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Comment by mjgs | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

Neat idea!

Love this idea.

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?

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?

> 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

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