Yappa Debuts First Audio/Video Social Commenting Tool to Encourage Less Toxic Online Interactions
Toxic commentary, online bullying, and anonymous web trolling may no longer be the plague that discourages web commentary thanks to Yappa World Inc., a southern California startup that will debut a free audio and video commenting tool for news and entertainment sites, blogs, and all publisher websites this month.
Yappa is an alternative way to communicate to the typical text comments offered at many news sites, sports forums, review sites, and customer service platforms. Yappa lets users leave audio only or video comments called Yaps that remove the limitations of the traditional text-based approach, which have to rely on emojis to enhance text communication. Now, website visitors can quickly and easily record an audio-only or video clip of their comment to embed into the Yappa plugin on any particular article or blog post.
According to Yappa, users can be flagged for alleged profanity, pornography, bullying, and hate speech by admins and other users and banned from the site. Because users can’t hide behind an anonymous name or avatar the solution has had a less than 2% flag rate among early adopters.
Yappa Features and Online Issues Addressed
- Audio/Video comments adds sentiment, emotional depth, and a clear understanding of what user attempts to convey, which is often lost or misunderstood via text
- Increases user session times for publishers to retain their audience
- Creates and fosters a social community for its publishers
- Yappa takes minimal page space in comparison to the long threads of text within comment plug-ins. It can be integrated as a replacement or enhancement to text commentary.
- Solves the problem of toxicity and anonymity that creates hostile commentary environments
- Mobile accessibility. Yappa allows users to post audio/video comments on websites from within their mobile browser without downloading an app.
- Backend transcription. Yappa transcribes every comment, indexes the keywords and allows the organic conversation to be searchable via SEO.
Yappa works on any computer with a webcam and microphone, as well as on mobile devices.
The Yappa Wordpress plugin is also free and can be installed.
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