Hacker News Reader

Years and years ago there were a lot of people on HN who were very vocal about the word "podcast," and how every time it was uttered it gave Apple a free ad for its music player to the exclusion of other options.

I guess we got over it.

View on HN

We have a similar problem now where people are sure the word "podcast" refers to some kind of specialized thing that has to be accessed with dedicated software, as opposed to referring to an audio file that you download from the internet.

The existence of the special term has caused a good amount of harm by enabling this confusion.

The most important part of "podcast" is that phrase you hear so often, "wherever you get your podcasts". It's an open standard, you can pick your app, they can be hosted anywhere. If an audio program is exclusively available on, say, Spotify, it isn't a podcast.

I disagree, most podcast episodes and ads mention a few popular options plus “or wherever you get your podcasts” and the proprietary gated stuff hasn’t been doing that well!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com