Show HN: hackernews.roundtable.audio turns HN posts into live audio discussions | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: hackernews.roundtable.audio turns HN posts into live audio discussions

hackernews.roundtable.audio

109 pointssethkim65 comments

Lots of cool products and experiments happening in the audio space at the minute.

Although I’m not sure how practical this actually is. Most of the comments I read on HN tend to be many hours old by the time I find them.

What would be cool is to have a scheduled virtual stage meeting where the 5 most popular commenters on a post have a discussion.

For the kind of discussions we have on HN (the insightful, informative ones), text is by far the best format. Both in terms of expressiveness and ease-of-consumption. The asynchronous nature of text comments give people time to think before responding.

I'd classify audio discussions (such as those on Clubhouse) more as entertainment, than informative.

I absolutely agree with your first paragraph, but regarding the second the low bandwidth on text compared to audio sometimes means a lot of information is left out.

A lot of times when discussing something here (or anywhere in text) I see something I'm fairly convinced is wrong, but it's apparent that it's misunderstood many steps back, and I just don't bother if I'm not up for writing a wall of text of premise before getting to how that leads to my point.

(And I'm sure vice versa is true equally often)

Audio really helps here, but it's less searchable and accessible post facto, and it requires simultaneous presence.

This format (written) is also super convenient to return to HN and search for something. As long as there is not transcription (at least for searching purposes), audio is semi-useless (at least for the use that I may have).

I have used the 'Search' in HN multiple times to educate myself on topics, reading the article in 3-4mins and then spending 20mins on comment section to expand and enhance my knowledge and/or critical thinking.

HN can be a useful library.

This could be a great interview podcast.

Somebody writes a fascinating comment who clearly understands the subject. Interview them about the article and post back to HN for distro

I'm reminded of Diggnation from around 2005.

Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht would put out weekly videos/podcasts where they'd talk about the top news articles appearing on Digg (which Kevin helped start).

Because Kevin was in the tech, media, and startup scenes, there was a lot of interesting information mixed in along with the humor and drinking.

Is there a modern day equivalent to Diggnation?

How many of the people posting high quality comments on HN have the time to dedicate to doing that (in addition to writing the initial comment in the first place)?

I'd wager the answer is very few will be willing to add that time sink on. It'll all take a surprising amount of time to coordinate, prep, record, edit, publish.

Plus anonomity. There are so many people that post here not using their real name (throwaways, others)(you, me, many many others).

Good point, pseudonyms are common here, but only very heated topics have a bunch of throwaways in responses. Could this service be useful if it made your voice unidentifiable?

Love this idea.

Neat idea!

> many hours old

I regularly will respond to things 1-3 days old

Even if I don't get a reply (I regularly do!), people are definitely still reading, and will be in the future.

How do you keep track of aged replies to your comments? Do you use anything other than the base user comments view?

HN replies is really good for this:

http://www.hnreplies.com

The other thing that’s useful, all be it for a slightly different thing, is to setup some Google Alerts to notify you if your username / blog url gets mentioned somewhere.

https://www.google.co.uk/alerts

The most exciting one I've seen recently is Sonantic, a system for generating placeholder audio for game dialogues.

https://www.sonantic.io/

Quite a different part if the audio space, but yes that is quite a cool software tool. I watched the video from the main page.

Seems like you could very easily put together a scripted fiction show, with no actors!

Also there’s an API and cli tool so you could auto generate dialogue.

Not sure how much I like the idea of everything being computer generated, I mostly like actors, I can see it being useful in drafting up something quickly, a bit like a website mock-up, but for scripted dialogue.

The idea here is not to use it instead of actors for the final product, but to use this instead of existing solutions for placeholder audio. Recording and editing dialogue is a rather lengthy and costly endeavour. In big titles you typically have some manner of placeholder dialogue audio, usually computer generated, during development.

The existing ones I've worked with have all sounded very robotic, flat, and emotionless. It makes it very hard to hear how well something works when there's no character or emotion to the words. It also breaks immersion even when you (like me, who works as a graphics programmer) are working on entirely different parts of the game.

That makes a bit more sense, I wasn’t aware it was for gaming productions.

I guess it could potentially also be used to create audio podcast content, and perhaps news content.

Have you seen it used Ink which is for writing gaming narratives?

https://links.markjgsmith.com/archives/html/2021/04/#42da8fd...

Found it a few days ago, looks kind of cool.

I've seen it, yes. Haven't looked at it closely.

There's one thing I've played around with a bit more and find really cool because of how intuitive and fully featured it is: the Inform 7 language. Here's an example source code of an interactive story:

https://i7-examples.github.io/Bronze/source.html

I was hoping this was a way to listen to HN comment threads as audio, with different voices.

That also could be a cool idea, not sure how it would navigate a comment thread though.

You might find that some of the screen readers do that well. I’m guessing there are probably some on HN that have sight issues.

I hadn't thought of screen readers, I wonder how "screen readers for sighted people" would work like, for instance it would be fun if you could turn a HN thread into a Zoom-like call grid with emphasis on the people most active / important the discussion and assigned voices etc.

Thanks for pointing this out. I think there is a possibility for both preserved, text-based comments to exist alongside live, audio-based discussions.

I wouldn't want the HN experience being degraded by not being able to access relevant discussions about posts in the future, but I think those who are deeply interested could benefit from the ability to speak live about posts with others (including the OP) in a more intimate and fast-paced setting.

The roundtable for this post is a great example. There have been some super valuable comments in this thread as well as great discussions held in the audio chat room (except for the rick-roll, that is!).

Yeah I’m pretty sure there’s something really cool that could be built around this. There’s a lot of variety possible.

Brian host of Techmeme Ride Home Podcast has been experimenting with an occasional open table type discussion on Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse to discuss some of the topics and trends that pass through the daily podcast. He does the show with Chris Messina (inventor of the Twitter hashtag usage).

It’s similar in concept to what you’re doing, I’ve been enjoying listening, it’s been cool to see / listen to them build the show format in public.

Here an example show that I linked to from my linkblog recently:

https://links.markjgsmith.com/archives/html/2021/04/#89f1922...

Are people actually enjoying these audio products? Personally I find that they all fall under the category Podcast or Not Podcast.

Podcasts already exist and work pretty well. Not podcasts aren't easily accessible.

Feels a bit faddy if I'm honest

I’m an avid podcast listener. Yes I think some of these products probably won’t lead to anything, but there are some interesting experiments, often by existing podcasts.

For example discussion shows, a bit more like talk radio, that accompany a regular daily news podcast. The Clubhouse virtual stage, creates a different ambience with some audience participation.

https://links.markjgsmith.com/archives/html/2021/04/#89f1922...

I think some of these might turn into something fresh, that augments the existing audio tech.

Clubhouse is by design inaccessible to be fair

This is awesome! If there was audio to text or transcripts it would make it better.

Interesting comment - someone else pointed that out too. Could be a good feature to explore.

I can't hear anything on Firefox, but it works on Chrome.

Yup, that's a WebRTC thing.

Arthem here, @seth feel free to let me know if you would like any help with the project. Seem pretty interesting. I am available for contact on reddit /u/arehmat .

I have extensive experience developing software for video and audio calls over WebRTC. Firefox and Chrome pretty much always work the same. Safari, desktop and especially mobile (iOS) almost never works.

Edit:

Safari is by far the worst browser in existence. Unfortunately we're stuck with it until the USA Congress says otherwise.

> we're stuck with it until the USA Congress says otherwise

I know that "politicians suck" but we can't blame them for Safari!! Safari will stay around for as long as it serves Apple's interests. My personal choice is Firefox. But that's just me. People can use their own browsers in many/all OS, so feel free to ask your clients to use Firefox/Chrome/IE ;) and not Safari.

People/companies can always switch to Firefox/Chrome as they both have the capability for central administration.

Can you elaborate?

WebRTC only works on certain browsers and platforms.

WEBRTC is showing 94% support: https://caniuse.com/?search=WEBRTC

Can you elaborate on the Firefox support issue?

Honestly, the browser/platform test coverage isn't broad yet. Not too sure why Firefox is having difficult but I know some browser and platform combos are quite finicky with WebRTC.

I was sincerely hoping this converted text comments into audio. Cool idea anyway.

with unique generated voices taking usernames as a seed

Cool idea! I think that would help to preserve the conversation.

cool idea but audio conversations don't scale as well as text. In audio we noticed one has to hear other person speak, where as in text multiple people can start and comment on threads at the same time.

Sure, but the ratio of readers to commenters is off the charts. Most people would just listen to a (literally) vocal minority.

With positional audio you could solve some of this, there are millions of people talking right now, but you don't have to hear all of them, just like you don't read all the text posts at once.

You can also scan written text which is not possible with audio or video.

Edit: with scan I mean skimming until you find something interesting.

we are getting rickrolled

That is the true sign of product market fit.

Something like that!

I think sethkim would call it (p)rickrolled

Opening the link in a new tab doesn't work cos you're using a JS link. That's poor behaviour especially for this power user audience.

Which link are you referring to?

tl;dr: come talk to me about this project which turns HN posts (like this one) into live audio discussions at this link (very meta - I know!): https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/live/show-hn-hacker-news...

I'm Seth, creator of roundtable.audio (formerly discourse.fm), a web app for hosting live, unmoderated audio discussions.

I recently created an extension to the site (hackernews.roundtable.audio) which pulls stories in real-time from HN and gives folks the ability to drop into a live audio discussions rather than comment threads. You can then post the link back to the comments on the actual HN story to invite others to jump into the discussion. This isn't meant to compete with HN comment threads, but rather extend them in a new and useful way. You can see the original post I made about it here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096634.

I'm reposting because I wanted to share updates about the project, give this a little more visibility to interested folks, and I messed up posting last time (didn't include the URL with the title - oops).

The most notable update is that I open-sourced the code for the project which you can find here: https://github.com/sethkimmel3/roundtable.audio (and renamed it, too). In short, I'd like to see roundtable.audio provide the ability to turn content on any site with highly synchronous text-based content into live audio discussions. This includes sites like Twitter (see https://twitter.com/RoundtableBot), Hacker News (this post), Reddit, blogs, news sites, and more. If you like WebRTC and modern web apps, this could be a great project to hack on, and I'm excited to have community contributions!

Why this project? I think live audio (relative to text) decreases political polarization while increasing engagement, vulnerability, and serendipity. We can often learn so much more by talking to one another than hiding behind a keyboard. And in general, we can learn more from conversations that are pegged to some interesting topic.

I'll be in the roundtable for this HN story for the next few hours: https://hackernews.roundtable.audio/live/show-hn-hacker-news...

Come pop in and tell me what you think!

Is this, like, Clubhouse for HN?

Sort of - this specific extension "adds" live audio to HN, but broadly speaking it's meant to enable live audio to otherwise text-based sites.

That's fun, nice idea

Thanks!

Looks like the site crashed

yup. no websocket connection.

It's back up - sorry!

looks like we have crashed the server :-)

yeah sorry about that! Didn't expect that much traffic. Will try to have it up as soon as I can!

crashed again? ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com