Hi, I'm Alex and I love podcasts. I'm excited because I think there's a lot that can be done to improve podcast discovery and sharing. That's why I created Knomad, a social podcast app for the iPhone, and why I joined the Product Hunt team to lead our newest category: Podcasts!
Now you can:
- Post podcast episodes
- Make collections of podcast episodes and share them with friends
- LIVE Chat with your favorite podcasters
- Listen to podcasts on the PH website
For more info, check out our Medium post: https://medium.com/@AlexCartaz/i...
Please leave your feedback here!
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@alexcartaz this is freaking amazing. Welcome and excited to see where you take it =)
I had the pleasure of joining @brian_lovin and @uberbryn on Design Details podcast (airing next week) yesterday. They asked why we're expanding to Podcasts. I half-joked: "Because I wanted it." π
Great job, team. This will be fun.
@imrat we're working on bridging the gap for the mobile experience. we want to make it easy to play an episode you find on Product Hunt in your podcast app of choice!
Been poking the beta a bit this last week and I think this is a strong category for PH. Podcasts need curation badly, and at the episode level. Really looking forward to what the community surfaces. Congrats to the team!
@dshan totally agree. There have been lots of times when I tell someone about a specific episode, but it's a bit daunting for the other person to just start diving into all the episodes to find the gems.
@dshan I didn't "get it" when I thought it was for an entire podcast. At the episode level of granularity it makes perfect sense. Excited for the amazing collections that will come out of this.
@dshan thanks guys we're really excited too! glad you're liking it so far. Podcasts are always challenging and I'm sure we'll face a lot of hurtles (tech, features, etc.) making curation and sharing work smoothly, but I'm excited to see where we can it =)
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I really like the episode based voting, instead of voting up the entire show. But it also raises the questions how you are going to deal with "spam" from high-frequent podcasts that release multiple episodes per week?
It would be great to be able to subscribe to certain topics by using the collections.
Still the play button needs refinement in my humble opinion. I totally missed it until I saw the tweet "click that play button". I didn't even notice it beforehand. I just scanned the list for podcast name and episodes and entered those that sounded interesting manually into overcast's search.
And that leads me to my last complaint...I miss the "smart speed" (or at least 1.5x & 2x options), as well as "voice boost" of overcast and alike players too much to be using the player you provide.
Do you plan on implementing an option to share/send a podcast to those 3rd party players? Or are you tracking listening behavior (like wistia does with their video player) and therefore want to a) keep control over the player and b) keep users on producthunt?
Thanks in advance!
@boettges we plan to perfect daily curation in much the same way products posts for tech work. I like the subscribe to topics idea (actually sort of tested it out in the medium article featuring a collection on episodes talking about ad blockers: http://www.producthunt.com/@alex...). It should be easy to modify the player as well! Keep the feedback coming =)
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@alexcartaz@boettges Yeah, I saw the adblock collection mentioned somewhere today. That's pretty much what I meant. It would be great if newly added podcast episodes would then be added to some kind of playlist cue.
Still I think in collections there should be an indication (besides the play button) if something is a podcast episode or series (which now are treated as products). I can see this being confusing, if someone stumbles upon those externally (search, social media link) without first consciously having chosen the "podcast" section.
The podcast hunt would be a great experience on mobile, if sharing to the regarding podcast app is feasible.
Fantastic feedback, @boettges. We're going to do some usability tests to surface more issues like this.
I'm also looking forward to providing "quick links" to Overcast, Stitcher, Podcatcher, and other popular native apps to make it easy for people to play and subscribe to podcasts in their preferred app (although hopefully the iOS app meets peoples' needs once podcasts are added).
@rrhoover iOS app integration could be huge. I find I'm more active on the app than the website these days, and have also stopped checking Overcast regularly. Looking forward to testing this out to see if it boosts my podcast consumption!
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@adammash totally agree. I'm a podcast junkie and subscribe to way more than I listen to. This would be a great way to decide which episodes I'll actually listen to.
Ah, we've been working on something on podcast discovery as well. Got held up with some of the meteor and telescope updates recently so couldn't launch just yet. But I've expected good things from this since I know @rrhoover is into podcasts and would do well with it.
@rrhoover The best products are the ones the maker wants to use themselves. (and I didn't think you were only excited just because you're naturally exuberant).
I"m probably will have to retool the project a bit, but I already see some easy differences. Still overlap, but different use cases get different audiences. Not like everyone just uses Mail Chimp for email campaigns or reddit for meme discovery.
Very cool launch,.
I've been using the podcasts section for about a week, and I'll echo what others have already said: it's great!
Something I'd love to see is the ability to highlight a preview clip for episodes. Allow the submitter or other users to highlight sections of an episode up to say 90 seconds that are particularly insightful / funny / etc. When you have episodes that are fairly long and often start with 5 to 10 minutes of advertisements and irrelevant babbling, it makes it harder for someone to give it a shot. A good, representative preview clip could really help.
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@jasonmcamps I think this would be fantastic and totally makes sense, much like how YouTube can share via a given time
One of the most frustrating things with podcasts is the lack of discovery channels - fingers crossed that this can really fill out that need and help surface the best new and undiscovered podcasts!
@lexkon totally agree! this is a really important goal us for us
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Was pleasantly surprised to be invited to beta test this PH vertical - loved it!
Thanks @alexcartaz!
Need to find a way to add links b/w episodes of the same show.
All I can say is: YES!
I've been in podcast discovery mode for the past week, mainly using Twitter and Google to find new ones. This is well timed and definitely something I'll be checking on regularly. Great work on this! π
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