About

What is Podcast Roulette?

Podcast Roulette helps you discover new podcasts at random, and listen to them in your browser.

Swipe left on a podcast if you don’t like it, or swipe right if you like it.

Keep swiping for a virtually endless array of podcasts, where we try to avoid showing you the same one twice.

Podcasts you swipe right on are added to your personal playlist, where you can subscribe to them later.

Why Podcast Roulette?

Podcast Roulette is my latest crack at the podcast discoverability problem. There are hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there, but only the tip of the iceberg ever gets seen in the major podcast app browsers.

How do you get your podcast listed in the top 100? Have a lot of people subscribe to it. How do you get a lot of people to subscribe to it? Get listed in the top 100. New indie podcasts rarely break into that feedback loop, and if you’re someone who listens to podcasts a lot, it’s those fresh upcoming ones that you want to find.

When creating Podcast Roulette I had the following goals in mind, based on what I personally wanted to see in a podcast discovery app, but hopefully being useful to someone else as well.

  • It should be completely random – every podcast should have the same chance of being seen. At the same time, it should remember which ones I’ve liked and disliked, and not show them to me again.
  • It should keep discovering new podcasts in the background, so there are always fresh ones to replace the ones I’ve already seen.
  • I should be able to listen to sample episodes of the podcasts while I browse. I can’t tell how many times I’ve loved a podcast’s blurb, only to find it hard to actually listen to, due to my own weird sensory issues.
  • I should be able to use swipe gestures, on mobile and desktop, to sift through the podcasts.
  • Audio should be cued up to keep playing while I’m swiping, avoiding pauses as much as possible – so it’s like channel surfing on the radio, or playing “radio roulette”.

Acknowledgements

There are a couple of nifty front-end CodePens I’ve built on for the UI:

Tinder-like Card Swipe Interaction by Nikolay Talanov, https://codepen.io/suez/pen/MaeVBy/

I like the elegant simplicity of this approach, because it just uses default browser behaviour instead of unnecessarily complex scripting: elements defined later in the document are naturally going to overlay elements defined earlier in the document. You just have to remember to prepend dynamically added elements to the beginning, rather than the end. And it doesn’t rely on any third-party gesture handling javascript.

Draggable circle audio player with progress bar by 杨明, https://codepen.io/yondmn/pen/wOYYvd

Circle players are nice and compact, since they include both the play/pause control and the audio progress/scrubber in a nice small area. Unfortunately many of the circle audio players available rely on static image assets which are annoying to edit. I like this one because it uses pure SVG and CSS. Repurposing a circular range slider as an audio scrubber is also a clever solution.