[rnernento]

Reddit never started by taking me to a giant signup page for a paid subscription. As someone who was mildly curious and might have checked it out of you presented something interesting I immediately left, maybe think about making the base landing page more interesting in hopes of gaining traction with users and then make another landing page for people you want to sell the service to.

[wolframhempel]

Podbabble is free for users. It only charges you if you want to become a verified host and moderate your podcast boards. To me, this is preferable to selling your data and advertising to you. (https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy-revision-2021...)

[closedloop129]

The main point is not whether it's free or not but that the main page is a landing page. If you visit Reddit, you immediately see content, you are one click away from reading comments. Registering is optional and comes naturally when you want to write a comment yourself.

To convince your visitors, your site is just a landing page. It requires commitment to an account before it is possible to judge the site.

I don't have the experience to judge if that is a good strategy. But if you want to be the Reddit of podcast discussions, then you should show the discussions to the visitors and only request accounts from those who want to write comments.

[wolframhempel]

We had a lot of discussion about it, but it's a chicken and egg problem. We just launched, so there isn't much content to show straight away - and we felt it's worth explaining the concept. As content grows, we want to shift to a "content only" view for the homepage.

It's important to stress that Podbabble doesn't require accounts to view discussions - in fact, you can even comment anonymously without creating an account. If you click on any of the comments on the homepage or choose a podcast via search you'll immediately taken to its discussion page without any barriers.

[sfg]

Get rid of the landing page and get straight to the content.

Create content yourselves to fill the void until it grows.

[rnernento]

I think if you ever want there to actually be content you need a way to grab users and make it easy for them to start generating it.

When you say "it's a chicken and an egg problem" you're spot on. That's the problem for every new social network or user based platform trying to launch. Until you have a ton of users and content I would argue it's the only problem worth worrying about.

[penneyd]

I agree with this, I clicked to check it out and left after it appeared I had to sign up, sure I'm not alone.

[rnernento]

I'm not criticizing your business model, I'm just saying as a user who doesn't care about your business model and is just curious about podcast discussions your homepage isn't optimized for me.

If you focus on building a userbase first it will be easier to sell the service later.

As a user I have a billion things competing for my attention, if you don't make it super easy for me to get to useful or interesting content I'm going to move on and that's going to hurt you overall.

[Sakos]

I think it's odd to give sole control of moderation to podcast creators. It quickly leads to creators sanitising feedback to prefer only positive feedback.

[wolframhempel]

That's fair and its something we will have to get right over time. But its also tricky to find an ethical monetization model for social media.

You can sell your user's data to advertisers, or you can sell control or you can find some other channel.

We're e.g. playing with the idea to add a live podcasting feature that allows user's to comment and tip during a show a la Twitch.

[PogoPuppy]

Your latter idea is golden, in my opinion. Some of the podcasts I subscribe to regularly complain about their live cast options.

[sjostrom7]

Agreed with the other user - if you can get livecast + tipping going that'll be your hook. Hosts will then have a specific reason to plug your platform. Best of luck, very promising!

[cupofpython]

>It quickly leads to creators sanitising feedback to prefer only positive feedback

I dont see this as a big issue. It seems to be a place for podcast community members to gather and discuss instead of making yet another discord. If you dont have positive feedback for a podcast why comment at all to begin with? The podcast medium is entirely built to taste and fits well with being a bubble (despite bubbles usually being a negative thing).

The hidden issue would be power to cover up a scandal, so I would hope that for serious issues users can report a podcast and site admins can handle it appropriately.

[murphyslab]

> If you dont have positive feedback for a podcast why comment at all to begin with?

The quality of a podcast is not going to be uniformly positive. So a listener's feedback isn't going to be uniformly positive. It becomes a problem when the primary space for discussing a subject only permits positive feedback. Healthy communities do require negative feedback.

It's ironic that creator of Podbabble couches the creator-based moderation as a means to

> Foster healthy communities. Podbabble lets you moderate, adjust ratings, and flag comments as you see fit.

Too often, allowing the subject of a forum to moderate the forum leads to suppression of valid critique. And good critique can also come from outsiders; those who are not regular listeners.

A better alternative for Podbabble would be to allow creators to sponsor their podcast's forum, perhaps having it be featured more prominently or by removing comment rate limits.

[infinityio]

Personally, I'd recommend making more of the homepage the actual site, in the style of Reddit or HN's homepage - hopefully, the content that will be surfaced will explain it better than marketing does (and make it seem less closed off!)

[sfg]

Yeah, I got to the landing page and left immediately.

I want to see what the site is about before signing up or doing anything.