Dialup: Serendipitous Voice Chat | Hacker News Reader

Dialup: Serendipitous Voice Chat

dialup.com

99 pointshliyan23 comments

I used Dialup for a while when it was added as a Startup School feature and I’m using Clubhouse on and off now. Both of them suffer from tragedy of the commons.

DialUp was excellent while startup school founders were still using it, but the call pool diluted over time and several times the calls dropped randomly with no way to reach the person back. Because of the dropped calls we would start the conversation with the name of our business first, so we could continue on another channel if interrupted. So the conversations were still great enough to persist through the technical issues (startup founders like me, working through challenges we could both relate to, brainstorming and coming up with great solutions, etc). All it took to stop using the service were several calls where people who answered were on there just because they were bored instead of working on something and the value of it disappeared.

Clubhouse was quite interesting a few weeks ago, when there were fewer running threads and even if many of them were were noise, the HN/YC type people would aggregate around one or two. We had fun conversations about 4th+ dimension mathematical shapes, mobile app development, startup revenue models, technical stacks, prototyping, etc. Now the intimate threads are increasingly turning into hustle culture or scam-like conference podiums with huge crowds waiting Disneyland style for a chance to ask one question, which inevitably diverts most conversations into the same types of generic questions. You have to scroll down many levels and if there is any interesting technical topic, the group is usually very small and increasingly diluted by the noise.

Clubhouse needs to enable better filtering of conversation topics or they will lose that early crowd of valuable users fast.

Just as HN branched off from Reddit, there needs to be a Clubhouse for the HN/Startup School/YC crowd moderated with the same standards as HN.

That sounds great. I'm not interested in only talking to startup founders.

Two thoughts.

One: Must've been one hell of a premium domain name price (assuming it was bought from someone else).

Two: Why must you need the user's home or other mailing address, telephone number, mobile number, device location, credit and debit card numbers? [1]

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[1] https://archive.is/xrKRd

Funnily enough, at the bottom is the following:

> Dialup.com has been parked since 1994!

I went through the signup flow, and the only information it asked me that was ever verified was my phone number.

I really appreciate how this works to bring people together in a way that is the antithesis of the echo chambers of most other social media like clubhouse, Facebook etc.

I have heard that clubhouse is also audio only. Haven’t used clubhouse myself. How is this different?

It's not the audio-only aspect, but the random, one-on-one aspect of Dialup that makes it different from Clubhouse, which is exactly what it sounds like -- reproducing the same "clubs," social strata, and bubbles within an audio-only space.

Thanks, now I get it.

Here comes the era (fad?) of voice / telephone social media.

Clubhouse (Twitterverse's current darling) [1], Capiche (featured on HN a few weeks ago [2]), and now Dialup...

What's old is new again.

How does this happen? Does one startup get enough attention and funding that competing VC firms throw money at anyone that says they'll clone it? As sibling comments suggest, this domain name couldn't have been cheap, which seems to imply VC funding.

It's a slightly different usage pattern than Clubhouse (serendipity), but it's the same tech. Clubhouse has a bunch of celebs using it, so they're in a good spot to win 1:n audio broadcasting.

I wonder if any of this will have staying power beyond the pandemic. It feels like a premier podcasting app (Spotify?) could add this feature. Or Facebook.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/clubhouse-voice

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25424103

Hmm I have telephone wires in the building. Is it still possible to do landline calls?

Landline aficionados could call each others. It would be a rather elite club! Of course, the common folk would follow. And it would be eternal september from there on again.

I used this for a while and have had many interesting conversations with people from all over the world, including the creator of the app. I turned it of during the summer holiday last year, and forgot to turn it back on again. Back then it was called My Boss or something similar, and at the start of every conversation a question was sugested to get the conversation started.

Do you mean I should talk on phone to strangers, voluntarily???

I... am too awkward for that, sorry

I don't see a pricing page or a "buy now" button - what's the business model of this?

I've become extremely skeptical of anything social that relies on ads or "engagement" as that is the cause of all the problems we see with the current social media platforms.

On the other hand, zero people would pay for a social service when all of the big players let you in for free.

I get your point, that it means the maintainer will have to get money to run it from somewhere. It seems like a fairly small operation still maybe they just pay for it for fun?

I like this idea. I spend a bit of time sitting on tractors. When you run out of good podcasts, audiobooks temptation is to scroll HN, Twitter. This would be better.

Ah man this is a great execution of something I’ve been trying to get right in a side project for a while now. This whole idea of building valuable social connections and conversations out of the massive floating borg cloud of the current internet is what I aimed for with https://otherrs.com but this just feels like a much better way to achieve that same goal :)

Love the design !!

Exactly what I thought :D

The QR-Code scrolling with a marquee effect, the globe turning at the bottom and the retro icon style combined with modern fonts.

Looks awesome!

>>Dialup will ring your phones on an automated schedule

Well, that sounds like the worst thing ever. As someone who absolutely dreads talking on the phone, the idea of having an automated call at a certain time is just.....not for me, thanks ;-)

Another way to look at it would be a low risk way to desensitize you to it. Hang up on the first few. Say 'hey' to the next few. Make up a name and give it to the next few. Along the way you'll hear someone that's intriguing or engaging in a way that suits you and the conversation will flow a bit.

My youngest struggles to the point of tears with the same thing, but once she gets started she's effervescent on the phone. Maybe that's you, or maybe it's a struggle the entire way, but it's a skill you can learn and one that will benefit you from time to time.

^this

*(downvote if you need, it’s still worth it for me to support this)

It’s clever and cute but I don’t think it will last.

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