Why don't podcast players and podcast ecosystem in general have comments? I listen to a podcast, and want to engage with people who listened to it and ask questions to authors. Why don't we have it?
Podcasts often made available on lots of platforms and apps. That would mean the podcast owner would need to check all of those places regularly to respond to people - if they miss a platform they'd be accused of ignoring their audience by people who listen there. That's a lot of effort. Rather than doing that podcasters often have a website for their podcast that (sometimes) lets listeners engage with them, or they use social media with a Twitter or Insta account for the podcast.
Or, also because podcasts aren't standardized, if podcasts had a standard there would be a podcast standardization track, then there would probably end up being specified the possibility of adding comments to the payload and a way to specify endpoints for receiving comments. etc.
This would of course also open up for other things like perhaps including resources at a particular point in the podcast that the user could respond to - for example links to relevant demos of technique under discussion etc.
And probably a greater development of different podcast players.
> This would of course also open up for other things like perhaps including resources at a particular point in the podcast that the user could respond to - for example links to relevant demos of technique under discussion etc.
Minus the “that the user could respond to” but isn’t that just show notes and/or chapters?
Those are already a thing as supported by, e.g., Overcast [1]. Overcast also has a function to share short clips, which I guess is similar to being able to link to specific points in a podcast. Podcasters don’t use the functionality available, though.
>Podcasters don’t use the functionality available, though.
As a general rule content providers of any sort do not make use of functionality available in one content serving application, unless that application has near monopoly control of the market. Overcast evidently does not https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasts/comments/8ntp3x/podcast_ap... (unless stuff has changed drastically in last two years)
When it’s supported by the majority of clients though [1]…
> MP3 chapter markers are supported by most podcast clients, including Apple Podcasts on iOS (provided you're on iOS 12), Overcast, Pocket Casts, Antennapod Castro, Player FM and more.
Almost all podcast apps are still RSS based. Podcasts are in some ways the last mainstream bastion of RSS (despite Apple at one point trying to kill their reliance on RSS, but giving up and going back to RSS).
The larger RSS ecosystem already had semi-related standards for comments support such as Pingback/Trackback/Webmentions. It should be possible to reuse/recycle some such existing standards to the podcast world, if there were interest from different player makers.
You don’t have to centralise podcasts to centralise comments, you could do something similar to disquss and use the ID/hash of the podcast episode then offer some iframe for various outlets to use (assuming they would want to use your service).
Even if no one uses your service you could just have a site where people go to comment.
I couldn't agree more. For the last 2 years I've been building a podcast app that solves this problem called Repod -> https://repod.io
It's a full fledged social podcast app that enables people to comment + tag/categorize episodes. Would be super curious to hear your thoughts on the app.
This looks really well done. I don't think the messaging is strong enough to get me to switch from PocketCasts so you might want to work on that. I suspect podcast listening is a habit for most people and will just use what they always have. Every few months, a friend will get tired of apple podcasts and ask for an app recommendation, but people don't take switching lightly.
Can I import my subs? Who will see my comments? do my friends have to use repod? etc
Podcasting is built over rss, which is largely a read-only technology from the user side; the read/write variations never got traction, as people could not agree on a protocol (DAV? RPC? REST? etc). There seems to be little appetite to improve on the current standard, but I guess it could happen if developers of the biggest podcast apps were to agree on such improvements.
Distributed tech, after it gets popular, becomes a lot like herding cats, and when it comes to markup everyone has an opinion.
Tim Pritloves podcasts not only have comments, but the freakshow is streamed live with slack chat for interactions.
All podcasts of the metaebene are excellent btw and he is pioneering podcasting (over 12 years of high quality content and he seems to be striving for perfection). He has transcripts, chapter markers, live chat, comments, more than one codec, show-notes and additional features like fast and slow play in the web-player.
He also experiments with different things like auto-transcribe. I guess if somebody will be the first to actually offer a codec2 version of his/her podcast it will be him (If someone wants to correct me I would be happy to listen to a podcast that gets regularly released as codec2 :P)
I think Twitter can be used for it. Also podcasts use RSS for distribution so whatever comment system is going to be centralized to some service and everyone has to decide to use it.
I'd argue that though this is an avenue your listeners MAY use, it's not one the author ought to encourage. It's far more valuable to try and drive traffic to a site you own and control.
The Atom standard tried to support commenting directly in the content feed. There was a threading extension to incorporate comments in the feed file itself and a publishing protocol so that you can post a comment in standard way from, say, an app.
If that caught on with podcast apps and publishing backends there would be no need for a centralized system. Unfortunately, the adoption of that was practically zero. To quote the Indieweb wiki [1]:
They do. Lots of the podcasts I listen to ask users to leave comments on their website. Some even read out the comments in subsequent episodes.
But moderating comments - even on a niche post - is a chore. Wading through spam, trolls, arguments, etc isn't fun. It's much easier to ask commenters to email in - and that's what the majority seem to do.
I don’t have direct experience using this app called Breaker [1], but it’s designed to have some social features for podcasts so you can connect with friends or check other recommendations.
The fact that podcasts are distributed as RSS feeds to the podcast directories, such as Apple, Google, Spotify, etc., means that some centralized platform would be required for comments and other interactions. Many podcast authors have their own podcast websites where they may allow comments, but other listeners may not know of those sites or care to comment there when they have a ready interface to comment on Apple or Google or Spotify from their favorite podcast player.
Just like blogs, it's up to the author. Feeds will have whatever links the author puts into them, regardless of whether they're for all-text blogs or for podcasts.
Most podcasts have some sort of subreddit or similar web presence. If you're ever looking for a community never underestimate typing "reddit.com/r/(thing)" or "(thing) forum" in Google.
I agree with the comments about the technology and I also wonder if it has to do with how many people listen to podcasts—in the car, exercising, mowing the lawn—and not being active on a screen to comment. Maybe I'm wrong on this but I imagine many people listen this way. For example, I listened to one today while shooting hoops outside.
Many podcasts do have a post with show notes/transcriptions/etc. for each episode. And those will often be open for comments. But someone listening to the podcast (probably from a phone) would then have to go to that page.
Given that a lot of blogs/pubs that aren't about contentious topics don't get a lot of comments/engagement anyway, you probably just don't get a lot of comments even if there's a place for them.
I mean, if we're going to nitpick... For podcasts, the RSS file itself is served via HTTP, and it contains HTTP links to audio files, but there is no actual requirement for any HTTP server involved in either to serve up any HTML files for humans.
It might be hard to find and subscribe to a podcast without an HTTP server for humans, but it should be _technically_ possible. For many people, the HTTP server for humans they use is https://podcasts.apple.com, or maybe their podcast client, which hides all of those details away and might as well be interacting with a JSON API via gopher behind the scenes. Except, of course, it almost certainly isn't.
To answer directly to your question, it depends on the platforms, some podcasts choose certain platforms to allow comments i.e. Joe Rogan is on Youtube so viewers/listeners can submit their comments.
When people post podcasts here, as in [0] recently, then we have discussions. However, consider that podcasters don't want your questions, typically; the folks that do want questions will publish a phone number or email address allowing for engagement.
Podcasts often made available on lots of platforms and apps. That would mean the podcast owner would need to check all of those places regularly to respond to people - if they miss a platform they'd be accused of ignoring their audience by people who listen there. That's a lot of effort. Rather than doing that podcasters often have a website for their podcast that (sometimes) lets listeners engage with them, or they use social media with a Twitter or Insta account for the podcast.