I remember when I was first introduced to the concept of podcasts and heard one for the first time.

[nbailey@mstdn.ca]

@gwynnion I think a big draw early on was that AM radio was exclusively right wing slop in the 80s/90s and internet radio unlock topics other than Bigfoot and whatever rush limbaugh pulled out of his ass that week. But now podcasts are as bad, often worse, than the crap that used to be on the air

[blogdiva@mastodon.social]

@gwynnion there’s two of us LOL

[jrdepriest@infosec.exchange]

@gwynnion

I'm like "write a script!" If I want to hear people shooting the shit, I'll join a Teams call. Otherwise, I'll just read the transcript that's been "edited for clarity" thanks.

[jens@social.finkhaeuser.de]

@blogdiva @gwynnion I once dutifully listened to an episode acquaintances produced, only to realize that the first half hour of their creation was just faffing about with greetings and banter.

It's been years, but I want those two hours back.

[blogdiva@mastodon.social]

@jens @gwynnion LMAO

[disorderlyf@todon.eu]

@gwynnion I just want nerdy talk radio that isn't fascists and/or AI shills who don't realise they're fascist yet.

[xinit@mastodon.coffee]

@jrdepriest
I had a couple I listened to, but that whole "three guys sitting in their mom's unfinished basement" vibe was so common.

The occasional scripted one I found were still 45+ minute long and still really shallow on a subject or just uninformed opinion. No time for that in my life.
@gwynnion

[vanalope@timeloop.cafe]

@gwynnion this reminds me of when I realized as a teenager pro wrestling is just a soap opera aimed at dudes.

[muddle@infosec.exchange]

@gwynnion you know what else "pods" refers to. Dolphins. Think about it!

Seriously, though, they're not all bad. Fish(*) of the sea swim together and shit.

(*yeah, I know that dolphins aren't fish...)

[davey_cakes@mastodon.ie]

@gwynnion credit where it's due to podcasts which are just national broadcasters making online archives of their programmes and saying "come and get it nerds"

The archetypal podcast is, indeed, bad though. Three American men laughing at their own jokes, forever.

[ewerybody@mastodon.social]

@gwynnion luckily there are now podcasts for any kind of interest. of course any kind of nerd as well

[securedllama@infosec.exchange]

@blogdiva @gwynnion three. Podcasts make me feel uneasy so I have nothing to do with them. No idea why but there's something about them that I do not like.

[david_chisnall@infosec.exchange]

@gwynnion

It’s fascinating to me how the whole thing developed. When the iPod launched, most music players (and mobile phones) had an FM radio. FM radios are so cheap to make and tiny that you may as well put them in anything that already has headphones (the headphone cable works nicely as an antenna).

But Steve Jobs hated FM Radio. So the iPod didn’t have one. And, it turned out, a lot of people liked listening to the radio. Someone came up with the idea of sharing a bunch of MP3s via an RSS feed so you could download the latest episodes of a radio show to your iPod when you plugged it into your computer.

So now you have a way of publishing radio shows to iPods with basically no barrier to entry. Something that is to radio what a web page is to a magazine article: cheaper to produce, no scarcity of space. Some will be from people who are fascinating experts on a thing so few people care about that no mainstream publication would devote scarce space to them. Others are random ramblings.

Then the iPod’s entire market slowly died as mobile phones evolved the same functionality. Now most things that play Podcasts are not iPods and have a network available when they are playing them, but the legacy remains.

It’s as if we’d built the web assuming a model of log on, download a bunch of pages for offline reading, and then log off, and this model had persisted to today.