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

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!

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

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