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Believe it or not, but people without iTunes are also listening to podcasts. I've yet to come across a podcast I wanted to listen to without an RSS feed availa

Believe it or not, but people without iTunes are also listening to podcasts. I've yet to come across a podcast I wanted to listen to without an RSS feed available through a website. For discovery there are several good alternatives to iTunes, for example https://player.fm https://player.fm

toasterlovin 8y ago
> I've yet to come across a podcast I wanted to listen to without an RSS feed available through a website. That's because podcasts on iTunes just point to an RSS feed hosted elsewhere. iTunes doesn't host the audio files; it's just a directory.
- hansjorg 8y ago
  Yes, but the feed is always (in my experience) available as a link from a web page (hence decentralized and not dependent on iTunes).
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    Most people don’t know how to go to a podcast’s website, copy the link to the RSS feed, and then paste it into their podcast app. They just search for the podcast in their podcast app. So, if you produce a podcast, you need to be in the major podcast directories to get traction. Thus, in effect, podcasts are highly centralized.
    - danShumway 8y ago
      This feels like moving the goalpost to me. If PeerTube succeeded, but most of its videos were being linked and shared on Facebook and Reddit, would you call it centralized? It's fairly common for me to see people share direct links to a podcast's website if they want to share a specific episode. And even from the point of view where iTunes is a centralized indexer, they're still very clearly pointing at a decentralized service. The biggest podcast aggregation service in the industry decided to rely on a decentralized model rather than hosting files themselves. That doesn't count for anything? The fact that every single podcast app is using a distributed protocol (RSS), including Apple, doesn't count for anything?
      - toasterlovin 8y ago
        Note that my original point was not that podcasts are centralized. I merely took issue with somebody else claiming that podcasts are decentralized. They’re decentralized for distribution. But distribution is the easy part on the internet. It’s aggregating attention that is the hard part. And that part of the podcast market is entirely centralized.
        danShumway 8y ago
        > But distribution is the easy part on the internet. It’s aggregating attention that is the hard part. ATM for video the content hosting, distribution, discovery, indexing, consumption, and commenting are all centralized. Let's say PeerTube brings the video world inline with podcasts and knocks that list down to just discovery and content indexing. That would be a really big win. That would be way more decentralized than what we have now. If you're right, and solving all of those problems are the easy part, then PeerTube will probably be an incredible improvement to the video ecosystem. Podcsts may not be perfectly decentralized, but they're pretty stinking close. Services like iTunes are basically card catalogues at this point. The podcast app I use doesn't even include iTunes ratings, reviews, or suggestions, so they've obviously made the decision that these aren't features their users care about. My experience with podcasts is I get recommendations in a decentralized manner from friends, family, social media, and online articles. Then I go to one of several centralized card catalogues and search for the podcast by the name. Then I add the decentralized source to any podcast app (all of which work with every podcast regardless of who developed them) and use RSS to download a file to my physical device, which makes it easy for me to back up or mirror the file to other devices if the source ever goes down in the future. If 99% of my experience is decentralized, does the centralized 1% that basically boils down to a list of urls and a regex expression override that? Especially keeping in mind that nearly every podcast app still provides a mechanism for you to bypass that list whenever you want, and any good podcast app allows you to search for a podcast across multiple preloaded sources at the same time?
        toasterlovin 8y ago
        Maybe this is a better approach: what happens to the podcast market if Apple stops shipping a podcast app? The priors that come to mind when trying to answer this hypothetical is what happened to independent blogs when Google shuttered Google Reader and what happened to news companies when Facebook tweaked their algorithm to show less 3rd party content. In both cases, distribution was decentralized (blogs host their own RSS feeds and news sites host their own content), but attention was centralized (people accessed blogs through Google Reader and news through Facebook). In both cases, the decentralized distribution failed prevent a massive decrease in traffic to blogs and news sites. And that’s because competition for attention is fierce, so aggregating attention is hard.

toasterlovin 8y ago

> I've yet to come across a podcast I wanted to listen to without an RSS feed available through a website. That's because podcasts on iTunes just point to an RSS feed hosted elsewhere. iTunes doesn't host the audio files; it's just a directory.

hansjorg 8y ago
Yes, but the feed is always (in my experience) available as a link from a web page (hence decentralized and not dependent on iTunes).
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  Most people don’t know how to go to a podcast’s website, copy the link to the RSS feed, and then paste it into their podcast app. They just search for the podcast in their podcast app. So, if you produce a podcast, you need to be in the major podcast directories to get traction. Thus, in effect, podcasts are highly centralized.
  - danShumway 8y ago
    This feels like moving the goalpost to me. If PeerTube succeeded, but most of its videos were being linked and shared on Facebook and Reddit, would you call it centralized? It's fairly common for me to see people share direct links to a podcast's website if they want to share a specific episode. And even from the point of view where iTunes is a centralized indexer, they're still very clearly pointing at a decentralized service. The biggest podcast aggregation service in the industry decided to rely on a decentralized model rather than hosting files themselves. That doesn't count for anything? The fact that every single podcast app is using a distributed protocol (RSS), including Apple, doesn't count for anything?
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      Note that my original point was not that podcasts are centralized. I merely took issue with somebody else claiming that podcasts are decentralized. They’re decentralized for distribution. But distribution is the easy part on the internet. It’s aggregating attention that is the hard part. And that part of the podcast market is entirely centralized.
      - danShumway 8y ago
        > But distribution is the easy part on the internet. It’s aggregating attention that is the hard part. ATM for video the content hosting, distribution, discovery, indexing, consumption, and commenting are all centralized. Let's say PeerTube brings the video world inline with podcasts and knocks that list down to just discovery and content indexing. That would be a really big win. That would be way more decentralized than what we have now. If you're right, and solving all of those problems are the easy part, then PeerTube will probably be an incredible improvement to the video ecosystem. Podcsts may not be perfectly decentralized, but they're pretty stinking close. Services like iTunes are basically card catalogues at this point. The podcast app I use doesn't even include iTunes ratings, reviews, or suggestions, so they've obviously made the decision that these aren't features their users care about. My experience with podcasts is I get recommendations in a decentralized manner from friends, family, social media, and online articles. Then I go to one of several centralized card catalogues and search for the podcast by the name. Then I add the decentralized source to any podcast app (all of which work with every podcast regardless of who developed them) and use RSS to download a file to my physical device, which makes it easy for me to back up or mirror the file to other devices if the source ever goes down in the future. If 99% of my experience is decentralized, does the centralized 1% that basically boils down to a list of urls and a regex expression override that? Especially keeping in mind that nearly every podcast app still provides a mechanism for you to bypass that list whenever you want, and any good podcast app allows you to search for a podcast across multiple preloaded sources at the same time?
        toasterlovin 8y ago
        Maybe this is a better approach: what happens to the podcast market if Apple stops shipping a podcast app? The priors that come to mind when trying to answer this hypothetical is what happened to independent blogs when Google shuttered Google Reader and what happened to news companies when Facebook tweaked their algorithm to show less 3rd party content. In both cases, distribution was decentralized (blogs host their own RSS feeds and news sites host their own content), but attention was centralized (people accessed blogs through Google Reader and news through Facebook). In both cases, the decentralized distribution failed prevent a massive decrease in traffic to blogs and news sites. And that’s because competition for attention is fierce, so aggregating attention is hard.