Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go? • Hacker News Board

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#61

Post by tseabrooks » Tue, May 01, 2012, 2:45 PM UTC

I love the idea of Turntable.. I used it off and on... But it has usability problems that haven't seemed to improve.

1) It originally only allowed facebook login, or rather thats the only thing I could find. Now there is Twitter, which is better... but it's still unreasonably restrictive here.

2) The music search is a nasty broken mess. It reminds me of searching for music in the very very early days of Napster... No, wait... Napster was better. I can't search for albums very well, I can't sort the results, I can't distinguish between a good quality song an a shitty quality song often. Especially noticeable when search a song name and getting a live track instead of studio track.

3) Something as simple as "Shuffle" never showed up. I hated having to manually shuffle my list of music. Usually I'd add entire albums at once... but I didn't want to listen to all the songs in order.

4) Starting a room is frustrating because you can't listen to music by yourself. There is no way to grow a new room from me, by myself, to 100 if I can't listen. I'll simply leave the room.

5) Needs a DJ recommendation service or something. I need a way to not baby sit my list.

All of that aside, I think their service would work well as a spotify app maybe. There are other similar spotify apps now that are much nicer to use.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#62

Post by growt » Tue, May 01, 2012, 2:47 PM UTC

guynamedloren wrote: post #33

companyhen wrote: post #2

I started using http://plug.dj the past few weeks and I'm liking it much more than turntable. For one, it's international and you can stream/watch YouTube videos and play SoundCloud in the room. There's also an option to import your Turntable playlist.

Brilliant. One of those ideas that seems so obvious. As crazy as it sounds, I'm hard pressed to believe that there is a better music source than Youtube. Spotify, pandora, and soundcloud are shit in comparison. Youtube has EVERYTHING - I can get any song I want (popular or not) whenever I want it, for free. The reason I love turntable is that there's constantly new music, and it's curated for me. I mostly absorb, but…

Unless you live in germany, then youtube has nothing :(

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#63

Post by nthitz » Tue, May 01, 2012, 2:55 PM UTC

namidark wrote: post #60

rglover wrote: post #58

I had a falling out with Turntable.fm for the following reasons: - Too distracting. I used it most when I was working to have music on in the background, but if I wanted to participate I was constantly tending to my playlist. Not sure how to fix something like this. - No way to explore music outside of going into rooms. It would have been great if they had a "Top 200" tracks or a way to browse genres (just add in an…

That and their TOS just throws you under the bus

What about their TOS is bad?

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#64

Post by mnicole » Tue, May 01, 2012, 4:41 PM UTC

jayzee wrote: post #4

I got annoyed when I got into a disagreement with a moderator and was kicked out of a room repeatedly. I am not sure how many others had a similar experience but I just left the site after that. It made the site feel unwelcoming.

This. I recently sent a screenshot to them after 2-3 people were booted for disagreeing with the way a mod was handling the room. I'd been visiting that room on and off for nearly a year, and had never seen this person before.

They sent me a really nice response (thanks Jessica), but ultimately their inability to control what becomes an ego-based platform is going to kill them faster than the complete lack of redesigning their product since launch.

I'd even initially thought about applying for a designer role when they first launched, and had done a mock-up of the landing page that did a better job of promoting rooms and users, but they don't seem interested in hiring remotely.

Glad to find plug.dj, but I'm not finding the type of room I want and being at work, I don't have time to dink around the interface and figure it out. My main complaint with services like these is the cartoon trend. I'd much prefer a text-only view, especially at work.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#65

Post by StavrosK » Tue, May 01, 2012, 4:41 PM UTC

stevensacks wrote: post #39

reustle wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you behind www.Plug.dj

No, but I am. I'm Steven Sacks, the CEO and founder of http://plug.dj . plug.dj is not just music, it's videos, too. Everything comes from YouTube and SoundCloud so licensing is already taken care of. We love our users. Building a community is everything we are about. We listen and we care. We are involved. plug.dj is international, and not just in name. We have localized the site into 8 languages so far and our chat…

Please add BrowserID to your list of auth mechanisms, it takes a few minutes to integrate and is awesome.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#66

Post by twinturbo » Tue, May 01, 2012, 5:32 PM UTC

Simple, you are expendable. Give your user's a reason to say. Give them a product they're willing to pay for and can't live without.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#67

Post by dandelany » Tue, May 01, 2012, 5:37 PM UTC

namidark wrote: post #60

rglover wrote: post #58

I had a falling out with Turntable.fm for the following reasons: - Too distracting. I used it most when I was working to have music on in the background, but if I wanted to participate I was constantly tending to my playlist. Not sure how to fix something like this. - No way to explore music outside of going into rooms. It would have been great if they had a "Top 200" tracks or a way to browse genres (just add in an…

That and their TOS just throws you under the bus

TT.FM developer here. What in particular do you find onerous about the updated TOS? We collect very little in the way of personally identifiable information and don't share it with anyone except on an opt-in basis (for contests, events etc.). I happen to think our TOS is a lot better than most sites', which state that they'll share your information with anyone they want without your permission.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#68

Post by dandelany » Tue, May 01, 2012, 5:53 PM UTC

jayzee wrote: post #4

I got annoyed when I got into a disagreement with a moderator and was kicked out of a room repeatedly. I am not sure how many others had a similar experience but I just left the site after that. It made the site feel unwelcoming.

TT developer here. Sorry you had a bad experience. This is a difficult problem for us - each room is it's own community with it's own rules, and it's really hard to determine how much "policing" is appropriate on a global level. Personally, I'm of the opinion that we should intervene as little as possible. There are some cases in which people are obviously being malicious towards other rooms, eg. invading Christian rooms to play death metal, etc., and we do our best to respond and ban those involved. However, in cases of disagreements within communities, I prefer to let communities sort out their issues themselves - especially since it's so easy to create a new room/community, if you have others who agree with you. In fact, some of our best rooms have come from exactly this type of community splintering. We try to encourage small communities of like-minded people, rather than huge rooms in which everyone must play by rules that not everyone agrees with. As a user, I much prefer this to sites run by a "benevolent dictator" who has final say over what is and is not appropriate.

That said, there's an excellent chance we aren't doing it exactly right. We're constantly refining the ways we moderate the community, and we love getting input on the best ways to approach it. Feel free to contact info@turntable.fm or me personally at dan@turntable.fm if you have any more specific feedback or questions.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#69

Post by dandelany » Tue, May 01, 2012, 5:55 PM UTC

nestlequ1k wrote: post #38

jayzee wrote: post #4

I got annoyed when I got into a disagreement with a moderator and was kicked out of a room repeatedly. I am not sure how many others had a similar experience but I just left the site after that. It made the site feel unwelcoming.

I had the exact same experience. Moderators would boot/ban you if you downvote songs, or if you criticize anything ever. I havent touched turntable in months. Simple solution. Moderators should be able to mute users. But not kick them from the channel. What's the point of kicking if we're just here to listen to music? If they fix this, I think I'd go back.

TT developer here. Any user can "mute" any other user - just go to Settings > Ignored Users and add their username to your ignored list. Hope to see you back on the site soon!

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#70

Post by dandelany » Tue, May 01, 2012, 5:58 PM UTC

ericflo wrote: post #17

I found this article to be very well-written. It's not the most intellectual topic, but I do feel like I've gotten a pretty good window into the lives of the founders.

I, too, found the article to be well-written, at least from a technical perspective. However, as a TT employee who knows the founders personally, I didn't find it to be a particularly accurate view of their lives or personalities. I suppose this is the danger of "well-written" articles.