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Comment by evincarofautumn | Hacker News Reader

I’ve wanted to build something like this for a while, down to the 1-minute length restriction and follow/reply interaction. (And to go with it, a small low-power smartphone without a screen!) The main thing that stopped me was that I was working at Facebook when I came up with it.

However, I probably won’t be using this for one reason: waves are ephemeral, deleted from their servers after a week.

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May I ask why having the waves deleted after a week is such a disappointment to you? (And if anyone else thinks the same?) I'd love to know your thoughts / reasonings behind this statement.

I screenshot and save just about every Snapchat between my girlfriend and I. A lot of them are great pictures of our dogs, memories from vacations, a lot of junk but sentimental junk. At least have a feature to save your own waves, then maybe something enabled to allow your friends to save your waves. Maybe your friend tells a great story, you save it, they pass away, what a great memory to have of someone.

Edit: Just downloaded it and see that you can save waves. Nice.

Yes, right now you can save a wave and it'll stay for I think 6 months, but I'm talking to my devs to see if we can get it to save to the users phone for the long term (not limited). We'll see what happens with that.

this is snapchat for audio (longer decay timeline) - to coin a "X for Y" - nothing wrong with it and actually quite liberating.

Right, it’s not bad, just not what I want to use—what I had in mind was more like Twitter for audio, which this could be if not for that feature.

I'm sorry, not following. If not for what feature?

I think he means if not for the ephemerality of the waves. If they were persistent, you could go back and "catch up" on conversations you missed before and gain context. It's like an archive for a podcast. This would be a huge win

Also is there an auto advance feature if you have a queue built up?

Essentially everything is run from a queue. It's either the public queue (called the Ocean) which runs from most popular on down, or it is the private queue (called the Stream) which runs from oldest to newest. And yes, it should auto-advance when you reach the end of one wave, going straight into the other. Am I understanding your question correctly?

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