Show HN: I made crowdwave – imagine Twitter/Reddit but every post is a voicemail

[andrewstuart]

Hey it's Andrew - author of https://www.crowdwave.com here!

- crowdwave works best on your phone - unless you've got your headset and microphone plugged in to your desktop, in which case desktop works great too.

Here's the story:

So about six months ago I saw this post on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119

https://afterthebeep.tel is really cool - it's an anonymous voicemail box - you call the provided phone the number and leave a message. Blaine - the guy who runs the site (eventually) listens to and approves your message and writes a headline. It was fun, and I found I kept going back to it and listening to the messages. I left a message once and several weeks later it appeared on the site. Blaine, from comments I read, didn't seem in a hurry to take the site much further, which got me thinking...

And I simply could not get one question out of my head - "what would happen if users could just hit record on their phone, instead of having to dial a phone number?".

When I get a software idea I get pretty obsessive and that question just kept gnawing at me.

So, like the any reasonable programmer would, I stopped working on the project I had been working on for literally YEARS and took a detour. Because that's what you do isn't it - you just drop those multiple years of work and pick up the shiny new thing.

I saw that afterthebeep is open source and I loved the UI design - the Windows 3.1 aesthetic really appealed to me - it seems perfect for voicemail, so I grabbed the open source code and started development. I couldn't make much sense of the code - it was using tech I'm not familiar with, so I ditched it all except the layout and the graphics.

Fortunately, the project I had been working on for YEARS is basically a Twitter/Reddit clone, so I ripped the UI out of the afterthebeep open source project and did open heart surgery until like some bizarre Frankenstein's monster I had put the afterthebeep open source UI onto my code.

And I added in the functionality that I craved so much - a "record" button. Sigh.... relief. It was incredibly satisfying to hit record and see a message appear almost immediately. Nerd craving fulfilled.

But my satisfaction did not last long. I REALLY HAD TO fix that problem of getting the posts approved and headlines written. So I made a back end audio processing pipeline and fed the messages into an LLM, which ripped the text from the speech and I then shoved it into OpenAI and asked it to make nice headlines. And it worked beautifully - now you only have to wait 30 seconds to see your message with a nice headline! Ahhhh..... sigh, satisfaction... (it wouldn't be 2024 without an AI twist, would it now?).

But hang on! It would be SO much better if there was some sort of category system almost like subreddits - then people could post their messages into areas of interest. So I built the channel system and sat back.... job done.

Looking at the calendar, dreading to see..... I've dropped into obsessive coding mode and and I've been down this rabbit hole full time for MONTHS. I'm getting wary - and I'm also getting tired and sick of the effort - when's this going to end?

But wait, another idea! How much more cool would it be if you could have your own user account, and follow and like and subscribe! I've just GOT TO make that. AND surely it has to be multi language doesn't it? I mean Germans like talking too don't they? And user profile pics, and channel banner images, and options and settings. And if you don't put in terms and conditions and privacy and a cookie message then won't the Eurpoeans turn up and arrest me? At this stage I'm like a drunken junkie wanting just one more thing, one more thing...... scope ain't just creeping, the scope is up and racing away faster than Usain Bolt.

I'm now like nearly five months into this and packing all this functionality into a UI that both make sense and fits onto a tiny phone screen is becoming a huge challenge - a challenge I don't know if I can actually solve - and if I can't make the UI make sense then the whole thing will be unusable. The UI MUST be minimal and yet still reveal to the user pretty much everything within fewer than five pages in total. The UI had to work BEST on a phone. That was a HUGE challenge, and I really didn't know until the end of the project if I could do it at all. But finally the UI seemed to come together and it was a tight squeeze but fit onto the limited screen resolution of even my old iPhone 6s (yes it's my main phone).

Then, a few days ago, after many months of grueling grind, there was nothing left on the todo list. crowdwave was done! All the features were done and I'd finally chased down that scope creep.

Which brings us to today. Give https://www.crowdwave.com a go on your phone or desktop if you have microphone. It's brand new so there WILL be bugs - hopefully not too severe. Thanks to Blaine at https://blaines.world/ for the inspiration!

[nebyoolae]

There is something strangely compelling, to crib from another commenter, about this site, its throwback UI, and general “this seems like a good idea even if no one really uses it”actually potentially useful art-piece-ness.

I tried both recording something on the site and uploading a file (all from an iPhone), but neither worked.

Regardless, kudos on this project. Hope Bob gets his milk.

[andrewstuart]

Hello I'd like to help you with recording - would you mind please emailing [email protected] describing what went wrong when you tried to use the microphone, and what device you are using Thanks!

[matt_heimer]

I was wondering if you had considered the possibility of AI companies using the recordings for voice training and faking. Good to see that you made an attempt with https://www.crowdwave.com/robots.txt but a couple suggestions.

Some robots.txt validation tools include the query string and since you have Disallow: /*.mp3$ a URL such as https://audio.crowdwave.com/DhERq8HaTKupuN5DVohWDQ/19985/CM4... might be allowed because the URL doesn't end with .mp3

Consider using

    Disallow: /*.mp3

or

    Disallow: /*.mp3$
    Disallow: /*.mp3?

You might also want to make the same robots.txt file available at https://audio.crowdwave.com/robots.txt

[atentaten]

The ability to listen to all the messages in a channel without tapping, as if I’m listening to the messages on my answering machine, would do be nice.

[andrewstuart]

There’s an auto play tick box directly above the play button.

[teodoro127]

"So people don't like texts anymore. Are videos a temporary thing too? What's next? Must be audio records... I should do something... But I'm almost deaf... Hope someone else have fun doing it instead..." Now my prayers have been answered. Congrats! The UI is really nice.

[jwong_]

I was similarly inspired by afterthebeep, but didn't get anywhere. It'll be interesting to see if different niches/metas build up over time.

I had fun browsing the different topics, and could see myself using this as a way to have "slow" social media usage.

[yarg]

I read significantly faster than people speak, everything in voice would be immediately frustrating to me.

Though I think there may be a target audience in the blind community; who could find the demi-organic nature of recorded speech more conducive to genuine conversations than their standard text-to-speech conversion software.

(Which I think there's a good chance a lot of them are using for one of their primary social networking interfaces anyway).

[ed]

You should add a talkboy[1] inspired voice changer to make it less intimidating to leave a message

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkboy

[challenger-derp]

I just wanna say I like the idea and I think you're (OP) right on the mark on there being people who prefer communicating by voice in an informal setting instead of using text. Voice may be, in certain situations, a higher bandwidth medium since intonation may be incorporated. On the flipside, I personally feel like I could be exposing more of myself to the world than I'd wish to with voice.. like people with particularly unique voices may fear de-anonymization via voice.

Overall, I think it's a project worth playing around with, and who knows, traction could start building up.

[equilibrium]

Did Bob eventually get the milk? People are getting worried

[andrewstuart]

Bob has gone missing.

[mydriasis]

Love it! Getting an error on playback now, though -- just says "4". Odd! Console reads that "A resource is blocked by OpaqueResponseBlocking". I'm on Firefox.

[miek]

Same. I could play msgs on the first page I landed on, but not on any subs

[andrewstuart]

Would you mind please emailing a screenshot along with phone model to [email protected] please.

[modeless]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Airchat yet. It's already a social site where every post is a voice recording.

[tchock23]

I want to like Airchat, but I find the UX to be horribly confusing. Maybe it’s intentionally that way, much like how Snapchat supposedly started out?

[johnnyApplePRNG]

Cool concept! I think the main issue is that it's difficult to glean information from audio bits quickly. I can look at Reddit or HN's front page for example and quickly scan what I am interested in reading, but with audio that's not so easy.

[schlauerfox]

Sounds related to Wadsworth's Constant on youtube where it skips the first 30% because early on most were filler intros, also related to the millennial pause, where people over a certain age hit record and have a brief pause before talking versus younger who are already talking while the recording starts, which was an observation of tiktok users of 'elders' like Taylor Swift doing so.

[andrewstuart]

Yeah audio is a different experience that's for sure.

I find it's the sort of thing I use probably at different times to when I might use Twitter - perhaps in bed before sleep listen to some messages, on the couch chilling.

[smusamashah]

This is amazing. I vaguely recall seeing this long time ago (may be here on HN) and people were having fun and submitting new audios. It's not a new project right?

Update: you have linked that project in the about section of your site.

[andrewstuart]

Yes! It's explained in the blurb above......

[justsayinginnt]

The aesthetic is spot on.

What is the intro sound to each clip? Feel like I heard it before somewhere.

[andrewstuart]

>> Feel like I heard it before somewhere.

Depends how old you are!

In the olden days when you had a "phone message machine" at home, you'd come home and press the play button to listen to your messages, then hear a beep between each message.

It's meant to sound like the click of the play button and the beep.

[thomasswift]

this is pretty fun. - one suggestion auto-clip my millennial pause at the beginning

[WeaselNo7]

Super cool. Love the interface, was not expecting to be thrown back a few decades!

On mobile, I tried recording to /c/PepTalk, but after recording my voice, none of the buttons ('save', 'play' or 'stop') did anything. So I wasn't sure if it had actually uploaded.

Then when I went back to the /c/PepTalk channel to check I had a popup saying something like 'failed to fetch waves' (sorry, I don't recall the exact error message!).

I'll keep an eye on this ongoing though, as I adore the concept.

[andrewstuart]

Would you mind please emailing a screenshot along with phone model to [email protected] please.

[klondike_klive]

I'm so much less articulate when I'm speaking than when I'm typing. I can't see myself ever having the wherewithal to use this,but u have to say it's an interesting concept!

[zameermfm]

Love the idea! Awesome execution, I just want to see it in a future evolution of twitter like UI, so it becomes easy in my head to keep, access and listen. Keep building what you love.

[io84]

Brilliant execution, congrats!

I saw the note on your about page that says "crowdwave was written in a weekend" and I was blown away by the polish for such a short project... and then only afterwards read the post text here that actually it took months and was a rabbit hole. It shows though, well done!

[andrewstuart]

It’s a bit of a programmers in joke whoever they see anything they say “I could write that in a weekend”.

[raylad]

This was tried: Odeo was more or less this, and it became Twitter because people preferred text.

[spencerchubb]

and now my Twitter feed is dominated by video

maybe it was a matter of cost. over time the cost of storage has gone down, and people are more engaged by richer forms of media. video > photo > text