Next Big Thing, a HN-like site for music content
liisten.com
liisten.com
> Next Big Thing is not a place for ... anything else flat out offensive.
One of my favourite bands at the moment is "Rotting Christ" that name alone is very offensive to some people. Does that mean I can't post stuff about them? Where is the line? Can I post anything Black metal related? What about Gore Grind?
I think music has a much wider view of what is acceptable than tech. For example a lot of music/art is made with the sole purpose of being offensive. This is going to be hard to moderate.
The site looks slick and you deserve kudos for the effort. But I think you should seriously consider the value proposition of "The Next Big Thing."
EDIT: I just went back to you site and discovered that you do in fact separate music and news/editorial links.
Do you understand where I'm getting at? That's how Christians feel with names like that.
P.S. I don't think for a second that the name of someone you love should be degraded. Nor should someone I love either. That's my point.
Ditto @Buzaga
Yes, I don't object.
And to address the quote specifically:
>If you have no objection to a band, song or album cover that degrades your mother or someone else you love and revere, then hey, maybe it should all be fair game.
I wouldn't want users to degrade me or my family. But I've got no problem with a band calling itself "kill the families of all the atheists" (wouldn't go out of my way to listen to them, but that's a separate issue -- I'm an atheist, btw, so I'll choose that example) and if they're good their music should be on any good music site.
Depending on where you want to go with the project, it might be better to design the site to discourage participation by people who take band names and lyrics personally. Those people often don't have a lot to contribute to music discussions anyway...
edit: typos. Also I realize now that this is addressed as though I'm replying to the author of the original service, but I'm probably not. Sorry for any confusion that causes.
I honestly don't understand how vocalizing one's desire to urinate on his "beoytch" constitutes music. But I'm not going to dictate to people "what is" and "is not" art. I mean, people screamed bloody murder about Elvis and the Beatles back in the day. And it wasn't too long ago rock & rock was a profane evil poisoning young minds.
Twitter, Facebook, etc... can get by just fine with nothing but farmville marketing spam and lolcat videos. However, art and censorship don't mix. That's why the puritans at Apple label "explicit" music rather than ban it outright.
Said Putin about Pussy Riot.
I've found some great music there.
..which is more narrowly focused around the business of music and industry-related news, for those interested
and while that would be nice, i feel this (and pretty much every similar site) misses a very real problem around music discovery.. in that, for very active consumers, there’s no efficient way to track and monitor releases of specific interest to them. sites like this, r/music, and hypem are fine for surfacing what the majority finds cool, but they in no-way replace the need to monitor and frequently check-in with numerous source blogs and other sites to cover all that an individual is interested in (a very inefficient and time-consuming task)..
even more focused sites (and subreddits, if active), can never reach the level of personalization required to make them a reliable single-source for music discovery. don't get me wrong i frequent many and do find some great gems i'd otherwise have missed, but they're far from comprehensive..
and i don’t mean to discount anything here. it is a very difficult problem to solve given how disparate people’s tastes in music are, and even more so considering how widely distribution methods vary. i really feel anyone who can solve this problem would do quite well..
Disclosure: I developed their Android app.
Just a few suggestions:
* When you vote, the arrow should disappear. Instead, it just pops a notification saying you can't vote again - but there's no easy way to determine which songs you've voted on.
* It would be great to see a page of links you've upvoted so you can refer back to songs you liked.
Edit to add...
* A way to exclude domains you can't use (e.g. Spotify, which is unavailable in some countries).
* There's no need for the site to auto-scroll to the top of the page and display a Thank You message every time you vote.
In the post I do mention that you can do the same thing with reddit or following a ton of music related twitter accounts, but the voting and input from different people. We're not doing anything new, but I do think the presentation and appeal is there for nbt.
If you are interested, bookmark the link, it should be up again shortly.
This would probably not work with PuSH. But two separate feeds, one for PuSH and one that gives a voting-ordered snapshot when it's fetched, might let you target both the very-frequent and the casual users.
(haven't been able to check out the site yet, so this point might be extra ignorant)
A bit off topic: I'd love to see something like this but for motion graphics. I had planned to try to build it but that's clearly not my skillset, ha.
NBT itself seems to have died under the traffic, so I have some (perhaps stupid) questions:
1) How do you deal with voting rings and other gaming?
2) How do you deal with 'bubbles' - Some services keep me pretty tightly locked in to a certain bubble, when what I want is some leakage to explore and find new content.
[1]: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc
EDIT : I liked the sign up experience, that was really quick, kudos for that !
What I see as a problem is that it's probably going to become (if it gets really big) a copy of mainstream charts or (if a a genre group becomes the majority) only have music for that genre and related genres.
I wish them the best of luck but I personally don't see a future.