Inspired by my friend vulonkaaz's "chan-like" site, //paperchan.club, an imageboard that only allows user-drawn images to be uploaded, I've began work on a new experiment I am tentatively calling Voxchan[^1] that only allows recorded audio to be uploaded. Paperchan is an exciting community for a number of reasons. Due to depending on original content that takes some level of effort and creativity, a lot of cool art pops up there every day, and the steady stream of cool art getting posted encourages more cool art to keep getting posted.

I don't think I've ever seen a voice clip-based platform before. Sure, there's been group calling apps like Mumble, Skype, Discord, et all for a long time, and there's plenty of places to upload songs, but a forum where people post by speaking seems to be entirely novel. Vocaroo encourages anonymous audio uploads but it's more of a file-hosting service than a community.

Is voxchan an anonymous site? This is a fun problem to think about. People's voices are largely unique, but I feel someone is unable to be "doxxed" by posting with their voice alone.; and, with a little effort, people can also alter their accent, tone, and other bits of personally identifying data to some degree.

There's a hypothesis I have that making posts depend on voice will have a positive effect on the quality of contributions. On an imageboard or textboard it's pretty easy for 2 or 3 guys to try and derail every thread but appear as the voice of the community. Samefagging takes significantly more effort to do via voice; most haters and losers have awful voices too so I think they would rather not put in the effort it takes to keep up a trolling campaign. And their parents would probably yell at them for making too much noise on the computer.

There are a lot of lonely people in the world, especially in the world of chan-like sites, and I think that being able to listen to the discussions instead of just reading more text could have a positive effect for them. People who are otherwise scared to do "voice reveals" in communities like imageboards, Discord, IRC, et al may also be more willing to speak in an anonymous forum.

Only time will tell how it will play out. A public release may be ready in a few weeks. If you're interested in trying out the in-dev software, drop me a line.

[1]: Vox being Latin for "voice", "sound"