I really like the concept of this app (finding platonic friends for raves, etc.), and I’m not aware of any competitors to this app, so I’m giving it four stars.
I’m taking away one star and writing this review (in the hopes it reaches the developers) for the following reasons:
1. There’s a lot of gatekeeping of music events that get posted to the app that result in only very mainstream, very straight-focused events being posted. The process for adding an event is complicated. You’ve got about a 1% chance of getting an event added (even if it’s legit and locally popular or popular within communities, ie, the gay community) to this app that isn’t already populated in the app, and frankly no one cares to go to the effort to get the event added … so it’s just not going to get added. I have read that the app scrapes events from EDM Train, which is very, very mainstream. If Radiate is going to continue to scrape events, they should also be scraping from other major or significant local music listing platforms like Resident Advisor, Dice, Funqtion (for NYC), etc. And frankly, they should just let people easily add events—not sure why they care to gatekeep. The gatekeeping/mainstreamism tends to result in only events marketed to an early 20s crowd getting posted—but there are lots of other rave events targeted to an older crowd that would be great to have listed on this app.
2. The UI is cluttered and confusing to navigate. There’s a lot of noise, and it’s hard to find stuff. I recommend simplifying/cleaning up the UI to make it more intuitive.
3. It seems like the app only works in the US. I frequently go to raves abroad, and this app would be frankly much more helpful for international raves (where I don’t know anyone/don’t have friends). I don’t see any reason why this app needs to be limited to the United States—eliminating some of the gatekeeping that is built into this app (allowing more user content generation) would easily make it usable internationally without the developers having to do a bunch of work to add events/venues for international markets.
Thanks for developing this app! All feedback is meant to be constructive in the hopes that it will lead to improvements. :)