Original HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

I noticed a sustained usage from very few people (perhaps 10-20 users), even after a year.

So clearly there's some value other than the social aspect of the site. Not sure what to make of it though.

[Shameless plug] That's why I created https://digs.fm, which is kinda like Goodreads but for music.

Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

I've a few friends that have the same itch and so we were constantly exchanging recommendations via different communication channels (Signal, email, Slack etc.)

So I started building a website that's "like Goodreads, but for music releases". You can mark albums as "want to listen", "listened" and "dig" (loved), organizing your lists with tags and notes and share them with others. You then have a public activity profile and you can add other users as friends and see their own activity.

Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

Shameless plug: I'm a firm believer that human recommendations are superior, which is one of the reasons I'm creating https://digs.fm, something like Goodreads but for music[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862

That's actually one of the reasons I've created https://digs.fm (think Goodreads but for music).

Yeah the list view is not suitable for mobiles since it's a table. I'll have to come up with another way to display the tags and notes in the thumb view. I've put a ticket to tackle it, because apparently more people are using this on mobile every day.

> Can you see others' notes/tags? I don't see them, but maybe I'm missing that too.

So notes are private, but for tags I have a ticket to add a setting to choose if it's going to be public or private. Right now they're private. I think I'll prioritize this.

> It definitely would be cool to see if people click "want to listen" from someone else, I've already seen albums move from profile to profile. You could even track how each album spreads, and show a "virality" chart...how "contagious" it is, and then how many people actually listen or dig the album eventually.

That's a neat idea, it never occurred to me, thanks! Added it to the backlog.

---

As a minor suggestion, if a comment talks about a release in general (like a review), then it might be more suitable for it to be added on the release page (as opposed in a "Listened" or "Digged" activity item). If you scroll down on a release page, you'll see a "Community discussion" section, and if you add a comment there, it will appear in your activity feed.

Also, you can add tags to your items, as a means to organize them however you see fit.

Just a heads up, this is now fixed.

> One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain. I tried it with the browser extension and by copy-pasting the URL. Maybe you can change the way a bandcamp site is detected? Does the code only look at the URL to determine if it's bandcamp, or does it load the page and try to parse it?

I didn't know custom domains were a thing with Bandcamp. I've added a ticket to tackle this somehow (seems like they all CNAME to dom.bandcamp.com, so that could be useful).

> Another issue I ran into is the search; it seems like you need to type the album name exactly and with correct spacing and punctuation, not just partially.

Searching is something that could be improved a lot. Thanks for that specific example, it really helps. This'll be prioritized soon.

> I'm torn on this one, because I really liked being able to make an account without providing an email address, but social notifications might be more useful if I didn't have to go to the site to see them. Definitely should be opt-in, but I think the option to receive email notifications

Yeah there's already a ticket for that. I totally agree with making it opt-in. I myself despise notification noise I didn't explicitly asked for :) This will be definitely done short-term.

> This is just a personal nice-to-have feature and I know it can be somewhat contentious (if you are looking towards future monetization licensing might be a headache), but I would love more open source code.

This is something I occasionally considered a few times myself. To be frank, the code is far from a point that I'd be comfortable releasing at this point. I haven't considered monetization yet (not even remotely), but I would like leave that option open.

Perhaps I could start small, and release some code I've written to wrap the MusicBrainz database and make it available as a Rails model.

This definitely needs more consideration - not something that's likely to be done soon, since there are other things I'd like to focus on (like those you suggested, polishing and bug fixes).

---

Thanks a lot for the amazing feedback!

Note that you can paste URLs straight from Discogs/Spotify/MusicBrainz/Bandcamp in the search box, and it will take you to the release page in Digs.

I think that the my other comment comparing Digs to Last.fm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552617), applies pretty much for a comparison with ListenBrainz as well.

While they have some overlap (i.e recommend tracking users, statistics), they do differ in the fact that the one defines "listen" as "listen (new or repeated) of a track/album/artist", while the other defines "listen" as "first-time listen of a release".

Also, the other main focus of Digs is providing a way to organize your "Want to Listen" list (with tags, notes and more on the way), as a means to stay on top of all the music you found interesting at some point. The problem I had, specifically, was that I had "Queues" of things I like to hear in the future (albums, mixes, etc.) in 3 or 4 different sites: YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Discogs, Spotify. So I wanted to have a single way to organize all these (that's why Digs knows how to parse URLs from these services) and share them with friends.

All in all, I love ListenBrainz and I believe there is room for both sites in this world, since they tackle slightly different needs.

Let me try to clarify a few things. First and foremost, Digs is supposed to be a bookmarking tool (you add and organize albums to lists). Then, it's a social network.

It's not created with the mindset of it being a music streaming service. That said, for convenience and pragmatism, a web player is included if the release was added via a Spotify, Mixcloud or Bandcamp link, or if the corresponding MusicBrainz release had a Discogs URL associated with it. Ideally, every release on the page should include a web player - this is something I'm trying to figure out how to do automatically, without enormous amount of human moderation. (I understand this is all technicalities, I just wanted to explain how it works currently.)

> I see a feed of albums from strangers.

The "Community updates" feed is the default if you have no friends added yet. If this is too noisy (and after this post it will be, for almost all people I assume), then you can switch to "Friends' updates" by clicking on the dropdown arrow. The choice will be persisted and you won't see that noise again.

> If I'm sharing music: - I want a quick way to share music

The current way to share music, is passively, i.e. by having friends (your friends will see your activity in their home feed). The active way to share is to click on the "Recommend" option, from the action dropdown button in a release page (e.g. https://digs.fm/releases/2782921-DJ-Shadow-What-Does-Your-So...).

> Edit: Signed out and noticed you have "continue with spotify" on the logged out / sign in page https://digs.fm/users/sign_in -- that wasn't available on your home page https://digs.fm/. I would've signed up with spotify if available and maybe that would've exposed clearer UX?

The Spotify SSO is currently broken, so I've disabled it until I fix it. Apparently I forgot to hide it from the sign_in page as well - thanks for bringing this up!

Great suggestion. Truth is, I was focused so much on the core stuff (indexing releases, implementing the bookmarking system, user profiles etc.) that the friend discovery aspect is almost non-existent. What you suggested seems like a great start though.