from Hacker News

Show HN: Ballotter, an Online Video Debating Platform for Our Discussions

by grif-fin on 1/4/17, 1:18 PM with 27 comments

• by jamespitts on 1/4/17, 9:34 PM

  The big suggestion I have for your team is to structure live sessions with television-like scheduling. Early-on, a live experience web site does not have enough usage to generate a good time for users. I learned this while running rapt.fm, a live web platform for freestyle rapping.

  Have a calendar and use twitter or other means to announce upcoming events to concentrate the attention of users. Create well-promoted "prime time" slots, later add in regular programming, and overall make it clear to the users that all other times are "down times" and not likely to have a lot of debates going on.

• by oneshoe on 1/4/17, 5:28 PM

  Hello. I really like this idea and just watched a debate and did enjoy it.

  I do like the idea of it of aggregated and real time feedback from the viewers however, My only suggestion is to make the cheers and jeers a little less intrusive. I'm just not that interested in the peanut gallery and, (for me) it interferes with the fluidity of the very short time frame people have to talk.

  Great work though - I'm very interested to see how this does.

• by alistproducer2 on 1/4/17, 4:14 PM

  I had literally the same idea. I had actually started researching webrtc. the tech looked a little fragile so I decided not to go forward. I hope you can work out your kinks and get it running, because I would be interested in giving it a go. It's like trying out my idea without putting in any of the work!

• by grif-fin on 1/4/17, 1:18 PM

  We have created Ballotter as an online (live/recorded) video debating platform to bring the discussions worth sharing on an online stage. Ballotter has just came online and is at the beta stage. We hope to gather a collection of amazing debates and people who want their voice heard with spectators voting and sharing. Couple of questions for HN:

  - What is your take on Ballotter?

  - Any suggestions on the product?

  - Any suggestions on user gathering?

• by zalmoxis on 1/5/17, 10:13 AM

  Great MVP!

  You might want to look for supporting https://www.temasys.io/plugin/ for Safari and IE, though rumour has it that Apple is planning to support WebRTC.

  Also honored to see that you're enabling Redux DevTools Extension, so we can look inside the processes there.

• by gmgarrison on 1/4/17, 3:51 PM

  Don't require WebRTC on the landing page. Apple browsers don't support it but I can't imagine you want to prevent those people from even learning about your product.

• by keyboardhitter on 1/4/17, 4:18 PM

  Small typo on the loading screen, "If it's taking to long" should use 'too'

• by xolb on 1/4/17, 5:36 PM

  In the end of the debate, it would be interesting to show the score of each participant.

• by greatNespresso on 1/4/17, 7:27 PM

  Looks promising BUT I'm on mobile and it does not show the video.

• by Vinkekatten on 1/4/17, 3:41 PM

  "An error has occured" Error message: "error: Is the gateway down?"

  - It's down but the reload button had a nice, blue color

  - Maybe do a little more load testing?

  - Don't be down.