You can sell your user's data to advertisers, or you can sell control or you can find some other channel.
We're e.g. playing with the idea to add a live podcasting feature that allows user's to comment and tip during a show a la Twitch.
I dont see this as a big issue. It seems to be a place for podcast community members to gather and discuss instead of making yet another discord. If you dont have positive feedback for a podcast why comment at all to begin with? The podcast medium is entirely built to taste and fits well with being a bubble (despite bubbles usually being a negative thing).
The hidden issue would be power to cover up a scandal, so I would hope that for serious issues users can report a podcast and site admins can handle it appropriately.
The quality of a podcast is not going to be uniformly positive. So a listener's feedback isn't going to be uniformly positive. It becomes a problem when the primary space for discussing a subject only permits positive feedback. Healthy communities do require negative feedback.
It's ironic that creator of Podbabble couches the creator-based moderation as a means to
> Foster healthy communities. Podbabble lets you moderate, adjust ratings, and flag comments as you see fit.
Too often, allowing the subject of a forum to moderate the forum leads to suppression of valid critique. And good critique can also come from outsiders; those who are not regular listeners.
A better alternative for Podbabble would be to allow creators to sponsor their podcast's forum, perhaps having it be featured more prominently or by removing comment rate limits.
To convince your visitors, your site is just a landing page. It requires commitment to an account before it is possible to judge the site.
I don't have the experience to judge if that is a good strategy. But if you want to be the Reddit of podcast discussions, then you should show the discussions to the visitors and only request accounts from those who want to write comments.
It's important to stress that Podbabble doesn't require accounts to view discussions - in fact, you can even comment anonymously without creating an account. If you click on any of the comments on the homepage or choose a podcast via search you'll immediately taken to its discussion page without any barriers.
When you say "it's a chicken and an egg problem" you're spot on. That's the problem for every new social network or user based platform trying to launch. Until you have a ton of users and content I would argue it's the only problem worth worrying about.
Create content yourselves to fill the void until it grows.
If you focus on building a userbase first it will be easier to sell the service later.
As a user I have a billion things competing for my attention, if you don't make it super easy for me to get to useful or interesting content I'm going to move on and that's going to hurt you overall.
I want to see what the site is about before signing up or doing anything.