That said, I deleted my Disqus account as part of a general cleanup and I'm glad I did.
The web needs to shift more to a model where people pay openly for services; ideally with micropayments or a Spotify-like subscription to ensure a large user base. Free products are ok as a gateway to the paid product, but not if the business model relies on selling data (either directly, or as in Facebook's case selling the processing of data).
Pandora has been geo-blocked and IIRC only serves the USA since 2007, and SoundCloud appears to me to be offering a different service.
Likely it is better on Apple devices but I don't use those.
Lots of podcasts are free from their source, Spotify doesn't even offer one of favorite ones (a weekly DJ mix, 500+ episodes strong) all you need is an app like AntennaPod (Android).
CHIRP Radio (Chicago): https://chirpradio.org 4ZZZ (Brisbane): https://www.4zzzfm.org.au
Both are ad-free, other than local community orgs and the occasional local independent business plug, and funded by listener donations. Big bonus: huge variety in their playlists, with the DJs playing whatever they feel like.
To listen to a podcast? A podcast is an audio file you download like any other file and play like any other audio file. Why do you need a dedicated app?
- There is no dedicated podcast homepage, only a set of service links (Spotify, Itunes, etc.).
- RSS itself may not be provided.
- Audio is hidden inside Javascript requests.
I do listen to many podcasts by going to a page and finding the single-episode download link,and playing that directly via mpv or other CLI tools. Success rate is falling, seems to be ~75% or so anecdotally. Often I'll curl the page, explode elements to one per line, and grep for '\.mp3' references. Even that fails often.
And yes, I use dedicated podcast apps to subscribe specifically, but I don't want or need to subscribe to every last podcast just to listen to a single episode.
Open standards promote interoperability. Profit comes by building walls and moats.
Profit seems to be winning.
I use a podcast app to favorite the RSS feeds of podcasts and other content. It then keeps track of which entries are new, can automatically download those new ones, and keep track of what I've already listened to. It makes it a lot easier than manually looking at the RSS feeds and downloading the files by hand.
Much better than Spotify, which only ever "recommended" artists I've already listened to, or artists I didn't like, or genres I didn't. If you listen to a wide variety of music, it doesn't know how to handle this apparently.
I wonder why last.fm hasn't managed to leverage their data more, if that was really the biggest value of Spotify. Or perhaps they do and sell it to streaming services? Idc
Yeah, their data breach exposing mine and 18 million other's accounts made it the last time I used them.
My team and I went ahead to describe how it will work, and will be releasing it in 2022 after building it openly on GitHub:
https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#DIGITAL-MEDIA-AND-CONT...
But watch the silent downvotes for this comment... and this is part of the reason why it won’t happen unless someone braves ridicule even of the very technologists who are supposedly for it.
There are many reasons to be skeptical, the biggest of which is that ads pay more (for now) than micropayments for digital content. But that’s not why stuff like this gets downvoted. It’s because the economics of capitalism make it so that you either have to be a big company with a huge fund behind the push for some micropayment standard, or you are not taken seriously.