Ask HN: Why don't podcasts have comments?
Why don't podcast players and podcast ecosystem in general have comments? I listen to a podcast, and want to engage with people who listened to it and ask questions to authors. Why don't we have it?
Podcasts often made available on lots of platforms and apps. That would mean the podcast owner would need to check all of those places regularly to respond to people - if they miss a platform they'd be accused of ignoring their audience by people who listen there. That's a lot of effort. Rather than doing that podcasters often have a website for their podcast that (sometimes) lets listeners engage with them, or they use social media with a Twitter or Insta account for the podcast.
This would of course also open up for other things like perhaps including resources at a particular point in the podcast that the user could respond to - for example links to relevant demos of technique under discussion etc.
And probably a greater development of different podcast players.
Minus the “that the user could respond to” but isn’t that just show notes and/or chapters?
Those are already a thing as supported by, e.g., Overcast [1]. Overcast also has a function to share short clips, which I guess is similar to being able to link to specific points in a podcast. Podcasters don’t use the functionality available, though.
As a general rule content providers of any sort do not make use of functionality available in one content serving application, unless that application has near monopoly control of the market. Overcast evidently does not https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/8ntp3x/podcast_ap... (unless stuff has changed drastically in last two years)
> MP3 chapter markers are supported by most podcast clients, including Apple Podcasts on iOS (provided you're on iOS 12), Overcast, Pocket Casts, Antennapod Castro, Player FM and more.
The larger RSS ecosystem already had semi-related standards for comments support such as Pingback/Trackback/Webmentions. It should be possible to reuse/recycle some such existing standards to the podcast world, if there were interest from different player makers.
You don’t have to centralise podcasts to centralise comments, you could do something similar to disquss and use the ID/hash of the podcast episode then offer some iframe for various outlets to use (assuming they would want to use your service).
Even if no one uses your service you could just have a site where people go to comment.
As long as there’s an RSS feed this is possible
It's a full fledged social podcast app that enables people to comment + tag/categorize episodes. Would be super curious to hear your thoughts on the app.
Can I import my subs? Who will see my comments? do my friends have to use repod? etc
Distributed tech, after it gets popular, becomes a lot like herding cats, and when it comes to markup everyone has an opinion.
https://metaebene.me/podcasts/
Tim Pritloves podcasts not only have comments, but the freakshow is streamed live with slack chat for interactions. All podcasts of the metaebene are excellent btw and he is pioneering podcasting (over 12 years of high quality content and he seems to be striving for perfection). He has transcripts, chapter markers, live chat, comments, more than one codec, show-notes and additional features like fast and slow play in the web-player.
He also experiments with different things like auto-transcribe. I guess if somebody will be the first to actually offer a codec2 version of his/her podcast it will be him (If someone wants to correct me I would be happy to listen to a podcast that gets regularly released as codec2 :P)
Edit:
Afaik everything he does is open source as well and he shares https://podlove.org/about/ https://github.com/timpritlove?tab=repositories his work so others (like https://www.cleanelectric.de/) can build on what he worked on.
If that caught on with podcast apps and publishing backends there would be no need for a centralized system. Unfortunately, the adoption of that was practically zero. To quote the Indieweb wiki [1]:
> readers supporting atom comments: (?)
I'd argue that though this is an avenue your listeners MAY use, it's not one the author ought to encourage. It's far more valuable to try and drive traffic to a site you own and control.
But moderating comments - even on a niche post - is a chore. Wading through spam, trolls, arguments, etc isn't fun. It's much easier to ask commenters to email in - and that's what the majority seem to do.
The fact that podcasts are distributed as RSS feeds to the podcast directories, such as Apple, Google, Spotify, etc., means that some centralized platform would be required for comments and other interactions. Many podcast authors have their own podcast websites where they may allow comments, but other listeners may not know of those sites or care to comment there when they have a ready interface to comment on Apple or Google or Spotify from their favorite podcast player.
Just like blogs, it's up to the author. Feeds will have whatever links the author puts into them, regardless of whether they're for all-text blogs or for podcasts.
Given that a lot of blogs/pubs that aren't about contentious topics don't get a lot of comments/engagement anyway, you probably just don't get a lot of comments even if there's a place for them.
Many podcasts have a corresponding website, and some of those support comments, but there's nothing about the design of podcasts that requires it.
If you have a particular podcast in mind, perhaps direct your question to the publishers of that podcast, either via twitter or any website they have.
That they don't require separate websites is perhaps what you mean.
It might be hard to find and subscribe to a podcast without an HTTP server for humans, but it should be _technically_ possible. For many people, the HTTP server for humans they use is https://podcasts.apple.com, or maybe their podcast client, which hides all of those details away and might as well be interacting with a JSON API via gopher behind the scenes. Except, of course, it almost certainly isn't.
As others are saying, it's not really something that is standardised (or strictly necessary), which is why you don't see it much.
BabylonBee podcasts support comments on their site.
try looking on reddit - eg reddit.com/r/dancarlin