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Facebook Launches Podcast and Live Audio Room Services
- myworldmyrules 5y agoWill we able to earn from this service?
- lettergram 5y agoGiven the level of censorship Facebook has been partaking in I’m going to give this a hard pass.
- Apocryphon 5y agoIs breathtaking the amount of effort Facebook has spent xeroxing other products. I’m still amused by how they had their own online game show because of the success of HQ Trivia.
- afavour 5y agoFacebook... and Spotify, and Twitter. They've all got Clubhouse clones going now. Sometimes I find the state of 'innovation' in large tech companies a little depressing...
- croes 5y agoThe big players can only copy or buy up.
- b3kart 5y ago> only That’s a bold statement.
- reaperducer 5y agoOn the surface it is. But I think if you pause and look closely at the state a lot of the big tech firms these days, they're not run by visionaries and innovators any longer. They're run by C-levels trying to appease stockholders, and middle managers trying to appease the C-levels. That's why startups continue to thrive and occasionally outflank the incumbents. There are very few visionary people left in tech these days. Most have died, retired, or gone on to other things. I'd like to see a list of people that HN people think are currently "visionary." I have a few in mind, but I'd like to see what other people think, because I'm sure I've missed a few.
- luckydata 5y agoIn Facebook's case, they are being run by nobody. Never witnessed a more haphazard, disorganized company before working there. Truly frustrating place to work at, ruled by people with no vision and managed through a Kafkaesque system designed to create conflicting incentives for teams supposed to collaborate. I don't miss it at all.
- croes 5y agoEver heard of a hyperbole?
- Navarr 5y agoDiscord, too.
- goodcjw2 5y agoIt's probably true that they cannot resist cloning existing feature that's already working. But to cheer you up, FB is putting lots of efforts (rumor goes 10000 folks) working on AR/VR. That's quite a lot innovation :)
- corobo 5y agoWorking on putting ads in VR by the sounds of it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27532243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27532243
- goodcjw2 5y agoYeah, that's the part I don't quite appreciate what FB is doing on VR. They heavily subsidize the hardware, pushed lots of competitors out (e.g. Vive is really struggling), then start selling ads once they got dominant position.
- Bombthecat 5y agoAnd 200 are working on "how to show ads in 3d"
- echelon 5y agoIt's hard to grow as a social media startup now. If you're successful, Zuckerberg and the rest will spend tens of millions cloning you. Only a select few reach escape velocity. Snapchat, TikTok. How do you survive without being trampled by the giants?
- nowherebeen 5y agoYou can't. They can spend 200 engineers to study everything about your product and clone it. And it won't even make a dent in their revenue.
- Firebrand 5y agoYou focus on things people aren’t willing to post on their Facebook feed. Snap and TikTok remain strong despite being copied because it allows people to essentially shitpost without their close friends and family seeing it.
- Apocryphon 5y agoI wonder how VSCO is faring compared to Instagram, which is another similarly "anti-social" network. TikTok has the benefit of being owned by a larger conglomerate, ByteDance. Supposedly Pinterest was in talks to acquire VSCO.
- HWR_14 5y agoI mean, isn't Facebook just a xerox of MySpace?
- samstave 5y agoOnce, in a tech interview a long long time ago, the hiring manager asked me some questions about my experience and how I would do this and that... and I gave him my answer and he said: "Good, I am so tired of hearing from these young folks coming in and saying "well, the way we did it at Facebook was XYZ" and "Facebook does it right by doing it like this" and "FB this and that" "these kids think they know the best way to do everything because they did something one way, one-time at facebook - and it was their first job, they have no wisdom." --- The company; Twitter.
- eric4smith 5y agoHard pass. The way how they messed up their video offering is a damned shame. Plus... why would i want to put my stuff into Facebook's stratospheric walled garden, where if I need to pull it back out later on, its almost impossible???
- reaperducer 5y agowhere if I need to pull it back out later on, its almost impossible??? Or, in my wife's case, actually impossible. She's tried repeatedly for almost a year to download "her" data from Facebook. All she gets is a 4GB zip file that when uncompressed has a bunch of mostly empty folders and a 3.5GB "facebook_754893.zip.enc" file. By the filename, I guess it's an encrypted zip file, but nothing will open it. Searching the interwebs shows lots of people with the same problem, but no solutions. If she was in the EU, she'd raise a stink. But being American, she's S.O.L.
- telesilla 5y agoDo we need a volunteer service where Europeans can take over ownership of an account and shut it down / export data?
- YetAnotherNick 5y agoAssuming she would have actually got the data to open, what would you have done with that data? I don't think any service accepts facebook data and convert it into their account. And to me facebook seems like a at the moment conversation platform rather than something I would care to archive or look back into. Genuinely asking the reason people value downloading their fb data so much.
- reaperducer 5y agoAssuming she would have actually got the data to open, what would you have done with that data? It's a decade's worth of photographs, so she would have saved it to her computer.
- shp0ngle 5y agoFinally, a podcasting service aimed at seniors.
- reedjosh 5y agoAlong with censorship compliance and centralization. Just what podcasting was missing. /s
- CharlesW 5y agoThat smart and savvy HNers are calling a closed audio medium "podcasting" means that the only important open medium for audio and video distribution is dead. Embrace, extend, extinguish works.
- shp0ngle 5y ago"Podcasting" was coopted by Apple and put to their closed iTunes store almost immediately, haha Podcast Directory in iTunes Music Store is from... 2005 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/06/28Apple-Takes-Podcasting-Mainstream/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/06/28Apple-Takes-Podcast...
- CharlesW 5y agoYour comment proves my point, which is that smart and savvy HNers simply do not understand (and maybe don't care) about companies like Spotify and Facebook misrepresenting their proprietary audio platforms as "podcasting" in their efforts to kneecap and devalue standards-based media distribution. That makes me sad. Apple Podcasts is a real podcast app. You can open any standard podcast feed in the app and manage it like any other podcast. When you play a podcast, it plays the media as distributed by its creator(s). And when you do, the creators get the data. As you indirectly note, Apple is mostly responsible for the childhood and adolescent growth of podcasting as an open medium. If they do abandon real podcasting in favor of a proprietary-only, audio-only platform like the ones you're apparently rooting for, I'd guess that they'll be the last to go down.
- saos 5y agoNow my mum may launch a podcast.
- leokennis 5y agoSo…the Clubhouse hype has passed and now there’s an alternative from the worst company in the world? Yeah…that’ll work well.
- reaperducer 5y agoIt doesn't have to work well. It only has to work good enough to damage the existing competition, and scare newcomers from even trying.
- tmslnz 5y agoStarting today "Everybody and their mum has a podcast" is more than just a figure of speech.
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- xibalba 5y agoThis whole format is a dead end. Clubhouse user growth and engagement is stalled out (and likely in decline). Not that Facebook minds. The millions spent cloning Clubhouse are a rounding error on their financial statements.
- emilsedgh 5y agoClubhouse has been amazing though. I hope it can sustain. Discussions on it are much, much better than Twitter nonsense.
- jonwinstanley 5y agoInteresting that you like it, personally I couldn't seem to find the "good" content. There are always a huge number of chats going on and it feels impossible to figure out which ones are the interesting ones. Also, after following a few people the number of notifications was so high I had to turn them off. But without notifications how can you know what is going on?
- thatguy0900 5y agoI would assume the discussions are better because they are smaller. Has any online community managed to maintain quality discussions at scale?
- varrock 5y agoAre you speaking about any medium of discussion? If so, Hacker News is a great example.
- CPLX 5y agoStrong agree. I'm still a little bewildered about how Clubhouse got so much hype in the first place considering the actual product obviously sucks. With that said, I think Clubhouse could be in a way better position if they'd used their head start to actually work on making the product not awful. I have listened to 1-2 conversations where I've thought hey this has some value, but every time I open up and scroll through it it looks like early 2000's email spam except with emojis. Super low value topics like hustle harder or marketing nonsense. With social apps the algorithm is everything. I mean just look at Tik Tok. I feel like Clubhouse could have tried harder to make a magical experience where you opened it up and an interesting conversation was tossed your way. Oh well.
- yepthatsreality 5y agoThe pockets are turning out lint, Mark.
- spoonjim 5y agoFinancially it makes sense for Facebook to keep cloning products because it pays for itself when it works out (Instagram Stories) and there are no regulations or other penalties for doing it.
- HWR_14 5y agoMore than that, knowing that Facebook is willing to throw tens of millions into cloning your product and pushing it to their 2 billion users makes it difficult to start a competing product. Even as a loss leader to kill competition, it's well worth it.
- rvz 5y agoAs I have stated before [0], can anyone tell me how Clubhouse is somehow worth $4B? with around 2 million users? It appears that as soon as they have released the Android app in early May, almost all the competitors have caught up and already ate their breakfast, lunch and dinner. The only ones active on there are the VCs themselves spamming the notifications. Now we have Facebook launching their own Clubhouse-like service, it looks like there is no way out for Clubhouse to compete against the clones is there? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883580
- wdb 5y agoWondering if this would also be full of social media specialists, 'millionaires' telling how to become one, etc. This is wdb, and I finished talking.