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Comment by jameskegel | Hacker News Reader

It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example considering how much 1993 duct tape is holding it together. You cannot compare the UI and tech of the two; Bandcamp has neglected the same Courier New interface since they were a startup. SoundCloud engineering is worlds ahead. They were one of the biggest proponents and pioneers of containerized microservice architecture. They took a lot of beatings so that we wouldn't have to, and that's worth something to me. Frankly I've never read an inspiring development article from Bandcamp a engineering team.

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"They ran their business into the ground, but they did it with such great tech!"

I have no idea how Bandcamp is built behind the scenes, but from a user-facing perspective, their UI and UX seem way better than Soundcloud's.

>Frankly I've never read an inspiring development article from Bandcamp a engineering team.

I don't know the actual user numbers, but I'm guessing this is because Soundcloud has had to scale a lot more than Bandcamp has and not necessarily because Bandcamp's engineering team is worse.

But, hey, maybe Soundcloud did have a top-class engineering team. Doesn't really change my opinion of it, since I've always considered it the worst and least user-friendly out of all the streaming platforms (mid-song user comments I can't disable; next song autoplay that I can barely find the playlist for, with seemingly no relation to what I was just listening to; horrible sound quality; hideous and distracting color scheme that distracts from the music, much unlike BC).

That may be entirely the fault of the management and not the engineers, but still.

>> "It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example"

I didn't. I said they had gotten as far as SoundCloud which was close to the right product but not close enough.

>> SoundCloud engineering is worlds ahead. They were one of the biggest proponents and pioneers of containerized microservice architecture.

As a user, why should I care? After the redesign the product became abysmal to use. There are major bugs (like reordering spotlight in Chrome) which have been around for years with no fix. That's a paid feature, broken in a major browser for years. There are also still (or at least there were recently) some pages using the old interface. They wasted time building Go instead of fixing the almost great product they already had.

The age and the architecture of their backend have absolutely nothing to do with Soundclouds usability, which got worse and worse after every iteration, following the typical pattern.

The UI and the tech are not the focus. The focus is on providing a platform for artists to sell music. In that regard, it's been a great success. As an artist, I'd much rather distribute music on a platform that's proven to be run by those that put the needs of artists first rather than one that blows their load over how advanced their tech stack is.

Bandcamp's aesthetic has always been pretty minimal. I remember an obscure interview podcast I wish I could find now where one of the founders talked about their philosophy of not trying to splash a "brand" all over everything, so the artists felt more like they owned the look of their pages.

> It is funny you mention Bandcamp as your flagship example considering how much 1993 duct tape is holding it together. You cannot compare the UI and tech of the two; Bandcamp has neglected the same Courier New interface since they were a startup.

I really don't agree with that. While there's room for performance improvements at Bandcamp (the site can be slow on fridays, which is release day for most albums), their user experience and design is just fine and very functional.

Discovering an album via recommendations in your activity feed and actually purchasing and downloading said album is a matter of seconds.

It takes me longer to remove 5 items from a Soundcloud playlist, which is a process that involves opening and closing a modal window 5 separate times.

If one of those platforms feels neglected and dated it's Soundcloud.

The tech doesn't matter.

If I want to find pop punk from some unknown, Bandcamp makes it stupid easy to find them and download/buy their stuff and/or go see them live.

How about this for inspiring? https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/01/24/everything-is-terrific...

Bandcamp, with its "Courier New" interface, has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in value to its users and artists. And it's still growing.

That's cute that soundcloud made a bunch of blog posts about their super elite containerized microserviced architecture. How's their business doing? Who's making money on there besides industry plants?

Something must be terribly wrong at SoundCloud engineering besides the money crunch. They have done nothing to improve the core user experience for years. They've only made it worse on iOS. Try scrolling down the feed a bit on Chrome - it heats your computer up and starts gobbling CPU. None of their paid plans get me higher quality audio, which is sorely needed because by default their audio quality is shit. As an app or paid service, it's trash.

Yet it's the sole music app I use: all of my favorite artists and music are on SoundCloud. The only thing it has going for it is the community.

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