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Show HN: hackernews.roundtable.audio turns HN posts into live audio discussions
- sethkim 5y agotl;dr: come talk to me about this project which turns HN posts (like this one) into live audio discussions at this link (very meta - I know!): https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/live/show-hn-hacker-newsroundtableaudio-turns-hn-posts-into-live-audio-discussions https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/live/show-hn-hacker-news... I'm Seth, creator of roundtable.audio (formerly discourse.fm), a web app for hosting live, unmoderated audio discussions. I recently created an extension to the site (hackernews.roundtable.audio) which pulls stories in real-time from HN and gives folks the ability to drop into a live audio discussions rather than comment threads. You can then post the link back to the comments on the actual HN story to invite others to jump into the discussion. This isn't meant to compete with HN comment threads, but rather extend them in a new and useful way. You can see the original post I made about it here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096634. I'm reposting because I wanted to share updates about the project, give this a little more visibility to interested folks, and I messed up posting last time (didn't include the URL with the title - oops). The most notable update is that I open-sourced the code for the project which you can find here: https://github.com/sethkimmel3/roundtable.audio https://github.com/sethkimmel3/roundtable.audio (and renamed it, too). In short, I'd like to see roundtable.audio provide the ability to turn content on any site with highly synchronous text-based content into live audio discussions. This includes sites like Twitter (see https://twitter.com/RoundtableBot https://twitter.com/RoundtableBot), Hacker News (this post), Reddit, blogs, news sites, and more. If you like WebRTC and modern web apps, this could be a great project to hack on, and I'm excited to have community contributions! Why this project? I think live audio (relative to text) decreases political polarization while increasing engagement, vulnerability, and serendipity. We can often learn so much more by talking to one another than hiding behind a keyboard. And in general, we can learn more from conversations that are pegged to some interesting topic. I'll be in the roundtable for this HN story for the next few hours: https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/live/show-hn-hacker-newsroundtableaudio-turns-hn-posts-into-live-audio-discussions https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/live/show-hn-hacker-news... Come pop in and tell me what you think!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mhh__ 5y agoThat's fun, nice idea
- sethkim 5y agoThanks!
- CyberRabbi 5y agoI was sincerely hoping this converted text comments into audio. Cool idea anyway.
- suyash 5y agocool idea but audio conversations don't scale as well as text. In audio we noticed one has to hear other person speak, where as in text multiple people can start and comment on threads at the same time.
- koolba 5y agoSure, but the ratio of readers to commenters is off the charts. Most people would just listen to a (literally) vocal minority.
- pier25 5y agoYou can also scan written text which is not possible with audio or video. Edit: with scan I mean skimming until you find something interesting.
- pabs3 5y agoWith positional audio you could solve some of this, there are millions of people talking right now, but you don't have to hear all of them, just like you don't read all the text posts at once.
- zeeshanqureshi 5y agoThis is awesome! If there was audio to text or transcripts it would make it better.
- sethkim 5y agoInteresting comment - someone else pointed that out too. Could be a good feature to explore.
- axiosgunnar 5y agolooks like we have crashed the server :-)
- sethkim 5y agoyeah sorry about that! Didn't expect that much traffic. Will try to have it up as soon as I can!
- axiosgunnar 5y agocrashed again? ;-)
- sss111 5y agoLooks like the site crashed
- idlewords 5y agoOh wow. What's next on the feature list, bear spray to the face?
- axiosgunnar 5y agoWhat does bear spray to the face mean?
- ChrisClark 5y agoidlewords is just insulting the OP's project for no reason other than to be mean.
- idlewords 5y agoI'm insulting the concept of having to listen to HN comment threads. For all I know the OP's project is a jewel of design.
- modinfo 5y agoI can't hear anything on Firefox, but it works on Chrome.
- sethkim 5y agoYup, that's a WebRTC thing.
- tim1994 5y agoCan you elaborate?
- sethkim 5y agoWebRTC only works on certain browsers and platforms.
- animex 5y agoWEBRTC is showing 94% support: https://caniuse.com/?search=WEBRTC https://caniuse.com/?search=WEBRTC Can you elaborate on the Firefox support issue?
- sethkim 5y agoHonestly, the browser/platform test coverage isn't broad yet. Not too sure why Firefox is having difficult but I know some browser and platform combos are quite finicky with WebRTC.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoI have extensive experience developing software for video and audio calls over WebRTC. Firefox and Chrome pretty much always work the same. Safari, desktop and especially mobile (iOS) almost never works. Edit: Safari is by far the worst browser in existence. Unfortunately we're stuck with it until the USA Congress says otherwise.
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- axiosgunnar 5y agowe are getting rickrolled
- mjgs 5y agoLots of cool products and experiments happening in the audio space at the minute. Although I’m not sure how practical this actually is. Most of the comments I read on HN tend to be many hours old by the time I find them. What would be cool is to have a scheduled virtual stage meeting where the 5 most popular commenters on a post have a discussion.
- sethkim 5y agoThanks for pointing this out. I think there is a possibility for both preserved, text-based comments to exist alongside live, audio-based discussions. I wouldn't want the HN experience being degraded by not being able to access relevant discussions about posts in the future, but I think those who are deeply interested could benefit from the ability to speak live about posts with others (including the OP) in a more intimate and fast-paced setting. The roundtable for this post is a great example. There have been some super valuable comments in this thread as well as great discussions held in the audio chat room (except for the rick-roll, that is!).
- mjgs 5y agoYeah I’m pretty sure there’s something really cool that could be built around this. There’s a lot of variety possible. Brian host of Techmeme Ride Home Podcast has been experimenting with an occasional open table type discussion on Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse to discuss some of the topics and trends that pass through the daily podcast. He does the show with Chris Messina (inventor of the Twitter hashtag usage). It’s similar in concept to what you’re doing, I’ve been enjoying listening, it’s been cool to see / listen to them build the show format in public. Here an example show that I linked to from my linkblog recently: https://links.markjgsmith.com/archives/html/2021/04/#89f19226-ba67-4ccd-b3df-3d943780cd81 https://links.markjgsmith.com/archives/html/2021/04/#89f1922...
- atat7024 5y ago> many hours old I regularly will respond to things 1-3 days old Even if I don't get a reply (I regularly do!), people are definitely still reading, and will be in the future.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shermozle 5y agoOpening the link in a new tab doesn't work cos you're using a JS link. That's poor behaviour especially for this power user audience.
- sethkim 5y agoWhich link are you referring to?
- rkagerer 5y agoIs this, like, Clubhouse for HN?
- sethkim 5y agoSort of - this specific extension "adds" live audio to HN, but broadly speaking it's meant to enable live audio to otherwise text-based sites.