Podcasting walled gardens - I noticed the latest episodes of the Keen On podcast had increased in size from MBs to GBs. They had been taking an age to download, and in fact often seemed to get the client stuck in a loop, restarting the download for no apparent reason. I emailed Andrew to ask if he'd noticed. Got an answer from him, turns out he's started publishing video instead of audio. That at least explains the larger file sizes.
Apparently he's still publishing just the audio on Spotify, and he asked why don't I try Spotify. I replied that my instinct is to avoid Spotify. My impression is that they are a bit of a walled garden when it comes to podcasting. But to be honest I'm not sure where that comes from. Likely it's just an overall impression from many things I've read online over the years. I asked on Mastodon and people do still have that impression.
I was previously using Apple's Podcasts app, but it started not updating some shows, and was generally being quite flakey. So a few months ago, somewhat hastilly, I changed to Pocket Casts. It's been mostly a pretty good experience, though I've had to email them a few times to ask why a particular show didn't appear in the app. Each time they've ended up adding said show a few days later. The other annoyance is show pages listed in the app are generated by Pocket Casts. I didn't think much about it when I was forced to switch, but actually both these things suggest walled garden.
The point is that it isn't fully open because they are putting themselves in between listener and podcaster. Should they choose to, they could just not add some shows. If they supported RSS then they wouldn't have a veto on what shows you could add to the app. As for show pages they are inserting their own show pages which is a bit off. Arguably it does make the UI look a bit more consistent, but really they could also include a link to the actual show page. By only showing their version you are stuck in their ecosystem.
All this got me thinking, what exactly makes a podcasting app a walled garden?
My first attempt at an answer would be the following:
- Lack of support for RSS
- Internally generated show pages
- General distain for anything outside the app
It feels like we should be very good at identifying walled gardens but also at explaining why they aren't a good thing. It's not a great analogy when you think about it because most actual gardens, at least in cities, are walled, so a lot of folks might expect it to be a feature. #