Amino gives you a pocket-sized community experience [App of the Week]

Chatting with people about your shared passions and interests is one of the greatest joys on the internet, as well as one of the biggest draws of social media.

Amino is a mobile-exclusive social media platform that compartmentalizes this experience, providing a host of Reddit-style individual communities that can be subscribed to at the touch of a button.

These titular ‘aminos’ can be as broad as an entire genre or medium (i.e. “Sci-Fi” and “Art” have their own communities) or as individual as something you create just for your friends, family or workmates. Within an amino, you can filter content by type, so if you only want to see picture posts or are bothered by the ever-present polls clogging up your feed, you can change your browsing experience based on what you want to see.

Another useful function is a ‘headlines’ tab that highlights the app’s most popular posts on a given day, even ones in aminos you’re not a part of. It’s a good time-killer, and can help you find communities you might’ve otherwise overlooked without wading through tons of ones which don’t interest you.

The app has a neat way of gamifying the experience in order to foster interaction rather than lurking, too. Every time you post in a community or interact with another post, you gain ‘reputation points,’ which gradually fill a bar in your profile. Accumulating enough ‘REP’ causes you to level up, which unlocks achievements, badges, cosmetic effects, and more. Some aminos host hundreds of thousands of regular users, so finding enough content to generate the REP you need won’t be a chore.

If you’re stumped as to which communities to subscribe to, the app is able to automatically recommend them based on your browsing history and interests. It’s worth noting that what happens in a community stays in a community, so you won’t have to worry about your REP or posting history being visible to anyone other than friends if you’re active in multiple amino at once.

In addition to everything mentioned above, the app also has all of the requisite social media functionality as well. Users can friend/follow each other, send private messages, and create chatrooms between multiple users across different communities. The userbase does seem to skew a bit younger than some other social media platforms, but the vast array of curation tools at your disposal means it’s easy to avoid communities or individuals that irk you.

Amino isn’t the first social media app on the market and it sure won’t be the last, but for what it is, it provides a unique experience that’s simple to manage and gives you instant access to legions of people eager to discuss the things you’re passionate about.

You can download Amino for free on iTunes or the Play Store.