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[Changelog] Feb 26th, 2021

Another week gone by! This one was actually quite exciting and most of the changes revolved around a new feature we launched called SubmitHub Links. So before diving into that, there's one other update I think was notable enough to share...

Hot or Not average listen time

If you were to ask me what the biggest problem with Hot or Not is, I'd say it boils down to some users rushing through songs as quickly as they can so that they can grab their free credits and run. That ends up being a bummer for those artists who *are* trying to genuinely engage with each others' songs.

There are two ways to spot these speed-running users:

  1. All their votes are 100/100
  2. They have an average listen time of 20.1 seconds

Cracking down on #1 is difficult: folks could simply slide their votes in random arbitrary directions to get around any preventative measures. #2, however, is a bit more straightforward.

Starting this week, I'm keeping track of the "average listening time" for each user, based on their last 20 votes. While the minimum listen time is still just 20 seconds, I'm asking folks to maintain an *average* of above 30 seconds. If they dip below that, their "minimum" listen time ramps up to 45 seconds.

A few folks complained about this when it rolled out, and I totally understand that it can be frustrating. But my goal here is to improve the experience overall. If that means we lose a few speedrunners, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make <3.

Hopefully down the line I'll figure out how to deal with #1...

SubmitHub Links

Okay this was a lot of fun to code and took up the majority of the week.

What is a SubmitHub link? It's a landing page that can be used to optimize your ads. You can see one here and embedded below.


Why use a landing page when advertising?

  • Sometimes people click ads by accident
  • We can tell you whether they follow the link to your page, or simply close the window (conversion tracking)
  • Knowing your conversion rate makes it easier to optimize your ads

Why SubmitHub's landing page is the best

  • It's pretty
  • Free analytics
  • Super fast and lightweight (~6kb + image)

To give you an idea of how fast this actually is, here's a comparison between SubmitHub's version and two other options:

  • Hypeddit: 96 requests, 2.0 MB transferred, 7.3 MB resources, Finish: 6.56 seconds
  • Toneden: 38 requests, 2.0 MB transferred, 7.2 MB resources, Finish: 3.70 seconds
  • SubmitHub: 3 requests, 73.6 kB transferred, 72.8 kB resources, Finish: 524 milliseconds

This is obviously still a very beta feature, but if you'd like to try it out you can do so from this page, and feel free to join us in the #ads chatroom.