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I realize that you have your own voice actors, but it might not be a bad idea to solicit some help from people already familiar with the whole LessWrong conceptspace. I know we have quite a few members with some excellent recording setups.
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That's a good idea. Any suggestions on the best way to go about doing that?
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I might be missing something obvious but I'm a bit confused about the subscription length. It says on this page that one has 6 months to download the podcast and that you keep them forever. However, it also says in two places that it is 4.99 for 1 year of access. What significance does the year have?
Your confusion is warranted. I quickly changed the terms to one year based on feedback, but didn't update the description text. Sorry for the confusion.
Yeah, seriously. And I have a large amount of experience with different narrators. I find that having one fixed voice aids my comprehension and I don't care that much about how sonorous the voice is. If I could take my pick of a narrators, and some how get a text to speech version of their voice I would pick that and only listen to them to get the effect, but that isn't in the cards.
Interesting. I love how everyone has such different preferences.
We're definitely going to stick strictly to the human-narrated content, but there is certainly a growing market of services which can get you your TTS content and we think they have a place too.
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What we're really interested in doing moving forward, aside from more sequences, is turning the promoted posts into a podcast. This would be offered as a paid monthly subscription.
We'd love the community's feedback on this.
Edit As suggested by somervta, if anyone is themselves interested in narrating some content, please get in touch with us. We'd love to get people familiar with LW content to help out with the load. When we start adding more channels, we expect our of main challenges to be keeping the quality of the readers high.
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Just something that jumped at me from the FAQ:
Do I need to create an account?
Yes. This way we can manage which channels you are subscribed to and allows you to sign in and change your Castify subscription status.
An awkward turn of phrase. Consider replacing "which" with "the" and "allows you to" with "let you". Or rephrase it completely.
It's great to get all this feedback. Answer updated. Thanks.
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I imagine the less technical the subject matter the more likely it is to be useful to listen to as a podcast. I only listen to podcasts when I'm out on errands and so I don't want to or have to devote much mental energy to get something out of the podcast.
So, by this heuristic, I think the quantum physics sequence is probably out and Yudkowsky's coming of age is probably in.
Yes, we're very cognisant that some content just doesn't work as spoken word. We thought Less Wrong content was a great test case because most articles translate well to spoken word and is pretty unique in that the sequences nicely cluster content for us to offer.
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Minor interface tweak: most websites have taught me that if I click on the site logo at the top, I'll be taken back to the front page. I was expecting that to work on Castify as well, but it didn't, which delayed me for about half a second before I located the "Home" link. It's no big deal, but many users would probably prefer it if you followed the normal UI convention.
Another good suggestions. That's something I overlook all the time and is pretty easy to fix.
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Another comment prompted by the LW channel page...
you have six months to download the audio in the podcast (once downloaded they’re yours forever)
If one is free to keep the files forever after downloading them once, why not call this "buy" instead of "subscribe" and give people the right to re-download the files at any time? I doubt you'd lose much money from that, and I expect that it might actually net you more sales. A big reason why I'm happy to use various digital stores is the knowledge that I can always re-download the files at any time if I have a hard drive crash, and don't need to worry about one more thing that I should keep backed up. Or I can even go on a spending spree and buy a big bunch of things at once, knowing that I'll only download a couple of them now and can grab the rest whenever I have the time for them. If there was a time limit on when I needed to download my purchases, I'd be a lot less likely to do that, since I might forget about it.
If you call this "subscribe" and give people a limited amount of time to download the stuff, you're making their mental frame of reference to be to other subscription services, which I expect is going to evaluate unfavorably. Five dollars to subscribe invites an automatic comparison to Spotify, which I currently pay five euros a month to subscribe to, and which gives me access to a lot more content. (Yes, your five dollars is for six months not one, but that's a System 2 distinction and people tend to use System 1 for these kinds of decisions.) In contrast, if you're calling it "buy", my mind goes "wow, 29 articles by a professional voice actor for only $4.99? That's a killer bargain!"
That's pretty convincing. For some reason I had that limited access idea locked in my head. It just stuck for some reason. We will definitely have a chat about changing that very soon.
(Some background: We were going to launch initially with monthly subscriptions, where you get new content every month. In the end, we decided to start with a core sequence and gauge the feedback from everyone. So we had a subscription model "locked in" from early days.)
Update: This limitation and wording has now been removed. However, in our terms of service, we give you a minimum of two years to download the content. We'll keep it up as long as it's technically and financially feasible, or for two years, whichever comes later.
Thanks, I managed to miss that one somehow. It might have been because a green, banner-shaped button was classified by my brain as "graphic / advertisement", so my eyes skipped over it. I don't know if that's a common reaction, but if it is, you might want to make it look different.
That's gonna be bad news for us since all the primary action buttons are green and somewhat banner shaped. LOL.
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Great voice actor! Purchasing all of them.
Thanks for that. I hope you enjoy it.
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