This will probably be one I'll get a lot of comments on, but I've
looked at the marketing proposition of HPR in light of some of the
challenges we face. To prevent us dipping into the reserve queue and
seeing a slow but steady decline in both audience and hosts.. Maybe its
time to give HPR a bit of a makeover.
Hi there
Nice to here about the "Take you a little stroll through the vineyards forest, the vain carnivores, which is a forest located on a hill behind my house" . Living in Alt-Hoeselt, it is in my backyard ;-)
Good points about "The future of HPR". As a geek, a long time listener and fan, for me 'recording a show as a response' is just one step to much or to high as well...
Next time we can go together for a walk at Napoleons 'wijngaardbos'
Thanks for the HPR Episode.
Many greetings from a fellow geek from alt hoeselt
Dirk
Comment #2 posted on 2024-05-02 16:15:59 by Ken Fallon
Thanks for volunteering
Great show, thanks for looking at this from a business point of view.
You are correct in saying that the website could do with a update, and given our booth kit needs a revamp this would be a great time for a refresh. Anyone with design skills please step forward.
The intro and outro are specifically chosen to be calming to meet the communities requirement that the music should not wake people up who listen to podcasts when going to sleep.
https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2021-October/004294.html
I'm not sure how you fall into the mistaken belief that we only have an IRC channel, that we don't engage with the community, and we avoid corporate technology. On every footer of every page on the site is a list of social media outlets that we are active on. We actively engage on the Mailing list, Mastodon, Matrix, Mumble, IRC #oggcastplanet, X (Formally Twitter), Facebook and Linked-In.
Soon to be added will be our Telegram, and YouTube channels.
The actual answer to "Why don't we have a discord?", is because nobody has volunteered to do it - until now ;-)
If you are willing to set it up and manage it; then feel free to do so, and send us the link and we will happily add it to the site.
Comment #3 posted on 2024-05-04 04:13:09 by Knightwise
Alt Hoeselt Calling :)
Dirk! It only takes a geeky podcast to find out that we live so close by :) Imagine that! give me a ping via mail or something and we could meet up!
Comment #4 posted on 2024-05-04 06:31:43 by knightwise
Hacker Public Radio as “brown noise?”
Hey Ken,
Thank you for the positive feedback on our show. We are indeed “present” on X, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, but are we “active” there? Do we engage with the community there? I appreciate all the work that is being done, don’t get me wrong. I’m also more then happy to help to run the Discord server if we can actively promote it in the shows.
The one statement that (as a marketeer) did made me choke on my coffee is that : “As for the intro and outro that should be “soothing for people who want to fall asleep to the show” We cannot in all seriousness state that the content provided by our hosts is to be “packaged up” into some narcoleptic-brown-noise generator. Is this the message we want to send out? “tell us what you are working on, but not too loud, we wanna doze off to your content ?”.
The goal (for me) in contributing a show is to invigorate, inspire and motivate fellow geeks to try out new things, discover new technologies and share experiences, not to record a high tech guided-sleep-meditation.
I think in this regard we are misguidedly catering to a minute part of our community and should reconsider our approach in these matters.
Comment #5 posted on 2024-05-04 14:25:38 by mpardo
Interesting episode
I quite enjoyed listening to this episode of HPR. Very well articulated.
Seems to me that the main argument can be summarized as HPR should be chasing popularity. This may very well be the optimal thing to do, however, when I look around at those that have done so (which admittingly is a small sample size and not random, and may also suffer from survivor bias), I see results that are rather unpleasant (well, to me, clearly there are many who must enjoy those high ranking Youtube tech channels, for example).
Success can be measured in many ways. Popularity is indeed one of those measure.
Great episode all the same, but, count me out.
Comment #6 posted on 2024-05-05 09:03:38 by enistello
The future of HPR
A great show, many thanks for sharing.
With what little understanding of soshul meeja I have, I believe what is apparently effective is _active_ engagement with a wider community than what already exists. That means, indeed, going where a potential audience might be, and shouting about HPR.
TikTok, YouTube and SnapChat are where the kidz hang out, as well as Discord as you rightly pointed out.
Given limited resources, perhaps we should drop LinkedIn and Facebook in favour of one or more of those more zippy platforms? Ken already has plans for YouTube, I see.
While anyone with a few minutes could post episodes to those 'channels' (see how down with the lingo I am?!), I think that automating the process would be a good starting point. That's beyond my skill set, but I would bet that there are some listeners who could manage to knock something together?
As a community podcast, it's a community responsibility to get out there and engage, actively, where we can, to bring in new listeners and therfore contributers. Such is the reality of the internet in 2024. Sadly.
Comment #7 posted on 2024-05-06 09:46:03 by Ken Fallon
Active for a given value of active.
> Thank you for the positive feedback on our show. We are indeed “present” on X, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, but are we “active” there?
We spend easily 90% of our time working on community engagement in some form or another, and I would conservatively say that we have invested thousands of hours into it over the years. Each community requires a tailored approach because it is not realistic to expect the same approach on LinkedIn to work on TikTok. Therefore we actively engage to a level and extent that is appropriate for a given platform, as dictated by the terms and conditions, the behavioral norms and operation rules of the community there, while keeping in mind the return on investment each platform delivers.
The fact of the matter is that some channels do not lend themselves to providing contributions. As an example, FaceBook and LinkedIn have zero engagement. The feedback I get from people I tried to engage with on LinkedIn is that they don't want their employer to know they are associated with a project with the word Hacker in it's title. While several Facebook groups responded to my request with a one line link to some of the more unsavory shows we have hosted. We maintain a presence as an avenue for contact.
We have been on Twitter since August 2008 and have more than 10K post there with 1,019 Followers. To this day we comment and respond to every show, and actively follow up on engagement. To my knowledge we did not get a single new host via Twitter.
Community building takes a lot of time and it can be years before you see the results of your work. So please don't just setup an account on a service if you are not willing to maintain it for the long run. It's one thing to not have a presence on a platform, it's another to have a defunct inactive presence.
By far the best way to engage is talking to people about HPR and asking them to contribute. This applies to online interactions, but is especially true of in person contacts.
Comment #8 posted on 2024-05-06 09:49:30 by Ken Fallon
On proprietary platforms
We do not have the luxury of restricting ourselves based on whether the platform is using proprietary software or not, we go where the potential contributors are. One could be forgiven looking as the software choices we use, and are getting engagement on, that we are bias towards FLOSS platforms but what you are seeing is "Effect" and not the "Cause". Starting out our policy was to use existing platforms as much as possible, we were not afraid to use and pay for proprietary software. However in our nearly 19 years of operation we saw that companies come and go. With proprietary software you are left high and dry while, with FLOSS software you can find someone to host it.
The show focused on our IRC channel, and while it's true we did have a thriving community there for a while, that stopped when Freenode got taken over. We maintain a presence on IRC, but most people have moved to Matrix where the contributions and feedback has been very good.
You suggested (possibly ironically) replacing IRC with a BBS. From 2005 each show was automatically posted for discussion there. Unfortunately that community was abandoned when the corporation producing the software stopped support. It was shut down after it was compromised, and then the site got over run with spam.
Our comment system was a third party application running on cPanel. The corporation producing the commenting software stopped support, and after it was compromised the site got over run with spam. For a time the entire HPR domain was blocked as a spam site. Dave and I were able to salvage the database, and put in very robust checks on code that is now released undo AGPLv3.0. Since then cPanel upped their prices to such an extent that we migrated to a static site also available under the AGPL, but we were able to just move the MailMan operation to a service which we pay for.
In 2011 we jumped on the Google+ bandwagon and did get a lot of contributions, until it was shut down in 2019.
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