The Pod Sage

Dave Jones, collected

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Wisdom

Don't let perfect sync be the enemy of good

Broadcast TV closed captions are often minutes out of sync, so even a podcast transcript that isn't adjusted for inserted ads is still better than broadcast television.

so like, we're already better than that. So I don't think, you know, even if you have a non time adjusted transcript, you're probably still fairly close to what you mean, like, you're probably still way better than broadcast television, honestly.

Episode 133: It's a Lifestyle! 01:20:13

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Advertisers want every customer; they just don't want to be seen

Brand-safety talk about never advertising on 'disinformation' sites is mostly cover. Readers of those sites also need car insurance, and their money spends like anyone's. Advertisers want those sales; they just don't want anyone to find out, which is why personalized feeds like TikTok's suit them.

Sure, but that's so so the so the real the real issue there is not that you don't want to you want to but you just don't want anybody to find out about it in that way

Episode 133: It's a Lifestyle! 01:04:23

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1 other mention

Don't become the central repository

Dave doesn't want Podcast Index to become the single source everyone depends on. The goal is open data that anyone can build their own lists from.

I don't want Google to rely on us, I don't want to be the go, everybody has to go to COVID I don't want to be the good central repository for the universe, like we, the whole idea here is that everybody can see it. So everybody builds their own list

Episode 132: Felt-Manhood 00:46:14

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1 other mention

Anything critical belongs in the feed itself

Elements critical to how a podcast functions, like the enclosure and anything to do with monetization, go directly in the RSS XML, not in side files like chapters. It's more reliable, and some hosts will never support the add-ons. Extras can be layered on later.

there's a certain set of elements that are critical to the functionality of the podcast, make it work. And they're not like, sort of add on Extras, and monitor anything to do with monetizing, or that that should be considered critical to the functionality of the show of the podcast.

Episode 132: Felt-Manhood 00:37:05

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5 other mentions

Build simple primitives that snap together like Lego

remoteItem should be the one standard way to reference external content: at minimum just a feed GUID, with layered fallbacks (item GUID, feed URL) so apps without a backend can still resolve it. Then podroll and value time splits are built from that one block.

Like you can just plug and play this thing is like Lego blocks, it can go anywhere.

Episode 131: Toilet Scroller 01:57:10

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2 other mentions

If you want your kids off social media, live it yourself

Dave moved to a Light Phone partly for his 13-year-old daughter: he can't scroll on the couch all night and then tell her she can't have a phone. Put your money where your mouth is.

if I want her to not be addicted to social media and have like mental health problems for real from all this from all this garbage. Like, I got to live there, right? I mean, I got to put my money where my mouth is.

Episode 131: Toilet Scroller 01:24:40

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By the time a thing is perfected, it's already on the wane

Bluesky finally built a protocol that does federation right, but it feels like social media peaked two years ago. Things tend to get perfected just as they pass their apex.

by the time a thing is perfected. That's about the time that it's already hit. It's the apex, and it's on the wane.

Episode 131: Toilet Scroller 01:18:07

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A language model only manipulates language

Don't anthropomorphize LLMs. They parse and output language, and anything you can't clearly express in language is beyond them. People are shoehorning them into tasks they can't do (e.g. AI-classifying music was a coin flip).

this is a language manipulation system. That's what it does it, it parses language, and it puts out and it outputs language. Anything else that you attribute to this thing? is not possible.

Episode 131: Toilet Scroller 00:56:03

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Niche podcasts should take direct listener support from day one

A podcaster's biggest regret was not starting subscriptions sooner, so she wouldn't depend on ads. Advertising pays the bills only for the top 1% or less; the other 98% of podcasting should go value-for-value or direct-to-audience from the start.

I just wish my biggest regret is I wish I had done subscriptions earlier, so that I could start getting money, value for value thing going earlier with my audience so that I was not so dependent on advertising.

Episode 131: Toilet Scroller 00:39:31

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Not in the audio. The opening sentences paraphrase a podcaster's message to Buzzsprout, as Dave relays it; the conclusion about the 98% is his own.

1 other mention

A tag should do one thing and do it well

Like a Unix command, each namespace tag must be boiled down to its most basic essence. 'Made for kids' (who the show is for) works; mixing audience and content into one rating has failed for 1,000 comments. Multi-layered tags are doomed because they're complex in concept and in code.

It has to do it's just like a Unix command tool. It has to do one thing and it has to do it well. And only one thing and it is so easy. It is so tempting to bring in 234 or five other things.

Episode 130: For All The Drummers 01:13:07

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3 other mentions

Every open system needs a bar for spammers to jump over

No comment or chat system is immune to spam, so pick a barrier. Fountain uses money, Mastodon uses registration and moderators, and ephemeral chat uses time limits. Be honest about the difficulties.

So I think what the so you have these different bar these different sorts of bars you can set to pay for people to jump over to to help the spam issue.

Episode 130: For All The Drummers 00:42:49

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Decentralize upstream; keep apps simple

Pushing decentralization all the way down to mobile apps drains batteries, adds complexity and causes App Store trouble. Instead, collect things at a reliable point (a host, Podping.cloud) and fan them out from there. Aim for 'gas stations or libraries', where if one is closed you drive to the next, not oxygen that is everywhere.

Because if you push the decentralization, all the way down to the mobile app, that is a big burden for that for that app to carry.

Episode 130: For All The Drummers 00:39:26

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6 other mentions

Categories only help discovery up to a certain volume

You categorize things only so people can find them. A genre with six albums helps discovery; one with 18,000 is useless. Past a certain size, categories stop working.

genre category is only useful to a certain volume. And then you're just really, it just kind of falls off.

Episode 129: Turkish Punk 01:26:09

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Partial decentralization is a healthy compromise

Pure decentralization is monumentally hard. Podcasting, like Mastodon, is decentralized through many hosting companies acting as points of control. That slows the pace and means you don't have to solve every problem at once.

because pure decentralization, I mean, we all know pure, pure 100% decentralized things is very, very difficult. Like yeah, Like monumentally difficult

Episode 129: Turkish Punk 01:09:41

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Open music must be as easy as Spotify, and it can't be a 'podcast app'

The more the technology gets out of the way, the better the music. To win over indie musicians and fans, an app should run on podcast infrastructure but be a real music app, using podcast-app strengths like downloads and audio processing.

I think music, you know, the more the mute, the more the technology gets out of the way, I think you get better music.

Episode 129: Turkish Punk 01:01:23

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1 other mention

The medium tag gave music its first open delivery protocol

Music has never had an open digital delivery protocol. Tagging a podcast feed as music piggybacks on podcasting's existing infrastructure and spreads the costs around, compared with Spotify paying to store tens of millions of tracks that almost no one streams.

In the digital world music has never had a delivery protocol or delivery mechanism. That is that is open. I mean, everything has been proprietary since day one.

Episode 129: Turkish Punk 00:43:40

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Build slow and methodical, not 'fix it in the first patch'

After 15 years of VC-driven 'move fast and break things', the industry has gotten used to constant outages. A slow, methodical approach to building avoids falling victim to most of that.

if you go into something with a slow, sort of methodical, built, you know, approach to building it, you don't you don't have to fall victim to a lot of that stuff.

Episode 129: Turkish Punk 00:12:51

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2 other mentions

Strong identity only helps inside a circle of trust

On Nostr: a cryptographically secure identity is valuable in a trusted community like your Mastodon instance, but outside it (say, a controversial comment on a random blog) it can become a liability. Bitcoiners learned this and stopped reusing addresses.

concrete, concrete, cryptographically, secure identity only, it only matters, it's only desirable when there's trust.

Episode 128: Fully Fingered 01:22:19

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2 other mentions

'Only X% of podcasts do it' isn't an argument

When people dismiss a feature because only a small share of podcasts use it, Dave points out that less than 1% of podcasts are any good anyway. The good shows are the ones that count.

What I always think about when I hear people say there's only only such and such percent of podcasts do X I'm not thinking is always immediately will only only, like less than 1% of podcasts are any good anyway.

Episode 128: Fully Fingered 00:17:03

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Capture at the highest resolution; you can always go lower

Arguing for word-level timestamps in JSON transcripts over line-based SRT: once you have the finest detail you can derive coarser versions, but never the other way around. Word-level timing also enables clipping by transcript on a phone.

if word for word is just simply the best? You can always go lower resolution you can't go higher.

Episode 128: Fully Fingered 00:11:27

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Seek peace: sometimes just pick up the phone

Dave urged the Podcast Standards Project to lobby Apple and Google for a default podcast player and universal subscribe links, and to simply phone Spotify and ask them to support the person tag. Wars can't last forever; diplomacy works.

we war can last forever. We need to we need to seek peace. And peace, to me involves the diplomacy of calling a calling them up and saying hey, Can you all support?

Episode 127: Fortress of Freedom 01:29:43

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Not in the audio. 'we war can last forever' is likely 'no war can last forever' (transcription).

Discovery happens under pressure, not in a mode you choose

You don't open your podcast app to discover things; you open it to hear what you already chose. Discovery happens when something pushes you over the threshold, like loving a Jerry Reed song and wanting to know more about him.

Discovery is not a, it's not a flat thing. What I mean is, it's not like an own off. You don't you don't go you don't just you, you don't go into discovery mode. There's a there, it's more like there's like a pressure to discover discovery.

Episode 127: Fortress of Freedom 01:21:25

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1 other mention

Segregated communities are happier, and that's the danger

When communities only hear their own voice they're happier, because they don't know they're 'supposed' to be mad. Dave found this a fascinating psychological insight into algorithmic feeds.

when you when you segregate these communities, to where they can only hear their own voice. They're happier. And they and they don't know that they're supposed to be mad.

Episode 127: Fortress of Freedom 01:16:33

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Timeless music has character; the industry became a trading desk

Much of today's music feels disposable, while old catalogs with real character keep getting traded among rights-holders. Dave thinks there's no fixing it until music is back in the hands of the people.

The musical, the music is not timeless, but you do have this timeless that you have a catalogue of timeless music that has character. And it has and it's powerful.

Episode 127: Fortress of Freedom 00:51:41

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1 other mention

Write standards that need no one to change

For things like show-notes formatting, survey what every app supports, build the standard around the lowest common limit, and nobody has to rewrite their code. Don't tell developers they must change to adhere.

So what you do is you just take the one, that's the that's the lowest. And you build your standard around that. That covers Everybody see what I'm saying?

Episode 127: Fortress of Freedom 00:41:48

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1 other mention

'I'm not going to be your hand'

His wife Melissa, an artist doing a public installation, pushes back on clients who try to dictate every detail: commission the artist's vision, don't use them as a tool. Dave quotes her line approvingly.

It was trying to like tell her exactly what to do. No, no work that doesn't work this way. Doesn't work that way. And her her her line that she uses all the time is I'm not going to be your hand.

Episode 127: Fortress of Freedom 00:09:08

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1 other mention

Fed moves work, just not how they think

Rate changes do have effects, but they travel a circuitous route, arrive amplified, and show up in ways policymakers don't expect.

when they tinker with rates up and down. Oh, yeah, sure. It does have an effect. But the effect is not what they think it Is In It takes a circuitous route to actually get back to, in order to have an effect on on the economy.

Episode 126: Podcasting Power Rangers 00:34:52

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Advertising is cyclical, so have a safety valve

Advertising isn't evil, but it limits what you can say and it rises and falls with the economy. Subscriptions or value-for-value help you weather the down cycles.

we wouldn't be able to say what we wanted to say without without being free from the influence of advertising. But then, but then there's also that the the other aspect of it, where it goes up and down is civil is cyclical, you're gonna have up you're gonna, you know, you're gonna have huge drop offs.

Episode 126: Podcasting Power Rangers 00:32:25

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Some warnings cause the thing they warn about

Like the observer effect: an auditor can't put a going-concern warning on a shaky bank, because saying it out loud would trigger the bank run it predicts.

If you put a going concern morning, on Silicon Valley Banks audit, you're going to cause a bank run, like worried they won't survive a bank run. You can't actually say it out loud, because then they won't survive the bank run.

Episode 126: Podcasting Power Rangers 00:24:21

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YouTube isn't 'the biggest podcast platform'

No other medium gets conflated like that. Nobody called Dish Network the biggest radio market because Imus was simulcast on it. Being on a platform doesn't make it that medium.

Nobody will say that. Because I'm us in the morning was simulcast video on on Dish Network, that DISH Network is the biggest radio market. It's like, it doesn't make any sense.

Episode 126: Podcasting Power Rangers 00:21:32

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Not in the audio. 'I'm us' = Don Imus (transcription).

2 other mentions

A few hundred dollars a month changes a musician's life

Most excellent musicians will never earn a living wage from streaming. Like mid-size podcasters, a few hundred dollars a month directly from fans would make them happy, and that's achievable.

there's so many excellent music artists, that will they just cannot rise to the level to have a living wage on a traditional plus streaming platform. It'll never, it'll never happen.

Episode 125: Wolf Nuts 01:25:19

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The spec is easy; implementation is where problems live

Adoption happens gradually, then suddenly. Going slow is good because you learn what's wrong as you go. A spec can be dead simple; nearly all the problems come from implementation.

It happens gradually than suddenly. I think, because once and I'm glad, I'm glad it's going slow. Because we get to learn and see what's wrong as we go.

Episode 125: Wolf Nuts 01:12:25

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3 other mentions

Help desk wisdom: 'It's okay this time, just don't let it happen again'

Users assume IT is watching everything they do. You aren't, but you never tell them that. The right answer to an awkward confession is 'it's okay this time, just don't let it happen again.'

there's this implicit assumption that you're watching everything that they do, and that like it, but you're, of course you're not. I mean, there's like, you can't see much volume. You can see all this stuff, of course, but you never tell them that, though, that the proper answer to that is, it's okay, this time, just don't let it happen again.

Episode 125: Wolf Nuts 00:55:40

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Inflation is a psychology problem

Once inflation settles into public consciousness, people rush to buy real goods and hard assets before prices rise, which is why the Volcker-era Fed felt powerless.

it was a psychological human behavior issue. Because the, the, everybody when when inflation really settles into, to the public consciousness, you, you feel like you have to go buy, because you got to get it before the rate goes up. And you want real goods, you want you want hard assets

Episode 125: Wolf Nuts 00:15:42

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Grow when your customers grow

Praising Buzzsprout's model: when your company's growth is your customers' growth, with no funny money in between, it's a natural, healthy business.

Because you're, there's that direct your customer, you're the growth of your company is the growth of your customer. There's funny money in between. Exactly. It's a very natural thing.

Episode 124: Undeplatformable 01:59:41

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Not in the audio. 'There's funny money in between' likely a transcription of 'there's no funny money in between' (meaning inferred from context).