Great to hear that you have found them so useful. Thanks for commenting!
You mention many valid points (although I disagree that “distance to English” has that much relevance) but I think the elephant in the room nobody wants to adress here is that customizing ministories in order to optimize them for each language would be expensive and non-practical. This is a low cost approach to having a “universal collection of sentences covering most grammar and vocab” for an indefinite number of languages. It is therefore in its very nature that it will not be optimized for each of them.
I’ve used the mini stories in both German and Spanish.
In my opinion they are too difficult for beginners…unless they have used LingQ before for another language and/or are tolerant of not understanding a lot AND have the motivation to persist through not understanding (probably not a trait of a first time user to Lingq imo).
For my usage, for German I had already gone through Assimil German (which I uploaded to my library) and had also already taken Memrise A1 course. So I had a good grounding before even tackling the mini stories. So these were just additional content to pick up new words and get further practice. I did find it useful and repeated many of the stories a few times.
I do not find the mini stories interesting at all so I think that’s another reason true beginners may not be able to fight through them.
I think they have their place and can be useful. I do agree with Obsttorte that they shouldn’t be a requirement to add a new language. These without mini-stories can just be labeled beta or “lower” with the caveat that there may not be any pre-made content and you have to “roll your own”.
One interesting use that I’ve used them for is for “speaking” (or thinking in your head) practice. I have taken the mini stories in my native language (English). I go through them sentence by sentence and try to say or think how I would say the sentence in my target language (German for example). I’ve found it very useful for that.
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I have an interest in some less commonly studied languages like Slovene, Icelandic and Romanian so the short stories are great in the earlier stages of learning because they simply provide reading and listening material designed for learners. The drawback as others have pointed out is that there is no cultural context as they are the same texts in translation for all the languages.
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Did I understand correctly that you uploaded an Assimil course to LingQ? How did you do that?
I find Assimil very useful, but if I want to have a course like that in my LingQ library, I have to type all the lessons, and that’s quite tedious. Is there really another option besides typing?
Hi DJTembo,
It will only work if you have cd’s or usb with mp3 (something with the subtitles for the audio). It’s pretty tedious, but I’d do a few lessons at a time and review those for a week or so and then upload some more later.
Here’s a link where I describe the process I did (click on the title “Importing Assimil”):
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Thanks a lot, @ericb100! I’ll try this method. 
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Completely true. German mini stories are terrible, using written novelty language at an early stage makes absolutely no sense.
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I’m not sure they designed them for Russian–I think they are the same stories when I have glanced at them in other languages. (I consumed them first in Russian.)
But anyway, I agree with you–as boring as they were, I really like the design, especially the repeating the story but changing the person or tense or number.
I am glad that they make them available in many languages.