What is the impact? Have any of them attracted an audience of any meaningful size? If a month from now there are 1.3 million generated podcasts, what do you anticipate the fallout to be?
You can even see it in the case of e-mail spam, where while technically not platforms, it helped Gmail and Hotmail to become so big that they can basically impose their own rules on the protocol.
Is this a rhetorical question? Because the answer for podcast indexing and search services is surely pretty obvious.
I just don't understand how people can pretend this isn't happening just because they find each new twist of a technology fascinating.
It's not obvious at all. You see a problem, I see opportunities. The person you responded to mentioned Reddit. Well, the glut of garbage on the internet makes Reddit more valuable.
The "please, god, find me something a real person actually said about this real thing" isn't actually a problem very many people have. Despite all the complaining here, most people are happy with the results they get when they search Google or Bing or Facebook or Reddit.
So like every technology, there are positives and negatives. It isn't clear to me where this all nets out but I'm leaning slightly positive.
And if you don't find this technology fascinating, then I'm not sure what to say.
If given the choice between a dime and a fiver, is the fiver somehow worth more than if I'd offered you the choice between a fiver and a tenner instead?