[CharlesW]

Unfortunately, to Spotify's great delight, the word "podcast" has been successfully embraced, extended, and extinguished. Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the word "podcast" to mean audio shows on proprietary platforms that require proprietary players.

[cxr]

> Us technical types have been complicit in it by allowing the word "podcast" to mean [...]

Those types have done a lot of the same damage to the word "wiki". It blows my mind that Sourcehut of all places is a willing participant in debasing the term.

[ronsor]

What exactly is Sourcehut doing?

[cxr]

The same thing GitHub is doing: throwing a bunch of source files into a repo—i.e. the sort of thing that came before wikis (and the reason why wikis were invented in the first place—to displace those kinds of systems)—but then calling that a wiki. It qualifies certainly as what GNU calls a "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site". But to call it a "wiki" is wildly inappropriate—like saying "integral" when you're talking about derivatives:[1]

> Imagine you're a mathematician, and fellow mathematicians start calling derivatives integrals instead; that's basically how badly the term[] is being misused: it's being used to describe systems that are almost the _exact opposite_ of the concept.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561

[pabs3]

Whats missing from GitHub/SourceHut "wikis" that would make them actual wikis? At least with GitHub wikis you can edit them from the web like the wikis that came before GitHub.

[cxr]

Here's how you edit a wiki: spot the typo, hit the Edit button, make your change, and then hit the submit button.*

Many of these new-gen collaboration sites that bill themselves as having wikis result in a request for approval (pull request) instead of an actual edit when you attempt to make a change. (And in the Git-backed ones, the process is usually more egregious; see below.) This proposal/review/approval cycle is exactly what a wiki isn't. GitHub no longer imposes this workflow—there's now an option at least to turn your wiki into, you know, an actual wiki—but even today that option remains off by default so all pages are closed to changes unless the owner makes an effort to toggle the right setting[1]. What these are aren't wikis—they're anti-wikis; if you have a "wiki" that only you can edit, then stop calling it a wiki. (Notably, GitHub's setting doesn't control whether it will continue to advertise it as a wiki or not—instead of just, like, the "docs" tab or something.) Most of these are static sites with extra/fewer steps.

SourceHut is even worse than present-day GitHub, because for all its docs in the man.sr.ht namespace, this is the process you have to use to edit one of its anti-wikis: spot the typo, note the title of the page you're currently on, find the corresponding repo URL in the page footer, leave your browser to clone the repo to your machine, open that directory and locate the source file based on the page title you noted earlier, edit it, make a commit, and then (probably**) push your changes to the original repo. This flies in the face of the definition[2], etymology[3], and entire spirit of the word[4][5].

* Maybe you hit a wall because the specific page has been locked. Fine. Raise your concerns through linked resource for discussions. The fact that individual pages can be locked because e.g. they have a history of being the target of abuse does not negate the meaning of "wiki". If every page is locked down (including pages that don't even exist yet, so you can't go create them), then that makes a material difference—it makes it not a wiki.

** It may not actually be the case that trying to push your changes makes them immediately live on SourceHut—it very well may result in a request for approval by the project owner. No idea. I've never gone through the process on Sourcehut because of how much contempt is deserved by projects that have contributed to the campaign of debasing the term "wiki" to it-means-what-we-feel-like and who-are-you-to-say-that's-wrong levels of uselessness.

1. <https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-proj...>

2. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wiki#English>

3. <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wikiwiki#Hawaiian>

4. <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/wiki>

5. <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_wiki_way>

[thaumasiotes]

The word never made much sense though. A "podcast" is a file that you download from the internet. What's the point of calling it a podcast?

[giantrobot]

Because it was broadcast to your iPod. Where iPod means a non-networked personal media player which in the 00s overwhelmingly meant an iPod.

The distribution model was a client subscribes to the RSS feed on their computer, downloads new episodes (from the publisher's website), and then syncs them when the "iPod" is synced to the computer. Many PMPs but the iPod especially defaulted to syncing your computer library when plugged in (to charge). So the iPod just received no episodes of podcasts when people plugged them in to charge at the end of the day.

When iTunes added explicit podcast support it became even easier to subscribe and sync podcasts. This was and remains a good distribution model but Spotify et al have done their damnedest to co-opt the term to mean content exclusive to their platform.

[throw0101a]

Etymology of the podcast was from iPod, which was (probably) the most popular audio/music device for a number of years in the 2000s:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Etymology

There was a minor movement to label them "netcasts", but it didn't really take.

[CharlesW]

There's no point now, I suppose.

The history was that "podcasting" was an open medium, "open" being the point. A "podcast" was a show (e.g. "Smartless"). "Episodes" were audio or video files combined with metadata that lived in the podcast's RSS. Anybody could play in that ecosystem.

Now "podcasting" means anything/nothing. "Podcasts" are shows. "Podcasts" are episodes. "Podcasts" are things that increasingly need a proprietary app to play.

[scrame]

Because it was some apple fanboys who started it with the original iPod. Apple and a few others tried to trademark it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast#Trademark_applications

[jethro_tell]

And yet here we are clicking a floppy disk icon to save it. Language and meaning change over time. That's OK.

[CharlesW]

Of course it's okay for languages to evolve, but here's how you're missing the point:

Imagine that shortly after the turn of the century, Adobe created a proprietary platform for delivering internet content and called it the "web". Viewers must use Adobe Web Reader to use Adobe "web pages", which are DRM-protected PDF files delivered using proprietary protocols. Adobe has done deals with several hundred popular sites to turn off their standards-based websites and deliver Adobe websites exclusively.

This is what Spotify and others are doing, and nobody cares. Apple is effectively the last media giant left holding the flag for standards-based podcasting, but how long do we think that will last?

[blooalien]

> "Language and meaning change over time."

What I just love is when people use this excuse to justify "borrowing" a clearly defined technical term, using it incorrectly, and then insisting that their incorrect usage of that term is entirely valid because "language and meaning change over time."

(Not saying you're one of those people at all but that is one of the most frequent uses of that phrase that I tend to experience from other people.)

[thaumasiotes]

This doesn't seem particularly closely related to the discussion. The meaning of "podcast" hasn't changed. Instead, the question is "why bother distinguishing podcasts from other mp3 files that you also download off the internet?". If someone records an album and puts it up for sale online, how is that not a "podcast"?