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Comment by richard___ | Hacker News Reader

Couple things:

1. The sexual abuse story is unrelated to your app and feels like you're trying to guilt the customer into using it. The best way to support victims would be to donate directly to the NGO not use your app, and therefore this story seems like a disingenuous marketing strategy.

2. The problem with audio only social network is there's no way to "skim" things. There's no guarantee that the audio story a user clicks on will be interesting, and by the time the user figures out its not, you've just wasted 60s of his life and he's angry and wants to delete your app.

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So for #2, I think that this is where you need to be selective on who you follow. It won't be a Facebook where you have hundreds of people. Rather more like 15 or 20 people you really care about and like their stories. I think that's the niche that an audio only social network could fill.

So... podcasting but with shittier content?

In the same way that Tumblr is like blogging but with shittier content, or YouTube is like cinema production but with shittier content

I just started clapping when I read this. Thank you ovibos for a good Tuesday night chuckle. :)

micropodcasting

Uncanny - I just whipped this up: https://getvoicecapsule.com

Not a social network, but private audio, selective sharing, etc.

I think you could have skimming if people could mark the "moment" (20% into the content) that qualifies the content? And you could scroll through kind of like when you're flipping through radio stations.

Yeh like marking the "stinger" to play first as a hook. Doesn't Hello Internet do something like that immediately before the intro jingle and content starts.

We skim conversations at parties. I think we can technologically enable this cognitive faculty.

Just because we do it in one particular case does not mean we are good at it, or that it is a better and viable way of operating. I, for one, am very bad at it at parties and all those different conversations drive me insane. Well OK, not literally insane, but they make me feel bad. Because I cannot deal with those multiple audio streams. I get distracted by the noise (leading to unable to follow), and very from the environment nervous.

I don't think its better either, and I believe this is why we see audio as addition to written text (it is called 'podcast' because of Apple marketing w/iPod). In other words, the text is read and from there it is being decided if we follow up with more text, audio, or video. Video is an exception because the eyes are used there as well.

However it is important to recognise audio-only use cases. Audio only feedback may work in some situations e.g. during sports/fitness, or driving a car (radio). I haven't been able to come up with additional examples though.

Another problem might be that you can't use this at work without disturbing coworkers, or wearing a headphone.

Their premium accounts come with speech-to-text.

Then why use it in the first place? The entire point is that it's audio driven :P

...you can't listen to music at work without wearing headphones either. This has hardly put a dent in the popularity of music.

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