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Show HN: Hacker News Discourse turns HN stories into Clubhouse-style audio rooms

36 points by sethkim ↗ HN
I'm Seth, creator of discourse.fm, a browser-based tool/platform to create live audio chat rooms.

I just launched an extension of the site - https://hackernews.discourse.fm/ - which pulls stories in real-time from the HN site using the public API, and enables anyone to join a live audio discussion about the story (think Clubhouse rooms autogenerated for HN stories). Once you enter a room, you can grab the link generated for a room and paste it back to the comments on the HN story to invite more participants.

hackernews.discourse.fm is both a full-fledged product and a demo of how discourse.fm can be used to create live audio communities. HN is an ideal for this, as it benefits from its synchronicity, similarly-minded users, and it's basically a non-stop source of interesting discussion topics. That being said, almost any consistently active text-based community, forum, or news site could likely benefit from integrating live audio discussions. If you're interested in how you can use discourse.fm to accomplish this, let me know at info@discourse.fm.

I'd love to hear feedback about what I've built. It would be especially cool (and very meta) to discuss this live using the room on the hackernews.discourse.fm site.

Link to site: https://hackernews.discourse.fm/

Link to room: https://www.hackernews.discourse.fm/live/show-hn-hacker-news-discourse-turns-hn-stories-into-clubhousestyle-audio-rooms

11 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 36.5 ms ] thread
mkolodny
Great idea! I'll keep using the main hacker news site, but I'd love an easy way to go from a hacker news story to the related audio discussion. I'd probably use a chrome extension that takes me from a website to its related discourse.fm audio discussion.
sethkim
That totally makes sense. HN remains the "source of truth" - this is just supposed to be another means of discussing stories. A browser extension is a very sensible way of getting the best of both worlds
nexthash
Wow, this is a really cool idea, and I love the platform behind it! Reminds me of the old Anchor.fm. I can definitely see it riding the upswell of proximity and private chat room apps. Only question from me: how do you do moderation in these audio rooms? I know on Clubhouse it works so that there's a couple of speakers that control the room and talk while everyone else listens.

A post on HN earlier today highlighted some of the problems with this approach - such as these speakers spreading misinformation and not much moderation from Clubhouse staff. Just something to keep in mind as you grow your service. For reference, you can find that discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26093004

Good luck!

sethkim
Hey! Thanks for the positive feedback! Moderation is a key topic for discourse.fm. As the name suggests, it's a place to come freely discuss ideas without fear of being kicked out for simply having different opinions. Hence, we're going for "decentralized moderation" (i.e. no one is in control, not even the creator of the rooms). Obviously we'll have to implement some mechanism to protect against ill-willed users, but what exactly that'll look like is yet to be seen.
frunzales
The idea is great, I see lots of potential in this. Especially from a user quality perspective.
sanmak
Idea is cool. Try to club other sources as well to make it accessible for non-tech users.

I'm assuming it's a MVP to test the product. Kudos.

It Definitely needs an improvement, UI, audio, etc.

Bookmarked the app already.

sethkim
Thanks for the feedback!