Spotify isn't a podcasting platform. It's a proprietary audio platform that uses podcast feeds as input.
The Spotify app isn't a podcast app — you can't play podcasts with it. You can only play shows which have been imported via podcast feeds into their proprietary platform.
If Spotify can continue to get folks talking about Spotify as a "podcasting" platform, listening to "podcasts" on Spotify, etc. (and they've been very successful in doing that judging from the posts in this thread), the world will begin to forget that "podcasting" ever meant "open medium".
and then it's also not a podcast provider. Run me through how I'd listen to Gimlet's Academy[1] audio series in Overcast, and I'll concede that point too
And if everyone cares as little as you do, Spotify will win.
My hope is that most people on HN won't confuse "caring about open standards" with "pedantry".
> It's also the only app that seems to work with weak networks.
This is non-sensical. Episodes are delivered via ordinary HTTP. And with podcast apps (again, Spotify is not one), the odds are good that episodes from your subscriptions have been pre-fetched to local storage before you even play them.
> The Spotify app isn't a podcast app — you can't play podcasts
Exactly. A podcast is an audio stream that is published via RSS. If you can't subscribe to _any_ arbitrary podcast RSS with the app, then it is not a podcast app.
If podcast was a trademark, this kind if abuse of the word would not happen. But now it will be embraced, extended and eventually extinguished as we know it.
The people who produce podcasts think that podcasts are the shows they make. Why should your technical/implementational definition take precedence over that? It's not obvious that a photo is a JPEG file and it's not obvious that a podcast is an RSS file with audio embeds.
It is like a photographer calls a png file a jpg file, because to him jpg file is just an image file. The word podcast has a historical meaning, just like most other words. It is not my definition.
“Podcast” is more like “VHS” than like “movie”. Podcast is a format. There are lots of ways of listening to prerecorded audio. It’s only a “podcast” if the medium is similar to RSS+file. Otherwise, it’s just a show. Is an SVHS or some other extended format a VHS to a layman? Sure. But a DVD is not.
I once heard of a rich man who had his assistant burn podcasts onto CDs for him to listen to in the car. I don't think it would be normal usage to say he is a "podcast listener" though. When people think of podcasts, they think of someone using the internet to listen to audio, not a weirdo rich guy with assistants to do the dirty work of learning new technologies.
Would you say that a rich guy who has his assistants send emails is an email user? For example, it has been speculated that Trump has never sent an email.[1] But surely they didn't mean he's never had an assistant send an email. They mean he never used the application to do it himself.
Language is flexible and user driven, but parts of how people use language is to defer to expert users for fine distinctions while making the broad categorizations themselves. Experts have determined what is and isn't a "monkey" but it's sort of an absurd category because it has to carve out homo sapiens but include old world and new world monkeys.
In this case, users might not know that podcasts have RSS behind them, but they certainly know that a podcast is prerecorded audio delivered over the internet and they somewhat defer to experts about the formatting, the way that they would agree that a "Betamax" is not a "VHS" but an "S-VHS" might be a "VHS" to a layman.
100% agree with this. I have a Spotify subscription but I continue to listen to podcasts on another app. Even as a music app, Spotify lacks so many basic features (like swipe gestures to add a song to the queue) that I can't imagine it being any good for podcasts.
The Spotify app isn't a podcast app — you can't play podcasts with it. You can only play shows which have been imported via podcast feeds into their proprietary platform.
If Spotify can continue to get folks talking about Spotify as a "podcasting" platform, listening to "podcasts" on Spotify, etc. (and they've been very successful in doing that judging from the posts in this thread), the world will begin to forget that "podcasting" ever meant "open medium".