscriber is +1 nim per day.

Nominations

Now in Nimses, users can nominate each other for Angel status. To become an Angel, you need to collect 1,033 nominations. Angel status automatically increases the visibility of user content and, accordingly, its coverage.

As emphasized in Nimses, today, the nims accrued for life minutes are only an unconditional basic income, and to participate in all aspects of the project’s life, you need as much as possible nims. Here users have several earning scenarios: bring new users to the system; create themed Communities; collect subscribers and become an angel; sell goods and services in Nimses Goods; buy dominims for “fiat” money.

What was removed?

In the last Nimses release, the team tested the so-called infinims. It was an “entity” equal to one human life — 120 years or 63,115,200 nims. To buy an infinim, it was also necessary to pay 30% of the user fee, it turns out a little more than 82 million nims. For each infinim, Nimses promised to pay its owner as much as 15,000 euros.

This was used by many merchants at the Goods site. It was only necessary to sell the goods for 82 million nims and get the income in foreign currency. In October 2018, we were informed by Nimses that some merchants were thus able to convert their stocks of nims.

With the disappearance of the infinim, the Goods ecosystem has noticeably changed. If earlier it was possible to buy a lot of different goods especially for nims, now many merchants do not want to give away their goods this way: mostly “discounts” are left in the market – when you pay 50% of the cost with them, and you transfer the rest to the real hryvnia.

You can see what the social network was like at the beginning of its existence and compare it with what it is like today in our article about the first release of Nimses.

Since then, much has changed, including the design of the interface and its structure.

“All attention is on you. You are in the center. The world is shocked. And life really will not be the same,” this is how the changes were commented on in the mailing list to users on September 21.

If we believe the administrators of the service, this is the final build of Nimses. It has a lot of new features, among which financial ones are announced. For example, users are promised the opportunity to convert nims into real money. Previously, the service introduced a buyout of nims only from business accounts, and for 2 million nims were going to pay $100. However, this was an experiment and it did not last for a long time.

The course for merchants has changed since then, however, nobody knows in which way, and Nimses refused to comment on it (by the way, it is still not known who are the sponsors of the project). The merchants themselves also do not disclose exact figures, however, they claim that it is profitable for them to sell on the site.

Let’s see what has changed in Nimses for users and partners.

Photos, statuses and new tariffs

All navigation has moved to the top of the screen: here you can move between sections of the Goods, “temple” and “city”. We will get back to the Goods a little later, but for now let’s start with the Temples.

How UI Nimses looked from the very beginning, you can see here.

All cities in Nimses are divided into temples, or districts. The user’s identity to a specific temple (citizenship) is determined automatically based on its geolocation data.

In the Temples tab, you can now see not only all users who are nearby, but also their messages, which are available in a separate tab. Apparently, this function was made as something like statuses, with only 120 characters allocated to the text, almost like on Twitter. However, in fact, it reminds more of a bulletin board: someone offers verification for nims (recall, unverified users cannot use the Goods and the music service), someone is looking for a company to go to the movies, and someone is looking for people who would “share some nims” with him/her…

You can comment and like these statuses, just like regular photo posts, but you can publish them for free, while publishing a photo costs from 50 to 100 nims (depending on the source of the photo the price is 50 nims for photo taken with camera, 100 nims for photo uploaded from the gallery).

Moving around the city or country, you can subscribe to non-native temples in order to follow the lives of users in those temples, and it will cost 3 nims a day. In the “City” tab you can see all publications of users nearby, or publications of users you are subscribed to in a separate tab.

In the nearest future they also promise to update the chat interface.

“Infinims” or 15,000 euros for “life”

Each temple now has a “master”. He/she gets the treasury of temple for the day. The treasury is formed from transfers of Citizens of this temple (living in the area of ​​users). To become a “master” of the temple and get all the nims from the treasury to your account, you need to spend one quota of infinim, but this opportunity was not available to me because, obviously, I didn’t have enough nims on this quota.

By the way, ‘infinim’ is another new problem in Nimses. If ‘nim’ is the minute of a person’s life, then an ‘infinim’ is a whole life, or 120 years to be exact. In Nimses, it was estimated that 120 years in ‘nims’ is 63,115,200 nims. If you add another 30% of the user contribution to this amount, you get a little more than 82 million nims, that’s what you can exchange for the cherished infinim.

What for? For money. For the Infinim, Nimses promises to pay as much as 15,000 euros.

According to Andriy Boborykin, who is responsible for communications in Nimses today, it’s the infinims that are to be converted into euros through the Nimses Exchange platform. This offer is valid for both users and merchants. That is, in order to withdraw their expulsion to Nimses in foreign currency, they need to accumulate 82 million nims.

“In the Goods tab you can see the number of purchases by good, the activity there is high and there are enough opportunities to earn infinim, especially at the current stage, when the competition is relatively low,” says Boborykin.

What happens in Nimses Goods

Marketplace Nimses Goods remained almost unchanged on the outside. The interface remains the same, except that filters were added so that users can select products or discounts.

The buyer must deliver their receipt within 24 hours after purchase.

Among the first business partners who came to the Nimses platform were several well-known brands, in particular, “Vsi.Svoi” and FINCH. Moreover, they launched sales for nims before the launch of the Goods. Today, large sellers cannot be found in the Goods tab, mainly you can find goods and services from individual traders displayed there.

There are proposals from the indie brand Bee’s Knees which is the only clothes available, this is an atelier for sewing designer clothes, whose products, in addition to Nimses Goods, can only be found on Instagram. There are also craft goods like leather and textile covers, wallets and cardholders.

Many offers come from dropshippers. These are Chinese goods of a very different profile, starting from USB cables and banana bags to cheap watches like the ones OLX is filled with. There are also typographic products (notebooks, photo magnets, posters), educational courses, books, and, of course, food.

Proposals in the Goods tab are not sorted by geolocation, meaning the user from Kyiv sees goods and services from all over Ukraine. There are even offers from our eastern neighbors, for example, the residence “Two yews” in the Krasnodar Territory offers to stay in their guest house or take a steam bath at the bathhouse in exchange for nims.

How profitable is it to sell in Nimses Goods? Sellers’ reviews

For the first business partners, Nimses became an exclusively marketing platform, moreover, quite effective one. Even before the launch of the Goods tab, “Vsi.Svoi” released a special limited collection “I am Mine. Time is Yours,” which included caps, T-shirts, banana bags and iPhones covers. They sold all of these goods for nims, according to the User to User model.

“All the clothes for nims were sold out in just over an hour. However, the prices we set were just a convention: as long as it’s impossible to cash out, this activity is good as a way to increase our brand’s awareness,” the organizer and founder of the market and the “Vsi.Svoi” store Anna Lukovkina told back then.

FINCH also launched the stock before the opening of the Goods tab, and then for some time it was present on the Nimses trading platform. “We represented almost all of the basic products from the corner in TsUM, and this was at that time the most effective advertising for our brand,” says brand founder Kateryna Byakova.

FINCH offered its models with discounts up to 70%. The basic things of the brand cost an average of 1,500 UAH, and if you paid with 20,000 nims (equivalent to a falafel or a pair of coffee from the first sellers), you could buy them for 400 UAH. “But given the marginality and the TsUM commission, it would be imprudent to continue selling on the same conditions on an ongoing basis,” Byakova explained: in a couple of weeks, using the hybrid scheme of hryvnia + nims, FINCH sold no more than 50 products.

“Economically, this “almost” sampling turned out to be more justified than investing in an advertisement on Facebook or Instagram, where getting into the audience is more difficult and, in most cases, there is no conversion of likes or comments into the purchase. For a couple of weeks, we sold no more than 50 products using a hybrid scheme of hryvnias and nims, but after the goods were removed, we continued to receive calls and have people come to the corner for a long time. In general, we profited.”

What about today? For Anzor Abuladze and his coffee-to-coffee network partners, “KavaBulki” Nimses is not only an advertising tool, but also a platform for sales. Today, KavaBulki is one of the most active sellers on Nimses. Almost the entire range is available for nims.

According to Anzor, guests with checks from the Goods can make up to 20% of the daily visitors of “KavaBulki”. “During the summer, their number was less, it was the time of the outflow of students, who make up at least half of such clients. The location of the coffeeshop matters: the least of all guests with the Nimses app are located on Dorogozhychi, most of them are located on Lev Tolstoy, in the center of the city,” Anzor says. Some of the guests from Nimses have become regular customers of the network.

Recently, Nimses offered “KavaBulki” to test a new advertising tool on the platform: the user is invited to see an advertisement, and he/she is getting a certain number of nims for this. It looks like this:

To get nims for advertising, the ad must be viewed within 5-6 seconds

For now, the instrument is being tested, however, according to Abuladze, the results are not bad:

“Under the conditions of the test, the CTR of our first advertising campaigns is 10%, which is very good for advertising in social networks. Although in general, our sales within the application have declined. Unfortunately, together with the start of testing an advertising tool, the developers severely limited the number of purchases by one user in the entire store to one per day. Thus, we cannot yet fairly evaluate the effectiveness of the tool before and after its implementation.”

Such advertising is paid for by nims.

Dmytro Pinchuk has several accounts selling in the Goods at once: SquadyX (design services and creative goods), SX Print (printing services), Kievday Shop (original gift shop). The latter was registered immediately after the launch of Goods, the rest were added later.

According to Pinchuk, Goods is perhaps the main platform for the sale of goods and services of his companies. “Almost all of our products are unique in the framework of the Goods, many of the product lines we produce and sell exclusively on this site. Today, exactly those products that have become the most popular for the entire period of sales on Nimses are located in the Goods,” says Pinchuk.

According to him, more than 50% of all sales for today are carried out through the SquadyX store in the Goods.

“If earlier the sale of goods on the site were an alternative, in the near future Nimses Goods could be the main source of income. Over the last month several hundreds of goods/services have been sold there. Nims today is the most accessible cryptocurrency, and everyone can easily join this fascinating world. We believe in the great future of Nimses.”

FINCH left Nimses last winter. “We moved to the 3rd floor in an open space and changed the conditions of interaction with the TsUM, it became more difficult to resolve issues. It is not the worst thing to explain the conditions of purchase for nims to the dozens of sellers of each shift, leaving the device to accept nims; it’s more difficult with accounting, where each discount must be justified and approved by a number of TsUM specialists, and then all the rules must be drawn up, while eliminating a possible fraud. We were held hostage by bureaucratic procedures,” explained Byakova.

However, FINCH emphasizes that they have not lost interest in the platform and they do not exclude their return to the Goods. The company is interested in the opportunity to promote its products outside Ukraine after the global launch of the trading platform:

“Now the interest in buying for nims in Kyiv seems to be dead. But as far as I know, Nimses are entering new markets and opening up the sale of goods online, which will simplify everything, and we will be ready to return our goods to the Goods tab. We will receive not only the Ukrainian market, but also the USA, Europe. It is very interesting.”

Will goods merchants get real money for their sales?

No matter how Nimses developers tried to fix a nims rate, in fact it is determined by merchants. Initially it was assumed that one ‘nime’ will cost $1. However, at the same time the prices in the Goods tab could reach millions of nims for things worth a couple of thousand hryvnias.

Today, prices at the site of many merchants exhibited at the rate of 1,000 nims for 1-2 UAH. For example, a USB cable, which is sold at the price of 400 UAH on the website of the same seller, could be bought in Nimses Goods for 100,000 nims with a surcharge of 175 UAH.

Good things are more expensive: starting from 400,000 nims for designer pajamas to 1,5 million for an electric guitar. Then the developers introduced a new rule: the price per lot cannot exceed 100,000 nims. It did not strengthen the nims rate, the merchants simply removed expensive goods from the platform, or re-priced them including a discount. “It is simply not profitable for us to sell goods this way,” one trader explained in a private conversation with the editor of AIN.UA.

“We set prices considering other offers in the Goods tab and an attempt to maintain a balance in which we will not get any profit and will be able to continue using the Goods tool. We spend money on advertising,” said the co-founder of “KavaBulki”.

The conversion of the infinims to Nimses Exchange was launched back in the summer. According to Boborykin, there are already several merchants in Ukraine and Russia who have collected infinims. “After the necessary verification procedures, they will be able to withdraw them,” he said.

“After changing the rules of Nimses Goods, we are in the process of accumulating the right amount of nims for cashing. We will be able to give a more detailed answer to this question in the future,” says Dmytro Pinchuk.

“I had no illusions about converting earned nims into real money. And I don’t have these illusions until now, when the withdrawal threshold has increased 40 times, and the amount of expenses per person per day has fallen to 100,000 nims,” admits Byakova.

“The main thing is not to think of nims as a real currency as long as there is no 80 million in the account. This is, first of all, a gaming scheme that allows you to stimulate demand and raise recognizability.”