[HN Gopher] Show HN: A Reddit style site to discuss podcast epis...
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Show HN: A Reddit style site to discuss podcast episodes
Author : wolframhempel
Score : 213 points
Date : 2022-05-27 09:15 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (podbabble.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (podbabble.com)
| calpar111 wrote:
| ekpyrotic wrote:
| Huge well done on launching.
|
| I can see a significant amount of scepticism in the comments, and
| I think that much of the feedback is valuable and important, such
| as the lack of a 'point of difference', interface, value-add
| above existing solutions, etc.
|
| But, a little disappointed with the pessimism in the comments in
| general. Someone has gone out of their way to build something
| from scratch and, regardless of whether it ticks all the boxes at
| the moment, I think that deserves positivity and a big 'well
| done'.
|
| Projects rarely ever launch 100pc perfect -- or even 20pc
| perfect. It is best to launch, adapt, and iterate.
|
| Note to poster: try to imagine that all the comments here start
| with 'Well done for launching, but something you might want to
| think about is...' Lots of the points are valid and require your
| attention, but they have been presented in a defeatist and
| negative way -- as if your launch is the end of matter and, as a
| result, it is all doomed to failure rather than providing a
| springboard to change, improve, and pivot as required.
| tacoluv wrote:
| Agreed with all points. Also, look at the comment histories of
| most of the negative commenters. Haters gonna hate.
| jayroh wrote:
| I really appreciate this comment. Thank you for framing it this
| way, sincerely.
|
| Doing the work is hard. Putting yourself out there in a
| vulnerable state and hoping for the best is almost AS
| difficult.
|
| So, the best of luck to the OP. Adapt and grow.
| pvg wrote:
| _But, a little disappointed with the pessimism in the comments_
|
| The comments change as the thread develops so if you really
| want to help a Show HN out, just write your positive comment
| (or whatever other comment) about the thing without the meta.
| It ends up being either inaccurate or generating more meta. Let
| the Show HN be about the thing showhn.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| I-M-S wrote:
| Neat idea! As a podcaster I would love to be able to get feedback
| on my episodes this way. Have you ever considered adding the
| ability to embed it on external websites?
|
| Also, I tried claiming my podcast and commenting but neither
| seems to have worked for me. Perhaps because of high traffic?
| wolframhempel wrote:
| Really sorry. I can see repeated attempts for a podcast
| verification email sent out to a*@**o.org, but the email seems
| to bounce. If this is you, could you let me know at
| team@podbabble.com and I'd be happy to help sort it out.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| Why not just r/podcadts?
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| Genuine question, cuz i wanted to build something similar, but
| didn't cuz looking at that subreddit it seemed it was not very
| active and all the podcast communities were very fragmented
| costcofries wrote:
| I wish your homepage made it easier to more quickly engage in
| podcast discussion. Right now, my feedback is that it takes too
| long to get to proof of value, your UI is confusing and it's not
| clear to me what, or how, I can get to 'discussing podcasts'.
| causality0 wrote:
| Yes, loading is quite slow. I typed in a name and the search
| result showed almost instantly but it took over thirty seconds
| to actually get to the comment section. There's no reason you
| need to embed a player for the episode on the comment page. If
| I'm going to go to a web page and comment on a podcast I've
| already listened to the podcast.
| unholiness wrote:
| There's definitely reasons for it (to easily link to clips in
| comments) but there's no reason to block loading the comments
| on loading the episode or the player
| wolframhempel wrote:
| That's fair. When you are the first user to ever visit a
| site for an episode, we pull info from the show's RSS feed.
| So unfortunately we depend on the RSS feed host's response
| time.
|
| But the experience around it can and should definitely be a
| lot smoother.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| My thoughts exactly... I'm not sure if you can call it a reddit
| for podcasts if there's no logged out view
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I'm not sure I'm following. You can jump into any podcast
| discussion via the homepage, either by clicking a comment or
| by searching for a podcast. You don't need an account to see
| discussion boards and you can even comment anonymously.
| giarc wrote:
| You are referring to those comments in the top right of the
| page? If so, that isn't obvious, it looks like a demo
| image.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| fair enough :-)
| zeven7 wrote:
| > I'm not sure I'm following
|
| Sign out of reddit and take a look at the homepage. You
| will see something very different from your homepage. It is
| a much easier interface to get started with. I lurked on
| reddit's homepage for a year before I ever created an
| account or looked into specific subreddits that might
| interest me.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| Also see FanFare, the metafilter site for discussing podcasts
| (and movies, TV, and books): https://fanfare.metafilter.com.
| Costs $5 for a lifetime membership.
| SheddingPattern wrote:
| Would it be interesting to do this for all knowledge artefacts?
| Books, articles, blog posts, blogs. It would create a graph of
| all these works after all they/respond to each other but also who
| reads what.
| CaptainJustin wrote:
| So glad to see this. There is a real opportunity to create a
| decent space for these discussions. Allowing the podcast host to
| determine the governance model could get interesting and the
| possibility of allowing podcasts to monetize their /r/ could make
| it attractive to them
| CaptainJustin wrote:
| On the other side of things, I wonder if you could create a
| decent value prop for podcast clients to embed your chat bit
| inline or similar
| gman83 wrote:
| I've been using Podchaser, it's less about comments, more about
| community reviews: https://www.podchaser.com/
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| There is only one episode of the largest podcast so looks like
| you have some work to do still.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| that's not good - which one is that?
| Shadonototra wrote:
| the only audio oriented comment system that i appreciate was the
| one from soundcloud
|
| you select the exact time, and you put your comment
|
| everyone listening to that music could see what people say about
| that very specific moment, as they listen
|
| encouraging podcast creators to time their podcast would allow
| platforms to offer precise comment system that users can consume
| and contribute to consistently
|
| but nobody cares, because the people who build the platforms are
| not users, it's not built organically, therefore they don't
| understand these kind of special things
| okr wrote:
| yep, soundcloud popped up in my head immediately. Another
| missed chance by soundcloud.
| getpost wrote:
| Site QC: I clicked on the Twitter link in the footer. It
| references podbabble1, an account that doesn't exist.
| https://twitter.com/podbabble exists though.
| [deleted]
| pHollda wrote:
| This is unnecessary. The Reddit for podcast episodes is Reddit.
| pvg wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
|
| _In Comments
|
| Be respectful. Anyone sharing work is making a contribution,
| however modest.
|
| [...]
|
| When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is, but
| don't be gratuitously negative._
| CharlesW wrote:
| Setting aside the first sentence, I think this is valuable
| feedback for Wolfram.
|
| Podcasters will need to meet listeners where they hang out
| (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) _regardless_ of
| whether they can also be persuaded to use this additional
| niche social media site.
|
| Any podcaster who would use this service will have already
| created a multi-channel social media presence for their show,
| so instead of "do this instead" the sales pitch must answer
| "why do this as well".
| pvg wrote:
| You can make the argument any feedback is 'valuable' sort
| of like people contrive to defend entirely offtopic or
| incomprehensible comments as 'relevant'. But HN discussions
| have additional standards and not being a terse, dismissive
| jerk, especially about the work of others is one of the
| important ones.
| CharlesW wrote:
| Fair enough! Hopefully you found my comment kinder and
| more useful than the OP's.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I disagree, craigslist unbundling has been a successful
| strategy for many startups, why not the same for reddit?
| onlyfortoday2 wrote:
| wolframhempel wrote:
| Some podcasts have reddit boards, some are mainly discussed on
| Twitter, some run Slack Channels, some publish on Youtube and
| use its live commentary in the chat - most use a mix of these.
|
| I appreciate this is a bit like the "we have 14 competing
| standards" XKCD, but there's a deeper, underlying problem that
| Podbabble tries to tackle: The majority of podcast discussion
| is either too general (i.e. debating the hashtag of a show as
| opposed to a specific episode), ephemeral (i.e. Twitter or live
| chat where discussion only happens within a few hours of
| episode release) and its almost always distributed (some on
| Reddit, some here, some there.)
|
| Podcasting - albeit still comparatively tiny) is the fastest
| growing medium and I am confident that having a central,
| purpose built place for listener engagement will add value to
| the ecosystem.
| carabiner wrote:
| /r/redscarepod
|
| /r/JoeRogan
|
| These aren't just discussion groups for the podcasts - many
| of the users in these subreddits don't even listen to the
| podcasts. The subreddits for these podcasts have evolved as
| their own, independent communities. Why would they just up
| and leave for yours?
| bnralt wrote:
| Indeed. And I was just thinking about how sites like Reddit and
| Hacker News are terrible when it comes to discussing things
| like podcasts or building a community. An active web forum is
| what would be really useful.
|
| For example, the podcast subs I frequent on Reddit often have
| people posting the same questions over and over again. A forum
| would simply aggregate them into one post that gets bumped to
| the top when someone comments, perhaps with the first post
| collating all the information as time goes on. But on the
| Reddit style boards, the discussion disappears soon after it's
| posted, just when the information starts to get there. It drops
| off the front page forever, and a couple days later someone
| comes along asking the exact same thing. Every podcast
| discussion starts from scratch, and ends soon afterwards. If
| you're a day or two late to a discussion, chances are no one
| will even your response.
| irrational wrote:
| > A forum would simply aggregate them into one post that gets
| bumped to the top when someone comments, perhaps with the
| first post collating all the information as time goes on. But
| on the Reddit style boards, the discussion disappears soon
| after it's posted, just when the information starts to get
| there.
|
| This isn't necessarily true. It sounds to me like you only
| have experience with some of the larger subreddits like
| r/pics. If you frequent smaller hobby subreddits you will
| find that the moderators will do exactly what is being
| described here. Some are pinned on a permanent basis, others
| are rotated out on a weekly or daily basis. The tools to do
| this are already baked into Reddit, it is up to the
| moderators of each subreddit whether to use them or not.
| bnralt wrote:
| > It sounds to me like you only have experience with some
| of the larger subreddits like r/pics.
|
| As I said in my post, I frequent podcast subs, which are
| usually on the smaller side to things. Sure, you can pin
| posts, but only two at a time, which means they often get
| dropped and switched. And unless they're extremely recent
| (so you're pinning posts all the time), as soon as they get
| dropped, they disappear. Spent 30 minutes writing a post to
| a pin discussion that you posted minutes before moderators
| switched the pinned post to something else? Chances are, no
| one's ever going to see it.
|
| But a bigger problem is how nothing gets bumped to the top
| in those places. If I randomly stumble across a 5 year old
| discussion on IMDB and post a comment, it's going to be
| bumped to the top of the post list, and plenty of people
| will see it. If followed a link from something pinned to
| the top of a Reddit sub to a 10 day old discussion and make
| a comment, it's likely no one will see it. The only way
| people would even know there was a new comment is if they
| kept checking all of the dead conversations that have
| already fallen off the front page.
|
| And the upvoting/downvoting exacerbates this further. It's
| not just that you're limited to the most recent posts if
| you want someone to see what you've said, but you're often
| stuck replying to the most upvoted comments to that post.
|
| I'm surprised if I get a comment or upvotes on site like
| Reddit or Hacker News after a couple of days. On the
| webforums I frequent, I often get them after _years_. If
| this were a forum, I'd probably be making this post later
| tonight or later in the week. But on Hacker News, if I
| don't make it in the next couple hours it's likely no one
| would ever see my response.
| raspberry1337 wrote:
| >The Reddit for podcast episodes is Reddit.
|
| Yes and this is the problem, reddit is reddit and the comment-
| quality is terribly low, often toxic and dominated by a certain
| ideology that is particularly dominant and vocal on reddit in
| particular. I think this has potential if they manage to keep
| the comment quality higher, somehow.
| Sakos wrote:
| This is highly dependent on the moderators. If you have good
| moderators, you can have a subreddit with quality posts and
| comments rivaling HN. If you have bad ones, it can (and will)
| devolve into toxicity and ideological bubbling. I've seen
| both and I've seen ones in between.
|
| That said, maybe I'm just not in the loop, but I'm not aware
| of any subreddit dedicated to reviewing podcast episodes.
| Also, I'm not sure the Reddit format lends itself to creating
| a database of user reviews for certain episodes without
| _heavy_ moderation and a heavy-handed approach to posting
| (for example, to avoid duplicates). A lot of this needs to be
| formulated into an automated system that only a custom-made
| site can offer.
| bin_bash wrote:
| I was a heavy user of Reddit since it came out until about
| a year ago. I left precisely because it felt like every
| single subreddit I was talking to children.
| irrational wrote:
| It sounds to me like you only visit the larger toxic
| subreddits. There are many hobby subreddits where the tone is
| positive and uplifting. It's not Reddit as a whole that is
| the problem, but what subreddits you are visiting. Here is a
| hint, any subreddit that makes it to r/popular should never
| be visited.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| There are also many hobby subreddits where the moderators
| are jerks and have zero clue how to manage or grow a
| community.
|
| There may be some "goldilocks" subreddit size, but IMO
| there are approaching zero Reddit communities that are
| "healthily" run, probably because most of the people
| involved (users, mods) are literal, actual children.
| irrational wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience. I've been pleased, for
| the most part, with how r/woodworking, r/boardgames,
| r/cooking, r/18xx, r/cooking, r/gardening,
| r/boardgamedeals, r/visitingiceland, etc. are run. I've
| run into very few toxic subreddits.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Do you (or anyone here) think it's possible to unbundle Reddit
| communities?
|
| Or is Reddit the "perfect" community engine?
| [deleted]
| swal_ wrote:
| I love the idea and monetization model, trawling through the rest
| of a subreddit to find the thread for a recent episode can be
| tedious.
|
| Congrats on the launch, I have a couple of questions. Is it only
| for discussions around recent episodes? Or is it just that the
| specific podcasts i've searched for don't list all episodes?
| wolframhempel wrote:
| It really depends on the podcast. We run it of the podcast's
| RSS feed, some of which include the entire archive, some just a
| number of recent episodes. Some podcast players create their
| own archive to patch this which is something we might need to
| do as well.
| Zren wrote:
| There's no way of going from a podcast
| (/podcast/SHOW/EPISODE/UUID) to the show (/podcast/SHOW). I had
| to manually edit the URL.
|
| Visually, this is more like SoundCloud than Reddit, though that's
| probably because there's no discussions more than 2 comments deep
| to notice the difference.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I've wanted to find a podcast app that would allow me to easily
| pause, select a segment, and then tweet (preferably with auto
| transcript) or share on FB.
|
| I assume that I could make an anon comment here and then share a
| link to my comment on social media?
|
| EDIT: someone mentioned that podcasters have to pay for access --
| if this is true, would it mean that I could only comment on
| certain podcasts? This would be a huge limitation for me, and
| would make me very unlikely to spend much time on the site.
|
| I would recommend letting people comment on any podcast, but if
| podcasts want to show up on your topical lists then they have to
| pay. There are probably other better ways to feature gate; this
| is just one idea.
| getpost wrote:
| $29/mo seems high for the vast majority of podcasts, which are
| labors of love run on shoestring budgets. Of course, it's peanuts
| for the high traffic sites. Did you consider a Dropbox-like
| pricing model, e.g., free for low-traffic sites?
| cheriot wrote:
| Especially if podcasters will bring their audience a free tier
| can boost growth. Then charge for power tools. Find the things
| that professional podcasters need that amateur podcasters don't
| and charge for those.
| shafyy wrote:
| When I search for "Absolutely Mental" and click on any season, it
| leads to this error page: https://podbabble.com/podcast/undefined
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The discovery experience is terrible. There's a feed of recent
| comments, but the largest and most noticeable piece of content is
| the podcast artwork, not the comment text (and the layout feels a
| bit unintuitive). To find podcasts, I would need to manually copy
| all podcast names into the (very slow) search box. And then most
| of them would have 0 comments, since the service is new, or my
| podcast taste is niche. It might be better to have a list of
| shows, sorted by comment count (or otherwise popularity on your
| site).
| [deleted]
| rc_mob wrote:
| its amazing you tracked so many episodes somehow. i think one
| small thing to add is just a 5 star rating of each episode or
| something
| jamil7 wrote:
| I couldn't find a way to delete an account, so signup with a
| burner if you want to check it out.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| You can comment anonymously if you wish
| jamil7 wrote:
| I didn't realise that thanks, however you still need to give
| people a way to delete their account.
| troika wrote:
| Absolutely, of course. We've just launched and there are a
| number of features missing
| Kwpolska wrote:
| In the times of GDPR and CCPA, there is no excuse for not
| having a simple way to delete your data. You should be
| able to revoke consent and remove your data as easily as
| you provided consent.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| As you target also European users you should look into the cookie
| consent - continue browsing the site as accepting cookies is no
| consent.
| tasuki wrote:
| I'm European, and don't want to see any cookie consent
| banners/popups ever. They are awful. If you don't want cookies,
| your browser has a perfectly fine setting to disable them.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| And IANAL but AIUI most of those banners are illegal anyways;
| just browsing the site isn't consent and you're generally not
| allowed to force the issue unless the cookies in question are
| actually functionally useful to the user. At least I think
| that's how it works, I'm really not a lawyer and this isn't
| something that I pay much attention to.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I like that I can read a comment for a podcast I've never heard
| of before and jump into the exact timestamp being discussed with
| a single click. I also like that I can read comments without
| logging in, so I can judge the quality of the discussion before
| deciding to sign up.
|
| Things that could be improved: the site is a bit slow and I got
| at least one broken image - I imagine it is getting HN'd right
| now, though, so I'll check again later. I also agree with the
| main page being unfriendly - if it weren't for the side bar, I
| would have probably never tried it. I also wanted to go to a
| show's full list of discussions, but I didn't find a way.
|
| Overall I like it.
| mcluck wrote:
| This looks like it's still in the early days but are there any
| plans to integrate with other podcast providers? I usually listen
| to podcasts via Spotify and it could be cool to see the comments
| streaming by like they were lyrics or the chat on a Twitch
| stream.
| jatinkrmalik wrote:
| Pardon my skepticism but how is this any better than r/podcasts/
| - an existing community of ~2Mn+ people?
| bin_bash wrote:
| I haven't looked at this product but as a listener of podcasts
| I can think of 2 obvious reasons.
|
| First, r/podcasts is for all podcasts, I'd be more interested
| in a community for a specific podcasts (say my favorite one:
| Dithering).
|
| But also a r/dithering wouldn't really work that well since I
| might not be listening to a particular episode right when it
| came out. I'd prefer to talk to people about only the most
| recent episode I listened to.
|
| Of course a r/dithering could simply have a meta post for each
| episode but that isn't that easy to find.
| soneil wrote:
| It looks like it'd work pretty well if you're listening to them
| at the same site - so comments are tagged with the timestamp,
| soundcloud-esque.
|
| I can kinda see the logic - unfortunately sitting in front of
| my computer is my least favourite way to consume podcasts - and
| the workflow seems to break down quickly once you disassociate
| the two.
| janmarsal wrote:
| The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.
| Thus it has ever been.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| How do people discuss specific podcasts there? Never visited
| that subreddit before but the top entries seems to be
| discussion about podcasts, not discussions about content in
| podcast episodes.
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| Popular podcasts have their own subreddits that discuss each
| episode. Having a separate app/platform for this is going to
| be hard to sell.
| pHollda wrote:
| Exactly. CC r/PKA for example. It's like how TV Shows have
| their own subreddits, not just r/television.
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| The person I replied to was comparing it to r/podcasts and
| bringing up the subscriber count there.
| qhrrrasd wrote:
| To give it a try i typed "sceptics" and selected Sceptics Guide
| to the Universe which results in redirection to
| https://podbabble.com/podcast/undefined and an error "Error:
| could not handle the request"
| unholiness wrote:
| I got the same searching "mindscape" but tried again and it
| worked. I think it's a race condition in the search-as-you-type
| system (which also appears to have some flakiness, with
| searches from previous searches showing up after the latest
| search arrived).
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Very cool idea but the website seems awfully slow with all the
| animations and loading screens, and the audio player seems to
| keep resizing and lagging.
| maweki wrote:
| Somehow the podcast library is a bit mixed up with multiple
| podcasts of the same name. If you look for the "Greatest
| Generation" Star Trek podcast, the preview indeed shows the Star
| Trek podcast but clicking it brings you to a completely different
| podcast of the same name.
|
| Not a good look in terms of data quality here.
| unholiness wrote:
| The biggest thing missing for me getting started is a reddit-like
| "feed" showing where discussion is actually happening. Like the
| reddit logged-out homepage (/best, not /new).
|
| The value of Podbabble is the intersection of podcast episodes
| that 1) people are talking about and 2) I have listened to. Right
| now the only way for me to find that intersection is to start
| from (2), searching for every podcast I can think of, looking at
| several of the latest episodes and seeing there's no comments. It
| would be great to start from (1), so I can see right away which
| episodes people are discussing and see which ones might be
| relevant to me.
|
| Also, it seems like the only way to add a podcast to "my
| podcasts" is with an RSS feed link? Not from a link on the
| podcast's page I searched for? I'm unsure on what the desired
| setup workflow is.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This is good and what is needed. These feeds bring people in
| who aren't specifically seeking to discuss an episode of a
| podcast they like.
| cheriot wrote:
| 100% this ^. I listen podcasts daily, am interested in
| discovering new ones, and do not create any podcasts. Looking
| at the home page I'm not sure how to find any content.
| Definitely not interested in creating an account just to see
| what's there.
|
| I recommend reading Reddit's origin story. There needs to be
| interesting content to get the first users to create content.
|
| Maybe the goal is to sell podcasters and get them to bring
| their audience? Even then I think you need a good home page
| experience to hook those listeners.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Why would anyone want to recreate Reddit? Discovery can be
| its own app that is very good at recommending podcasts. This
| can be for discussions, like how forums used to be.
|
| Keep them separate, because the world needs to get back to
| what we had with forums where people interested in subjects
| sought ought a place to discuss them. Back then actual
| discussions happened and the entire world wasn't a giant
| flamewar.
| cheriot wrote:
| I didn't say recreate reddit. The point of the reddit
| origin story is that people will only start contributing
| content if there's already interesting content there.
|
| If I host a new forum and just leave it on the internet,
| will someone create a account and post when there's zero
| messages there? Unlikely.
|
| Ergo, founders of a social site need to seed it with
| interesting enough content that the first users will stick
| around.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Right and I'm suggesting Reddits origin story leads to a
| website like Reddit, and is not something anyone should
| seek to reproduce (unless being Reddit is your goal.)
| Making fake accounts isn't the way to go if you want a
| decent discussion site specifically for podcasts.
| Otherwise You already have subreddits for every most of
| them.
|
| The niche of a site like this is to not be going for
| growth at the expense of intellectual discussion.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Reddit's design is based on IRC. Subreddits are channels.
|
| You could just say your site is like that.
| npollock wrote:
| A few challenges I think you should consider:
|
| 1. People do their podcast listening on other platforms/players -
| what's the incentive for them to comment/post on Podbabble?
|
| 2. Podcasts have existing community/discussion on other platforms
| (FB, Discord, etc) that are free - what would motivate them to
| pay this service?
|
| 3. Could you demonstrate that Podbabble drives growth/downloads?
| That would motivate hosts and podcast marketers
| ushakov wrote:
| you can never grow a project like this if you demand money for
| entry
|
| as much as i hate ads, i'd say that for this type of project it's
| better to leave it free but show some relevant podcast ads
| atentaten wrote:
| >you can never grow a project like this if you demand money for
| entry
|
| How are you categorizing this project? What about it makes you
| think demanding money for entry is not feasible for growth?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| newsclues wrote:
| tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote:
| I think the host sign-up flow is a bit odd. I can enter any
| podcast name and have that trigger an email to the authors of
| that podcast (multiple times? I hope not).
|
| Seems like it would make more sense that an author could create
| an account on the site and then link podcasts to it. Triggering
| an email to podcast authors because I selected their podcast in a
| drop down feels a bit spammy.
| Aachen wrote:
| How does this work? I went to an episode of Nerdland, posted a
| comment, saw a brief loading icon and the input area emptied
| itself and... poof, nothing happened. Reloaded page, no comment.
| Tried posting again, but no comment appeared.
|
| Is the commenting system overloaded? Do I need to login first (it
| doesn't say so)? Does it need to be able to talk to Stripe the
| payment network to place comments (TrackerControl app shows that
| as the only detected tracker while using the site)? I didn't
| include links or markup, so if it was detected as spam (again:
| there's no mention of that, no error, no nothing) then I'd not
| know why.
| twistedcheeslet wrote:
| Promising once it has a volume of users. At first though, I
| imagine it would attract relatively new podcasts that don't yet
| have established communities.
|
| That said, until it reaches some critical mass which adds value
| to creators in terms of discovery and community, asking small
| time creators to fork out 360USD per year is quite a big ask.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It is not very reddit like to charge money to post.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _...asking small time creators to fork out 360USD per year is
| quite a big ask._
|
| Especially given that (1) podcasters would be the primary
| driver of users to this service, and (2) podcasters will also
| be doing all the moderation work.
| dangoor wrote:
| I like the idea of this! I don't feel like I'm unusual in that I
| listen to my podcasts in a player app (Overcast, in my case), and
| always away from a computer. It would be really cool if this had
| an API that podcast apps could talk to for comments (maybe the
| creator of the feed has the ability to include a link to the API
| in the metadata, making an open ecosystem of podcast comment
| tools)
| falafelite wrote:
| I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I think this is really really
| cool. Would certainly become a better and better experience (I
| think?) as more people leave comments on episodes.
| rnernento wrote:
| Reddit never started by taking me to a giant signup page for a
| paid subscription. As someone who was mildly curious and might
| have checked it out of you presented something interesting I
| immediately left, maybe think about making the base landing page
| more interesting in hopes of gaining traction with users and then
| make another landing page for people you want to sell the service
| to.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| Podbabble is free for users. It only charges you if you want to
| become a verified host and moderate your podcast boards. To me,
| this is preferable to selling your data and advertising to you.
| (https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy-
| revision-2021...)
| Sakos wrote:
| I think it's odd to give sole control of moderation to
| podcast creators. It quickly leads to creators sanitising
| feedback to prefer only positive feedback.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| That's fair and its something we will have to get right
| over time. But its also tricky to find an ethical
| monetization model for social media.
|
| You can sell your user's data to advertisers, or you can
| sell control or you can find some other channel.
|
| We're e.g. playing with the idea to add a live podcasting
| feature that allows user's to comment and tip during a show
| a la Twitch.
| sjostrom7 wrote:
| Agreed with the other user - if you can get livecast +
| tipping going that'll be your hook. Hosts will then have
| a specific reason to plug your platform. Best of luck,
| very promising!
| PogoPuppy wrote:
| Your latter idea is golden, in my opinion. Some of the
| podcasts I subscribe to regularly complain about their
| live cast options.
| cupofpython wrote:
| >It quickly leads to creators sanitising feedback to prefer
| only positive feedback
|
| I dont see this as a big issue. It seems to be a place for
| podcast community members to gather and discuss instead of
| making yet another discord. If you dont have positive
| feedback for a podcast why comment at all to begin with?
| The podcast medium is entirely built to taste and fits well
| with being a bubble (despite bubbles usually being a
| negative thing).
|
| The hidden issue would be power to cover up a scandal, so I
| would hope that for serious issues users can report a
| podcast and site admins can handle it appropriately.
| murphyslab wrote:
| > If you dont have positive feedback for a podcast why
| comment at all to begin with?
|
| The quality of a podcast is not going to be uniformly
| positive. So a listener's feedback isn't going to be
| uniformly positive. It becomes a problem when the primary
| space for discussing a subject only permits positive
| feedback. Healthy communities do require negative
| feedback.
|
| It's ironic that creator of Podbabble couches the
| creator-based moderation as a means to
|
| > Foster healthy communities. Podbabble lets you
| moderate, adjust ratings, and flag comments as you see
| fit.
|
| Too often, allowing the subject of a forum to moderate
| the forum leads to suppression of valid critique. And
| good critique can also come from outsiders; those who are
| not regular listeners.
|
| A better alternative for Podbabble would be to allow
| creators to sponsor their podcast's forum, perhaps having
| it be featured more prominently or by removing comment
| rate limits.
| infinityio wrote:
| Personally, I'd recommend making more of the homepage the
| actual site, in the style of Reddit or HN's homepage -
| hopefully, the content that will be surfaced will explain it
| better than marketing does (and make it seem less closed
| off!)
| closedloop129 wrote:
| The main point is not whether it's free or not but that the
| main page is a landing page. If you visit Reddit, you
| immediately see content, you are one click away from reading
| comments. Registering is optional and comes naturally when
| you want to write a comment yourself.
|
| To convince your visitors, your site is just a landing page.
| It requires commitment to an account before it is possible to
| judge the site.
|
| I don't have the experience to judge if that is a good
| strategy. But if you want to be the Reddit of podcast
| discussions, then you should show the discussions to the
| visitors and only request accounts from those who want to
| write comments.
| penneyd wrote:
| I agree with this, I clicked to check it out and left after
| it appeared I had to sign up, sure I'm not alone.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| We had a lot of discussion about it, but it's a chicken and
| egg problem. We just launched, so there isn't much content
| to show straight away - and we felt it's worth explaining
| the concept. As content grows, we want to shift to a
| "content only" view for the homepage.
|
| It's important to stress that Podbabble doesn't require
| accounts to view discussions - in fact, you can even
| comment anonymously without creating an account. If you
| click on any of the comments on the homepage or choose a
| podcast via search you'll immediately taken to its
| discussion page without any barriers.
| rnernento wrote:
| I think if you ever want there to actually be content you
| need a way to grab users and make it easy for them to
| start generating it.
|
| When you say "it's a chicken and an egg problem" you're
| spot on. That's the problem for every new social network
| or user based platform trying to launch. Until you have a
| ton of users and content I would argue it's the only
| problem worth worrying about.
| sfg wrote:
| Get rid of the landing page and get straight to the
| content.
|
| Create content yourselves to fill the void until it
| grows.
| rnernento wrote:
| I'm not criticizing your business model, I'm just saying as a
| user who doesn't care about your business model and is just
| curious about podcast discussions your homepage isn't
| optimized for me.
|
| If you focus on building a userbase first it will be easier
| to sell the service later.
|
| As a user I have a billion things competing for my attention,
| if you don't make it super easy for me to get to useful or
| interesting content I'm going to move on and that's going to
| hurt you overall.
| sfg wrote:
| Yeah, I got to the landing page and left immediately.
|
| I want to see what the site is about before signing up or doing
| anything.
| [deleted]
| robotjosh wrote:
| float4 wrote:
| First podcast on the right: Ben Shapiro. So I scroll down to
| check out the second podcast: Jordan Peterson.
|
| Not really in the mood to join such a community.
| husainfazel wrote:
| They're using some kind of API to get the podcasts since a very
| rare pod that I followed showed up - so maybe that's just due
| to the listeners that BS and JP have.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| That's right. There is no sophisticated feed algorithm (yet
| :-). It literally just pulls the most recent comments on the
| platform -
| [deleted]
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Those are two of the most popular voices in this medium, it'd
| be needlessly limiting to exclude them if you're trying to
| launch a business around discussing podcasts.
|
| For every one of you, there may be a dozen people who are
| _attracted_ to the platform for the fact that these two are
| included.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah, I'd probably not highlight political podcasts on the
| front page if I was going for a general audience. Risks
| snowballing and becoming a partisan site (I'd also not
| highlight, say, a Crooked Media podcast there, despite being a
| fan...)
| owlbynight wrote:
| Great idea, but bad execution. UI is not good. I expected
| examples of popular podcasts on the front page that I could
| immediately engage with. However, I was met by confusion. It took
| me way too long to realize that the search bar was the only
| method of discovery.
|
| In my opinion, this isn't even at the beta level yet, let alone
| at a point where you should be asking for a subscription fee that
| high.
|
| I'll keep an eye on this because this interests me, but the
| initial red flags give me pause. You need a talented UI/UX person
| pretty badly.
| [deleted]
| alaxsxaq wrote:
| I searched for two podcasts; one failed with an error ('Error:
| could not handle the request) [No Agenda]. I tested another one,
| [eggchasers], and that worked reasonably well. My main criticism
| is that, when a search returns something meaningful, there is not
| a lot there to compel me to create an account and drill in
| deeper. If I were designing this, I would seed the 'sign up'
| presentation to new users with some relevant bits from the
| conversations which are happening on your site. If there are no
| current conversations, then some message which would spark my
| desire to start one.
|
| Also, what value does the acast privacy link for each episode
| provide that wouldn't alternatively be provided by some header
| element?
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(page generated 2022-05-27 23:00 UTC)