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I believe in paying for things I enjoy. I don’t use YouTube enough to pay for it, but I pay for other services, books, and content. When you love something, the payment is patronization. You want the thing to continue to exist.
Sign up for a Patreon then. Paying Google to support a creator is like paying the brothel madam because you love the courtesan.
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Google being a giant monorepo is almost certainly at play here. Maintenance costs are always high on products. But upgrades and constant progress on underlying technology is, itself, often a large part of the need for maintenance. Please don't take this as an argument against monorepo. It is a discussion point there, but even if you view this as largely negative, I assert a lot of these negatives come with the size o…
Interesting, i've always considered monorepo to be a maintainability win. Your code doesn't rot (as much) because it's constantly rebuilt and tested. When someone improves some downstream code (for example makes some code faster or safer) you get the benefits immediately. And most importantly - you can do huge interface-breaking refactorings on the whole codebase at once, without versioning dance. For example you can…
This would be akin to trying to move a car to a system that shuts off during stops. Totally doable, but requires a massive change in how reliant passive systems are on the serpentine belt/alternator for power.
The entire podcasts industry seems to be on a downward spiral. I feel like the days are numbered for Spotify's podcast dreams as well, looking at how little they are promoting them now in app or outside. What on earth happened? It was the hottest new thing in media, and then...everyone just collectively lost interest? Was it just the Covid bubble, or something else?
It might be. But it's also a great place to find extremely niche audio content.
The entire podcasts industry seems to be on a downward spiral. I feel like the days are numbered for Spotify's podcast dreams as well, looking at how little they are promoting them now in app or outside. What on earth happened? It was the hottest new thing in media, and then...everyone just collectively lost interest? Was it just the Covid bubble, or something else?
Spotify tried to acquire the biggest whales in the podcast market, thinking that it would be a revenue stream that wouldn't require paying massive royalties to record labels, which is why they've never made a profit on the music streaming side.
They overspent, buying up celebrity podcasts and creating some of their own, all financed with super-cheap capital that lasted until 2022 when interest rates rose globally. Interest in podcasts have also fallen since the stay-at-home peak, but Spotify added a layer of enshittification by splicing in ads into podcasts dynamically.
This is a massive UX fail because podcasts are supposed to be static audio files without additional monetization. But Spotify spent so much acquiring Rogan et al, they have no choice but to saturate podcasts with ads.
The entire podcasts industry seems to be on a downward spiral. I feel like the days are numbered for Spotify's podcast dreams as well, looking at how little they are promoting them now in app or outside. What on earth happened? It was the hottest new thing in media, and then...everyone just collectively lost interest? Was it just the Covid bubble, or something else?
I feel like the issue is exactly that capitalists ruined it by making an industry out of it. Also if there is no rss feed I can subscribe to to get the releases, I don't consider it a podcast. So Spotify doesn't offer podcasts in my view...
They never made a sustainable business by licensing music, and thus see podcasts as free real estate they can monetize without having to bay Universal, Warner, Atlantic etc.
Damn, I just discovered it 4 days ago. It is excellent, with zero cruft. Looks like I'll need to use Apple Podcasts.
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It might be. But it's also a great place to find extremely niche audio content.
Exactly. "Blogs" might be dead -- also, many blogs are still the best content on the internet. Democratizing both the newspaper column and the radio show is great -- so many interesting voices out there.
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If you like things inshittified, then it seems like a great idea. Let's put big tech in between me and the things I want to consume, when there's no need, and let them begin to try to make money off of it and make everything worse!
You mean like introducing ever increasing ad loads and removing background playback to a premium tier to create “value” for subscriptions while simultaneously trying to resurrect cable television despite the Internet being a thing, for example? I love how hard people will advocate for their YouTube subscriptions like it’s the best thing ever. YouTube’s recent changes are so Hollywood entertainment exec-esque lately (…
I err on the side of people have been so sick of YT's badgering that Premium truly feels like a great solution - despite that only being the case because of Google creating the problem in the first place.
Open source alternative on Android: Antennapod: https://antennapod.org/ https://antennapod.org/download/ Available on Google Play and F-Droid. I switched to it many years ago anticipating this exact Google product shutdown, and I've been very happy with it :)
Any good self hosted podcast streaming options, or other options that allow shared listening?