Product Update #3

What's new in product this week?

Quick Reminder: At Uncut.fm, we are committed to deepening engagement with podcasts by connecting hosts directly with their listeners — Our multiplayer format breaks down the barriers between hosts and their audience. It's a home base where podcast hosts can build community around their content and receive valuable feedback and qualitative data on an episode by episode level.

We’ve continued to revamp the overall user experience of our episode player. We gave the chop 🔪 to the campfire so listeners could have a better way to view and navigate elapsed comments.

Now it’s time for reactions to get a little attention. Our team is actively improving the UX of posting emojis so listeners can tell you *exactly* when they fell out of that chair laughing.

We recognize a lot of the value of reactions is actually for the host themselves, to give them some simple feedback about various parts of their episodes, but we also believe it’s a way to introduce serendipity into the playback experience. To that end, we are also introducing a new feature to showcase reactions from others as a natural way to meet fellow listeners in a casual way. Who knows? This feature may help you strike up a conversation with a fellow listener who shares your oddball sense of humor. (Don’t forget to invite us to the wedding.)

All this work has allowed us to decouple reactions from listener lists and to temporarily remove those lists from the playing experience. We’ll bring back a better version when we get to work on the new Episode Cover (next up for us.) This also made our engineering team very happy and we like to do that from time to time. 😇

Finally, this work opened up some interesting opportunities for episode browsing and discovery via reactions. We quickly explored these but we'll all have to wait a little longer for that. It's just hard to achieve beautiful simplicity sometimes.