Xavi Benjamín He/They

I agree with @mijustin​’s analy­sis here:

VCs are par­tic­u­lar­ly hun­gry for there to be a ​“cen­tral­ized plat­form” for pod­cast­ing, where ​“dis­cov­ery, con­sump­tion, and mon­e­ti­za­tion can hap­pen in the same place.” That desire serves no one but VCs and the cen­tral­ized plat­form. One cen­tral­ized plat­form = bad for creators.

Cur­rent­ly, pod­cast­ers have lever­age because they own the con­nec­tion with their audi­ence. YouTu­bers don’t have that.

I don’t know any YouTu­ber that doesn’t have some type of gripe with the plat­form. They enforce pol­i­cy incon­sis­tent­ly and down­right stu­pid­ly. Trans­paren­cy is severe­ly lack­ing as well. Which coin­ci­den­tal­ly plagues most if not all of the tech monopolies.

Pod­casts feel like the last thing still built on top of an open foun­da­tion, in this case RSS. We need to be mov­ing more in that direc­tion, not to more cen­tral­ized plat­forms. In addi­tion to the above prob­lems, gate-keep­ing and cen­sor­ship are sure to result from this cen­tral­iza­tion as well.

It might be too far of a gen­er­al­iza­tion, but fuck it: if ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists are inter­est­ed, it’s prob­a­bly not good.