How do people discuss specific podcasts there? Never visited that subreddit before but the top entries seems to be discussion about podcasts, not discussions about content in podcast episodes.
It looks like it'd work pretty well if you're listening to them at the same site - so comments are tagged with the timestamp, soundcloud-esque.
I can kinda see the logic - unfortunately sitting in front of my computer is my least favourite way to consume podcasts - and the workflow seems to break down quickly once you disassociate the two.
I haven't looked at this product but as a listener of podcasts I can think of 2 obvious reasons.
First, r/podcasts is for all podcasts, I'd be more interested in a community for a specific podcasts (say my favorite one: Dithering).
But also a r/dithering wouldn't really work that well since I might not be listening to a particular episode right when it came out. I'd prefer to talk to people about only the most recent episode I listened to.
Of course a r/dithering could simply have a meta post for each episode but that isn't that easy to find.
I think the host sign-up flow is a bit odd. I can enter any podcast name and have that trigger an email to the authors of that podcast (multiple times? I hope not).
Seems like it would make more sense that an author could create an account on the site and then link podcasts to it. Triggering an email to podcast authors because I selected their podcast in a drop down feels a bit spammy.
Promising once it has a volume of users. At first though, I imagine it would attract relatively new podcasts that don't yet have established communities.
That said, until it reaches some critical mass which adds value to creators in terms of discovery and community, asking small time creators to fork out 360USD per year is quite a big ask.
> …asking small time creators to fork out 360USD per year is quite a big ask.
Especially given that (1) podcasters would be the primary driver of users to this service, and (2) podcasters will also be doing all the moderation work.
Would it be interesting to do this for all knowledge artefacts? Books, articles, blog posts, blogs. It would create a graph of all these works after all they/respond to each other but also who reads what.
Some podcasts have reddit boards, some are mainly discussed on Twitter, some run Slack Channels, some publish on Youtube and use its live commentary in the chat - most use a mix of these.
I appreciate this is a bit like the "we have 14 competing standards" XKCD, but there's a deeper, underlying problem that Podbabble tries to tackle: The majority of podcast discussion is either too general (i.e. debating the hashtag of a show as opposed to a specific episode), ephemeral (i.e. Twitter or live chat where discussion only happens within a few hours of episode release) and its almost always distributed (some on Reddit, some here, some there.)
Podcasting - albeit still comparatively tiny) is the fastest growing medium and I am confident that having a central, purpose built place for listener engagement will add value to the ecosystem.
These aren't just discussion groups for the podcasts - many of the users in these subreddits don't even listen to the podcasts. The subreddits for these podcasts have evolved as their own, independent communities. Why would they just up and leave for yours?
Yes and this is the problem, reddit is reddit and the comment-quality is terribly low, often toxic and dominated by a certain ideology that is particularly dominant and vocal on reddit in particular. I think this has potential if they manage to keep the comment quality higher, somehow.
This is highly dependent on the moderators. If you have good moderators, you can have a subreddit with quality posts and comments rivaling HN. If you have bad ones, it can (and will) devolve into toxicity and ideological bubbling. I've seen both and I've seen ones in between.
That said, maybe I'm just not in the loop, but I'm not aware of any subreddit dedicated to reviewing podcast episodes. Also, I'm not sure the Reddit format lends itself to creating a database of user reviews for certain episodes without heavy moderation and a heavy-handed approach to posting (for example, to avoid duplicates). A lot of this needs to be formulated into an automated system that only a custom-made site can offer.
I was a heavy user of Reddit since it came out until about a year ago. I left precisely because it felt like every single subreddit I was talking to children.
It sounds to me like you only visit the larger toxic subreddits. There are many hobby subreddits where the tone is positive and uplifting. It’s not Reddit as a whole that is the problem, but what subreddits you are visiting. Here is a hint, any subreddit that makes it to r/popular should never be visited.
There are also many hobby subreddits where the moderators are jerks and have zero clue how to manage or grow a community.
There may be some "goldilocks" subreddit size, but IMO there are approaching zero Reddit communities that are "healthily" run, probably because most of the people involved (users, mods) are literal, actual children.
That hasn't been my experience. I've been pleased, for the most part, with how r/woodworking, r/boardgames, r/cooking, r/18xx, r/cooking, r/gardening, r/boardgamedeals, r/visitingiceland, etc. are run. I've run into very few toxic subreddits.
Indeed. And I was just thinking about how sites like Reddit and Hacker News are terrible when it comes to discussing things like podcasts or building a community. An active web forum is what would be really useful.
For example, the podcast subs I frequent on Reddit often have people posting the same questions over and over again. A forum would simply aggregate them into one post that gets bumped to the top when someone comments, perhaps with the first post collating all the information as time goes on. But on the Reddit style boards, the discussion disappears soon after it's posted, just when the information starts to get there. It drops off the front page forever, and a couple days later someone comes along asking the exact same thing. Every podcast discussion starts from scratch, and ends soon afterwards. If you're a day or two late to a discussion, chances are no one will even your response.
> A forum would simply aggregate them into one post that gets bumped to the top when someone comments, perhaps with the first post collating all the information as time goes on. But on the Reddit style boards, the discussion disappears soon after it's posted, just when the information starts to get there.
This isn’t necessarily true. It sounds to me like you only have experience with some of the larger subreddits like r/pics. If you frequent smaller hobby subreddits you will find that the moderators will do exactly what is being described here. Some are pinned on a permanent basis, others are rotated out on a weekly or daily basis. The tools to do this are already baked into Reddit, it is up to the moderators of each subreddit whether to use them or not.
> It sounds to me like you only have experience with some of the larger subreddits like r/pics.
As I said in my post, I frequent podcast subs, which are usually on the smaller side to things. Sure, you can pin posts, but only two at a time, which means they often get dropped and switched. And unless they're extremely recent (so you're pinning posts all the time), as soon as they get dropped, they disappear. Spent 30 minutes writing a post to a pin discussion that you posted minutes before moderators switched the pinned post to something else? Chances are, no one's ever going to see it.
But a bigger problem is how nothing gets bumped to the top in those places. If I randomly stumble across a 5 year old discussion on IMDB and post a comment, it's going to be bumped to the top of the post list, and plenty of people will see it. If followed a link from something pinned to the top of a Reddit sub to a 10 day old discussion and make a comment, it's likely no one will see it. The only way people would even know there was a new comment is if they kept checking all of the dead conversations that have already fallen off the front page.
And the upvoting/downvoting exacerbates this further. It's not just that you're limited to the most recent posts if you want someone to see what you've said, but you're often stuck replying to the most upvoted comments to that post.
I'm surprised if I get a comment or upvotes on site like Reddit or Hacker News after a couple of days. On the webforums I frequent, I often get them after _years_. If this were a forum, I'd probably be making this post later tonight or later in the week. But on Hacker News, if I don't make it in the next couple hours it's likely no one would ever see my response.
Setting aside the first sentence, I think this is valuable feedback for Wolfram.
Podcasters will need to meet listeners where they hang out (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) regardless of whether they can also be persuaded to use this additional niche social media site.
Any podcaster who would use this service will have already created a multi-channel social media presence for their show, so instead of "do this instead" the sales pitch must answer "why do this as well".
You can make the argument any feedback is 'valuable' sort of like people contrive to defend entirely offtopic or incomprehensible comments as 'relevant'. But HN discussions have additional standards and not being a terse, dismissive jerk, especially about the work of others is one of the important ones.
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.
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...)
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.
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!
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
In the times of GDPR and CCPA, there is no excuse for not having a simple way to delete your data. You should be able to revoke consent and remove your data as easily as you provided consent.
I like that I can read a comment for a podcast I've never heard of before and jump into the exact timestamp being discussed with a single click. I also like that I can read comments without logging in, so I can judge the quality of the discussion before deciding to sign up.
Things that could be improved: the site is a bit slow and I got at least one broken image - I imagine it is getting HN'd right now, though, so I'll check again later. I also agree with the main page being unfriendly - if it weren't for the side bar, I would have probably never tried it. I also wanted to go to a show's full list of discussions, but I didn't find a way.
Somehow the podcast library is a bit mixed up with multiple podcasts of the same name. If you look for the "Greatest Generation" Star Trek podcast, the preview indeed shows the Star Trek podcast but clicking it brings you to a completely different podcast of the same name.
I can see a significant amount of scepticism in the comments, and I think that much of the feedback is valuable and important, such as the lack of a 'point of difference', interface, value-add above existing solutions, etc.
But, a little disappointed with the pessimism in the comments in general. Someone has gone out of their way to build something from scratch and, regardless of whether it ticks all the boxes at the moment, I think that deserves positivity and a big 'well done'.
Projects rarely ever launch 100pc perfect -- or even 20pc perfect. It is best to launch, adapt, and iterate.
Note to poster: try to imagine that all the comments here start with 'Well done for launching, but something you might want to think about is...' Lots of the points are valid and require your attention, but they have been presented in a defeatist and negative way -- as if your launch is the end of matter and, as a result, it is all doomed to failure rather than providing a springboard to change, improve, and pivot as required.
But, a little disappointed with the pessimism in the comments
The comments change as the thread develops so if you really want to help a Show HN out, just write your positive comment (or whatever other comment) about the thing without the meta. It ends up being either inaccurate or generating more meta. Let the Show HN be about the thing showhn.
To give it a try i typed "sceptics" and selected Sceptics Guide to the Universe which results in redirection to https://podbabble.com/podcast/undefined and an error "Error: could not handle the request"
I got the same searching "mindscape" but tried again and it worked. I think it's a race condition in the search-as-you-type system (which also appears to have some flakiness, with searches from previous searches showing up after the latest search arrived).
I love the idea and monetization model, trawling through the rest of a subreddit to find the thread for a recent episode can be tedious.
Congrats on the launch, I have a couple of questions. Is it only for discussions around recent episodes? Or is it just that the specific podcasts i've searched for don't list all episodes?
It really depends on the podcast. We run it of the podcast's RSS feed, some of which include the entire archive, some just a number of recent episodes. Some podcast players create their own archive to patch this which is something we might need to do as well.
Very cool idea but the website seems awfully slow with all the animations and loading screens, and the audio player seems to keep resizing and lagging.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I think this is really really cool. Would certainly become a better and better experience (I think?) as more people leave comments on episodes.
Neat idea! As a podcaster I would love to be able to get feedback on my episodes this way. Have you ever considered adding the ability to embed it on external websites?
Also, I tried claiming my podcast and commenting but neither seems to have worked for me. Perhaps because of high traffic?
Really sorry. I can see repeated attempts for a podcast verification email sent out to a*@**o.org, but the email seems to bounce. If this is you, could you let me know at team@podbabble.com and I'd be happy to help sort it out.
I like the idea of this! I don't feel like I'm unusual in that I listen to my podcasts in a player app (Overcast, in my case), and always away from a computer. It would be really cool if this had an API that podcast apps could talk to for comments (maybe the creator of the feed has the ability to include a link to the API in the metadata, making an open ecosystem of podcast comment tools)
I wish your homepage made it easier to more quickly engage in podcast discussion. Right now, my feedback is that it takes too long to get to proof of value, your UI is confusing and it's not clear to me what, or how, I can get to 'discussing podcasts'.
I'm not sure I'm following. You can jump into any podcast discussion via the homepage, either by clicking a comment or by searching for a podcast. You don't need an account to see discussion boards and you can even comment anonymously.
Sign out of reddit and take a look at the homepage. You will see something very different from your homepage. It is a much easier interface to get started with. I lurked on reddit's homepage for a year before I ever created an account or looked into specific subreddits that might interest me.
Yes, loading is quite slow. I typed in a name and the search result showed almost instantly but it took over thirty seconds to actually get to the comment section. There's no reason you need to embed a player for the episode on the comment page. If I'm going to go to a web page and comment on a podcast I've already listened to the podcast.
There's definitely reasons for it (to easily link to clips in comments) but there's no reason to block loading the comments on loading the episode or the player
That's fair. When you are the first user to ever visit a site for an episode, we pull info from the show's RSS feed. So unfortunately we depend on the RSS feed host's response time.
But the experience around it can and should definitely be a lot smoother.
the only audio oriented comment system that i appreciate was the one from soundcloud
you select the exact time, and you put your comment
everyone listening to that music could see what people say about that very specific moment, as they listen
encouraging podcast creators to time their podcast would allow platforms to offer precise comment system that users can consume and contribute to consistently
but nobody cares, because the people who build the platforms are not users, it's not built organically, therefore they don't understand these kind of special things
137 comments
[ 565 ms ] story [ 3881 ms ] threadI can kinda see the logic - unfortunately sitting in front of my computer is my least favourite way to consume podcasts - and the workflow seems to break down quickly once you disassociate the two.
First, r/podcasts is for all podcasts, I'd be more interested in a community for a specific podcasts (say my favorite one: Dithering).
But also a r/dithering wouldn't really work that well since I might not be listening to a particular episode right when it came out. I'd prefer to talk to people about only the most recent episode I listened to.
Of course a r/dithering could simply have a meta post for each episode but that isn't that easy to find.
Seems like it would make more sense that an author could create an account on the site and then link podcasts to it. Triggering an email to podcast authors because I selected their podcast in a drop down feels a bit spammy.
That said, until it reaches some critical mass which adds value to creators in terms of discovery and community, asking small time creators to fork out 360USD per year is quite a big ask.
Especially given that (1) podcasters would be the primary driver of users to this service, and (2) podcasters will also be doing all the moderation work.
I appreciate this is a bit like the "we have 14 competing standards" XKCD, but there's a deeper, underlying problem that Podbabble tries to tackle: The majority of podcast discussion is either too general (i.e. debating the hashtag of a show as opposed to a specific episode), ephemeral (i.e. Twitter or live chat where discussion only happens within a few hours of episode release) and its almost always distributed (some on Reddit, some here, some there.)
Podcasting - albeit still comparatively tiny) is the fastest growing medium and I am confident that having a central, purpose built place for listener engagement will add value to the ecosystem.
/r/JoeRogan
These aren't just discussion groups for the podcasts - many of the users in these subreddits don't even listen to the podcasts. The subreddits for these podcasts have evolved as their own, independent communities. Why would they just up and leave for yours?
Yes and this is the problem, reddit is reddit and the comment-quality is terribly low, often toxic and dominated by a certain ideology that is particularly dominant and vocal on reddit in particular. I think this has potential if they manage to keep the comment quality higher, somehow.
That said, maybe I'm just not in the loop, but I'm not aware of any subreddit dedicated to reviewing podcast episodes. Also, I'm not sure the Reddit format lends itself to creating a database of user reviews for certain episodes without heavy moderation and a heavy-handed approach to posting (for example, to avoid duplicates). A lot of this needs to be formulated into an automated system that only a custom-made site can offer.
There may be some "goldilocks" subreddit size, but IMO there are approaching zero Reddit communities that are "healthily" run, probably because most of the people involved (users, mods) are literal, actual children.
For example, the podcast subs I frequent on Reddit often have people posting the same questions over and over again. A forum would simply aggregate them into one post that gets bumped to the top when someone comments, perhaps with the first post collating all the information as time goes on. But on the Reddit style boards, the discussion disappears soon after it's posted, just when the information starts to get there. It drops off the front page forever, and a couple days later someone comes along asking the exact same thing. Every podcast discussion starts from scratch, and ends soon afterwards. If you're a day or two late to a discussion, chances are no one will even your response.
This isn’t necessarily true. It sounds to me like you only have experience with some of the larger subreddits like r/pics. If you frequent smaller hobby subreddits you will find that the moderators will do exactly what is being described here. Some are pinned on a permanent basis, others are rotated out on a weekly or daily basis. The tools to do this are already baked into Reddit, it is up to the moderators of each subreddit whether to use them or not.
As I said in my post, I frequent podcast subs, which are usually on the smaller side to things. Sure, you can pin posts, but only two at a time, which means they often get dropped and switched. And unless they're extremely recent (so you're pinning posts all the time), as soon as they get dropped, they disappear. Spent 30 minutes writing a post to a pin discussion that you posted minutes before moderators switched the pinned post to something else? Chances are, no one's ever going to see it.
But a bigger problem is how nothing gets bumped to the top in those places. If I randomly stumble across a 5 year old discussion on IMDB and post a comment, it's going to be bumped to the top of the post list, and plenty of people will see it. If followed a link from something pinned to the top of a Reddit sub to a 10 day old discussion and make a comment, it's likely no one will see it. The only way people would even know there was a new comment is if they kept checking all of the dead conversations that have already fallen off the front page.
And the upvoting/downvoting exacerbates this further. It's not just that you're limited to the most recent posts if you want someone to see what you've said, but you're often stuck replying to the most upvoted comments to that post.
I'm surprised if I get a comment or upvotes on site like Reddit or Hacker News after a couple of days. On the webforums I frequent, I often get them after _years_. If this were a forum, I'd probably be making this post later tonight or later in the week. But on Hacker News, if I don't make it in the next couple hours it's likely no one would ever see my response.
In Comments
Be respectful. Anyone sharing work is making a contribution, however modest.
[...]
When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is, but don't be gratuitously negative.
Podcasters will need to meet listeners where they hang out (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) regardless of whether they can also be persuaded to use this additional niche social media site.
Any podcaster who would use this service will have already created a multi-channel social media presence for their show, so instead of "do this instead" the sales pitch must answer "why do this as well".
Or is Reddit the "perfect" community engine?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Create content yourselves to fill the void until it grows.
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.
I want to see what the site is about before signing up or doing anything.
Things that could be improved: the site is a bit slow and I got at least one broken image - I imagine it is getting HN'd right now, though, so I'll check again later. I also agree with the main page being unfriendly - if it weren't for the side bar, I would have probably never tried it. I also wanted to go to a show's full list of discussions, but I didn't find a way.
Overall I like it.
Not a good look in terms of data quality here.
I can see a significant amount of scepticism in the comments, and I think that much of the feedback is valuable and important, such as the lack of a 'point of difference', interface, value-add above existing solutions, etc.
But, a little disappointed with the pessimism in the comments in general. Someone has gone out of their way to build something from scratch and, regardless of whether it ticks all the boxes at the moment, I think that deserves positivity and a big 'well done'.
Projects rarely ever launch 100pc perfect -- or even 20pc perfect. It is best to launch, adapt, and iterate.
Note to poster: try to imagine that all the comments here start with 'Well done for launching, but something you might want to think about is...' Lots of the points are valid and require your attention, but they have been presented in a defeatist and negative way -- as if your launch is the end of matter and, as a result, it is all doomed to failure rather than providing a springboard to change, improve, and pivot as required.
Doing the work is hard. Putting yourself out there in a vulnerable state and hoping for the best is almost AS difficult.
So, the best of luck to the OP. Adapt and grow.
The comments change as the thread develops so if you really want to help a Show HN out, just write your positive comment (or whatever other comment) about the thing without the meta. It ends up being either inaccurate or generating more meta. Let the Show HN be about the thing showhn.
as much as i hate ads, i'd say that for this type of project it's better to leave it free but show some relevant podcast ads
How are you categorizing this project? What about it makes you think demanding money for entry is not feasible for growth?
Congrats on the launch, I have a couple of questions. Is it only for discussions around recent episodes? Or is it just that the specific podcasts i've searched for don't list all episodes?
Also, I tried claiming my podcast and commenting but neither seems to have worked for me. Perhaps because of high traffic?
Sign out of reddit and take a look at the homepage. You will see something very different from your homepage. It is a much easier interface to get started with. I lurked on reddit's homepage for a year before I ever created an account or looked into specific subreddits that might interest me.
But the experience around it can and should definitely be a lot smoother.
you select the exact time, and you put your comment
everyone listening to that music could see what people say about that very specific moment, as they listen
encouraging podcast creators to time their podcast would allow platforms to offer precise comment system that users can consume and contribute to consistently
but nobody cares, because the people who build the platforms are not users, it's not built organically, therefore they don't understand these kind of special things