You’re the first person I’ve heard with anything positive to say about their podcast UI, so I’m really curious what those four are.

Apple’s podcasts app goes out of its way to avoid showing the tracklist of the current channel or the list of recently played podcasts, or to make you misclick on the little channel name which changes the current track (given that you can’t list the recently played, any misclick is a major annoyance). I think they might have hired a AUX, an “anti-user experience” engineer.

I was listening to a history podcast (British History podcast), which has been going on for years. I listen while running, so it’s managed on my phone. For a while, I would occasionally get the app trying to skip ahead, but only if it had issues downloading the next episode (again, I was out running).

I eventually just downloaded batches of 10-20 episodes and everything worked perfectly in chronological order. And more recently, it all “just worked” even while new episodes were released. My guess is that some behavior recently changed, but I can’t confirm it.

So, I think the UX goal is to try to get you some content of it has issues with the next chronological episode.

It is accessible from Listen Now at the very bottom.

Because on these platforms if I list best 4 podcast apps, Spotify won’t come within miles of that short list.

I am slowly decreasing my use of Spotify because of the way it’s pushing podcasts while all I want is music from it. Nothing else.

Best thing to do is actually to pay for Spotify and use it regularly, but never touch the podcasts. They have metrics and usage logging all over the app and they will know over time how few paying subscribers are listening to Joe Rogan et al.

They'll soon give him the can if they know there's lower engagement than expected for the price being paid.

And I told them why I unsubscribed.

Pretty sure that’s better still.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Po...

After a year or two of this they finally moved it further down the page where I don't have to see it every day, though.

Nah, given their scale no one is probably listening to any arbitrary comment you sent it upon quitting, and from a behavior perspective they probably have no idea why you churned.

Like I said, keep using and paying for the product and don't use the feature you don't like - if others agree, they'll soon get the message.

You are their dream music-only listener. You don’t care how aggressive they get. The changes they are making clearly don’t bother you and you’ll keep shoveling money their direction no matter what they do.

I’d rather vote with my feet and wallet. If a company is too stupid to learn from hard cash then they’ll never learn from in-app statistics.

They fund early people to get momentum and lock others in at high rates once they build out an audience.

I'd love if my employer "locked me in" at a higher rate lol.

I think the book could have used a lot tighter editing, it gets kind of tiresome in many parts... but the basic fundamental observation seems right to me and helps give me the mental models to recognize and describe it.

"it" being the way in the internet economy those who occupy that "middleman" position can become "chokepoints" who can hold both consumers and producers hostage.

Or, as Doctorow wrote in a blog post covering some similar ground:

> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

— https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

I'm not sure if they all die, there are a LOT of platforms around which haven't died yet, but those first steps are very recognizable in chokepoint middlemen like Spotify is for music and is trying to become for podcasts. First you give both consumers and the "business customers" (whether podcast producers or product sellers on Amazon) a great deal; then, once you've locked the consumers in you make the deal for consumers a lot worse in order to keep your business customers on your side; then, once you've locked _them_ in too (perhaps because they need you to reach the consumers, who are all on your platform), you tighten things up for business customers too, trying to extract as much money as possible from consumers and share as little of it as possible with the producers, while both have a hard time leaving you due to network effects.

So, yeah, it always starts great for your users. This is how you trap them, so you can then start tightening the screws.

So, I had to switch to spotify because it doesn't do that. I don't need to listen offline as much recently, since I wfh.