[pandeiro]

Not surprised this degenerated immediately into a mass ranting session about pandemic science with pretty much the entire catalog of cognitive biases and logical fallacies on display.

I guess that's interesting to some, from a sociological standpoint, but for me, there's more than enough of this on literally every other social media platform.

I'm interested in a discussion about the actual dynamic of spotify vs youtube dissemination and whether the claims made in the article are valid. Because the entire premise is backed by the "secondary metric" of how many Twitter followers a guest's account grew by -- this seems pretty ripe for confounding variables, like the appeal of the guest, auxiliary appearances elsewhere, the news cycle at the time overlapping with the guest's subject matter, and other things.

Curious what others think of this.

[hncurious]

If you took Rogan's podcast and transported it back to, say, 2014, there would be no controversy. He would simply be seen as a liberal comedian having casual, friendly conversations with a wide variety of people.

It's just that we're currently in the middle of a moral panic and the self righteous authoritarian hall monitor types are having their day in the sun. Just as we saw in the 80s/90s with Howard Stern who was offending similarly delicate sensibilities. Although today's empowered puritans are not the same group that went after Howard, they are of the same cloth, merely rebranded to the time. It's an unfortunate recurring bug of America.

Frankly I find it incredibly boring, anti-intellectual, anti-curious and absolutely stifling. The sooner we all get back to ignoring them the better.

[yuuu]

The problem is that the self-righteous authoritarian hall monitors now seem to comprise the majority of the U.S. population and nearly everyone I have a professional interaction with.

[evv555]

Maybe not the majority but a large fraction of board rooms, bureaucratic positions. Basically anyone with leverage over your life.

[Thorentis]

Maybe it's the time of day, but HN is usually good at cutting through the usual politicised stuff, and just discussing the issue at hand.

At the end of the day, Spotify isn't a Podcasts platform, and nobody I know associates Spotify with podcasts. Surely somebody on Rogan's team knew this, but I suspect the money was simply too good to pass up. Imagine starting a FinTech SaaS with the sole purpose of being acquired, and then being offered $100m by a Biotech company. I'd probably take it.

[jessaustin]

There is probably something to this analysis, particularly for new listeners. (Rogan might be big enough that new listeners are less important?) Spotify has chosen not to use these other platforms to the extent that it could use them. This is an example (perhaps the canonical one?) of Ben Thompson's "strategy tax". For an individual podcast, it would be better to have something on all platforms/protocols/modalities. They want to attract Youtube viewers as well as RSS subscribers as well as everyone else. A capitalist firm like Spotify that wants to make a little money every time anyone ever listens to anything is comfortable losing a bit on every show it produces, if it can convince investors that doing so could bring about their favored apocalypse of rent-seeking. Each show is taxed to benefit the firm's long-term strategy.

Spofity seems to have modeled its Rogan acquisition as a platform crossover event. Lots of loyal Rogan listeners had never installed a Spotify app, and now a certain percentage of those people have. However, the way Spofity have structured this, as a one-time thing in which Rogan no longer reaches other platforms in comparable ways, seems to limit the potential benefit of this maneuver.

The reason I no longer listen to Rogan's podcast is that it is no longer an actual podcast. My players are still pointed at his RSS feed, but that thing is dead. I have no interest in using special apps published by Spotify to listen to something that used to be available in the normal way. I realize that is a fairly odd preference, but it satisfies the categorical imperative. I'm not the only person who strongly prefers to listen in a particular way. Spofity's strategy is different from that of many patronage-supported podcasts, which publish e.g. half of their episodes publicly, with ads encouraging people who would like more episodes to send money. Those podcasts are marketed in a more open way than Rogan's.