Dave Jones, collected
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Responding to UK proposals to regulate 'social harms', Dave says deciding what's harmful is what governing is for. Laws are what a society passes through its representatives. 'Lawful but awful' is by definition a shifting set of opinions held by a few.
I thought that's what we do through the process of governing.
Episode 82: Ranking the Stars (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:24:47 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave says shared playlists could be digital word of mouth: literally showing what you listen to. Clips never took off because they take minutes of fiddly effort. An app that asks once whether to share your starred episodes publicly makes every star instant and effortless.
this is digital word of mouth. I'm literally showing you what I listened to.
Episode 81: Nodes of Joy (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:38:52 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Describing how the namespace is governed, Dave says making James Cridland a co-maintainer was intentional. It keeps the namespace from being just a Podcast Index thing, and they disagree often enough that Dave can count on James to push back. James also comes from the advertising side.
James and I disagree frequently enough to where I know that I can depend on him to push back, which is important. You need push back.
Episode 81: Nodes of Joy (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:04:23 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Following a brainstorm with Buzzsprout's Kevin Finn, Dave says Podcasting 2.0 is a useful phrase for the next iteration of podcasting. It's a concept, not a white paper, which causes confusion. What's needed is a concrete implementation people can point to (what became the 'podcast standard' idea).
It's a concept, not a white paper, and what you really need for some concrete implementation,
Episode 81: Nodes of Joy (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:57:15 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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In wartime, propaganda vilifies whole nations, and businesses may cancel ordinary people for what their government did. Dave says protecting yourself as a citizen from that is one of the reasons to decentralize.
that's what you're one of the things that you're protecting, against when you decentralize. And in the ways that we've been talking about is, you have to protect yourself as a citizen, from the things that your government may do.
Episode 81: Nodes of Joy (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:52:47 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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On the tension between what's best for a business and what's best for users, Dave suggests Podcasting 2.0's answer is to have no customers at all. It has a vision to satisfy instead. Nobody gets rich, but neither did the pioneers of the early internet.
This is true the podcasting 2.0 project doesn't have any customers to please. What we have is a vision to satisfy.
Episode 80: Wheels Up (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:10:00 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Responding to criticism that the Podcast Index should have started by replicating Apple's iTunes tags, Dave says no one adopts a namespace that only duplicates what already exists. New tags that serve the vision give adopters a reason to declare it. Once about 400,000 feeds declare the namespace, existing tags can be folded in.
what you need is new things. And those things happen to serve the vision, but they also give adopters a reason to implement the thing that you created.
Episode 80: Wheels Up (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:57:25 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Using Alecks Gates's unprompted proposal for a JSON payment proof token as an example, Dave explains how Podcasting 2.0 works. Nobody tells anybody what to do. People build what they want toward a shared vision, and standards come from proposals the group gives feedback on.
People do what they want. Nobody sets the rules. People do what they want. And as part of a shared vision, we create standards.
Episode 80: Wheels Up (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:49:13 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Anyone can join Podcasting 2.0 and help build. But Dave draws a line: trying to get other people to stop doing something isn't creation, it's commentary. That can still be valuable, but if you want to create, go build a new thing.
don't mistake telling somebody else they ought to stop doing a thing as an act of creation, because it's not.
Episode 80: Wheels Up (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:43:49 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Defending open platforms, Dave notes that right-leaning and libertarian people are the ones most often cancelled right now. He warns that history shows this will change, pointing to anti-war left-wing journalist Chris Hedges being cancelled too.
But please understand that can change. history, history is any indication, it not only can change but it will change.
Episode 80: Wheels Up (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:41:22 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Reviewing the community's 'report card' on Podcasting 2.0, Dave says he wants criticism: bugs don't get fixed unless they're reported. When you criticize, be nice, assume you don't know everything, and remember who you're criticizing. Here that's about 100 volunteers with day jobs and no money, not Apple or Spotify.
I want criticism. It's it's how things get me it's how things get better. For me, bugs don't get fixed. If they aren't reported.
Episode 80: Wheels Up (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:36:57 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave recalls how YouTube won video: Google bought it and made its results first-class citizens in Google search. Video lends itself to visual search far more than audio, so podcasting can't replicate that, no matter how much artwork and still images companies try to bolt on.
There's no such equivalent to that, in podcasting, you can't do the same thing. That's, you can't take the audio medium, and, and replicate that thing with it.
Episode 80: Wheels Up (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:23:04 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave calls the podcast industry 'Munchausen by 1000 proxies'. No industry is more eager to give away its autonomy. It keeps longing for the next huge corporation to come in and take it over, maybe from underdog syndrome after being born in an age of big media.
There is no perhaps no industry that wants to give its autonomy away more than the podcast industry.
Episode 80: Wheels Up (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:10:44 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Big donations let the Podcast Index cover more than hosting, node and fee overhead, so it can save money to keep running if something really bad happens. Dave and Adam take no distributions, and they still pay pass-through LLC taxes on money they never see.
we're trying to build up enough money in the bank, to be able to run this for a while if something really bad happened.
Episode 79: Users and Developers Partying Together (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:30:26 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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In blog aggregators, an HTTP 301 simply means you update the URL. In podcasting, directory IDs mapped to feed URLs, especially Apple's, turn redirects into a mess of conflicting sources. Dave wants to stop treating Apple as the source of truth and go back to HTTP being the law, like the rest of the internet.
we need to go back to a scenario where HTTP is the rule is the law. And when it tells you to do something, you do it. Which, which is how the entire internet worked except for podcasting.
Episode 79: Users and Developers Partying Together (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:18:47 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave says he's had to relearn this many times. For over 10 years he'd add 'killer features' to the Freedom Controller for Adam, only to find Adam never used them. Adam's explanations showed that what Dave imagined a podcaster wanted was nothing like real show prep, because Dave wasn't a podcaster.
what I thought a podcaster wanted, or what I thought a podcast prep looked like, was actually nothing like what it looked like, because I wasn't a podcaster.
Episode 79: Users and Developers Partying Together (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:21:18 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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After the cross-app and lightning comments drama, Dave says healthy projects can handle robust public debate without the usual flame war and fork. Anger doesn't mean the angry person is right. It's a sign to chill out, listen to what they're saying, and come back with a different approach. If you still can't agree, the world moves on.
when people get angry about stuff, typically what that means to me is that you need to stop what you're doing and listen.
Episode 79: Users and Developers Partying Together (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:05:54 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave describes his 'Darwin's dilemma' about Bitcoin. El Salvador adopting it feels like relief from monetary oppression. But US or EU acceptance could come with draconian conditions, like Wasabi Wallet filtering UTXOs, that undercut the point of having it.
the pathway to accepting you know, the Bitcoin as digital currency within the US could be the pathway could look like all of these oppressive steps
Episode 78: Dice in the Can (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:45:19 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave agrees that requiring payment for comments improves quality by stopping mass spam. But it doesn't stop trolls: if a comment costs only a sat, it's no real barrier to someone who wants to be nasty.
I agree with that from a spam farm perspective, where you have just massive amounts of Viagra spam going out into the world. But there's another layer of sort of low quality commenting that doesn't really get dealt with when it comes to that.
Episode 78: Dice in the Can (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:25:31 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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In the social interact rewrite, the group drops a list of about 20 platforms and formalizes only the three protocols in active use: ActivityPub, Lightning and Twitter. If a spec fits three quite different things, it can probably fit whatever comes next. Dave says they won't muddy the water by trying to cover every niche case.
let's just take what's actively being used work on, on, for getting a formal, you know, definition that works for those three things.
Episode 78: Dice in the Can (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:10:30 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave doesn't look at boostagrams during the week. He prints them right before the show, because they're show content: publishing them in advance means listeners already know half the show, and it's less exciting.
I don't even look at the booster cramps during the week. I print them off right before the show because I don't want to know what they are before we read them because it's show content
Episode 77: Is that a minipub in your pocket? (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:59:48 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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After a call with the makers of an enriched-chapters app, Dave says podcasting has something closed platforms lack: the pace of innovation. You can't write plugins for YouTube, but anyone can take a podcasting idea, build on it and make it better.
you can't write plugins for YouTube. You can't extend these arguments at all. And the ability to take to take an idea and build on it and make it better. Is is maybe the killer feature of podcasting.
Episode 77: Is that a minipub in your pocket? (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:49:32 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Not in the audio. 'arguments' in the transcript likely means 'platforms' or similar. Quoted verbatim.
Dave doesn't care whether media is served from object storage, servers or IPFS, or played in a mobile app, website, PWA or embed. What matters is that the source of delivery and the endpoint stay decentralized. That's his concern about YouTube's push into podcasting.
what matters is that the the delay the source of the delivery, and the end point where it's delivered to maintain decentralization
Episode 77: Is that a minipub in your pocket? (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:39:50 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave distrusts survey stats that 40% of people listen to podcasts on YouTube. If someone counts a PewDiePie channel as a podcast, that's fine for them. But reporting it to the traditional podcast industry is like asking whether people watch movies without separating theaters from TV. And if it were true, why would YouTube be paying to get into podcasting?
It misinforms the podcast industry about what actually happens.
Episode 77: Is that a minipub in your pocket? (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:33:08 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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RSS's loose spec is both its strength and its weakness, and Atom was arguably the better format. Having lived through that format war, Dave says you learn not to be a hardliner. The best spec rarely wins alone: winning takes a good spec married to the politics around it.
what makes the format when is a combination of the spec being being well done. And the politics of what go on with it. There. You cannot separate those two things, right? Because just having the best spec rarely is enough.
Episode 77: Is that a minipub in your pocket? (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:22:38 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Not in the audio. 'when' in the transcript is 'win'.
The namespace's early tags, like chapters and license, were 'easy' in the sense of obvious low-hanging fruit. The next ones, like cross-app comments, related items and channels, take longer because they need schema and protocol.
we hit a lot of easy stuff in the beginning of the namespace. So a lot of and I say, easy in quotes, what I really mean by easy is that they were sort of obvious.
Episode 76: Pining for PodPing (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:55:10 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Not in the audio. The opening words 'we hit a' sit in a cue labelled Unknown, mid-sentence between Dave cues. It clearly continues Dave's sentence.
The Podcast Index feed poller was written for Node 12 on the 'request' HTTP library, which has since been deprecated. Bugs no longer get fixed, so it keeps falling behind modern protocol quirks like TLS 1.3 issues. Dave decides to rewrite it in Rust rather than keep carrying it forward.
It's slowly breaking over time, it is slowly getting more and more unable to handle modern quirks within protocol.
Episode 76: Pining for PodPing (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:16:02 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Juggling the namespace, the index, ancillary software like Hello Pod, the podcast and more, Dave plans to give each sphere its own dedicated week every month. Switching between five different spheres in a day sucks him dry.
tasks witching just sucks me dry. Right? If I have to do like five different things in one day that are in different spheres, spheres of,
Episode 76: Pining for PodPing (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:12:24 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Not in the audio. 'tasks witching' is the transcript's rendering of 'task switching'.
When developers know some users will have questions, Dave says the right move is to guide them inside the app instead of waiting for support requests. The best apps tell users about a known problem up front.
when you can anticipate as a developer that that a specific section of your users are going to have questions or is always the right thing to guide them in the app itself, rather than to wait for a support request.
Episode 75: Liquidifying for Love (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:51:16 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave compares trusted Lightning receiving to POP3 email. Almost nobody runs their own mail server: we trust a cloud server to receive on our behalf and our clients pull the mail down. But we keep control of sending. Delegating receipt while holding onto spending is a reasonable trust model.
we sort of delegate the receive ability to receive email on our behalf to some cloud server that we've chosen to trust for that function.
Episode 75: Liquidifying for Love (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:13:50 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Discussing Roy Sheinfeld's article on Lightning liquidity, Dave says that after very fast growth people need to stop and work out what's happening. Lightning was going through a liquidity-allocation discovery phase as node operators worked out channels and fees.
whenever you have sort of hyper growth over a short period of time, it really, people have to stop and breathe and figure out what is going on.
Episode 75: Liquidifying for Love (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:26:24 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave strongly opposes using email validation for feed claiming. Once you store emails you're subject to GDPR and similar rules. An app or OAuth-style handshake avoids personal data entirely and could also enable open subscription claiming, like RadioPublic's PodPass.
It's much cleaner if you can just avoid ever dealing with an email address and only deal with some sort of app. You know, handshake.
Episode 75: Liquidifying for Love (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:14:26 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Helipad shows messages from random people on the internet, so rule one is stripping HTML tags so nobody can inject a script tag. Dave ran his strip-tags function over the whole JSON block. That broke on an innocent '<3' heart emoji and froze the app, a lesson in sanitizing at the right layer.
prime prime directive number one, when it comes to protecting your JavaScript from random user generated content is, you know, tag tag stripping within HTML, right?
Episode 75: Liquidifying for Love (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:05:22 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Praising John Spurlock for building podcastsocial.org, a working comment service with a good-looking site and an API, Dave says that kind of demo breaks the chicken-and-egg problem. Most people don't think in protocols and white papers. They need something visual to see before others build their own.
most normal people don't think in terms of protocols and white papers and specs, most people think in terms of shiny things.
Episode 74: Confetti Canon (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:21:04 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave says they always knew cross-app comments would be the hardest part of Podcasting 2.0. Social networking and commenting are hard on their own, for political and social reasons as much as technical ones.
we knew this from the very beginning that comments was going to be the hardest thing. And it's not is hard, not just for technical reasons, but also for political reasons, and social reasons.
Episode 74: Confetti Canon (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:20:14 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Responding to concern that cross-app comments could show up on shows whose podcasters don't want them, Dave points out it's no different from Apple, Goodpods or Podchaser. Any platform can let people comment on your podcast, and you have to let that go.
you as a podcaster cannot control what you get as a podcaster cannot control with the fact that some platform spins up and allows people comment on your podcast, and you just gonna have to let that go.
Episode 74: Confetti Canon (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:15:17 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Echoing Jack Dorsey, Dave says web3 sings the song of decentralization, but its VC funding sits with a few powerful firms. Web3 only becomes what it claims when the money side is decentralized as well as the technology. Otherwise the pull is to re-centralize, including selling users' data.
the VC money that is going into it is not decentralized, that that is all in one basket.
Episode 74: Confetti Canon (episode page, opens in a new tab) 01:01:22 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Dave urges every host to adopt Podping. If it becomes the standard, a new platform could walk the blockchain back a year to find active feeds instead of starting from a whole database. Hosts pushing that data out make their own future work easier and cheaper.
when you're a participant in it as a hosting company, pushing that data out there. You are making your job in the future easier. And cheaper.
Episode 74: Confetti Canon (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:47:53 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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People hear that Podping shows when feeds update and stop there. Dave asks hosts, apps, analytics firms and publishers to imagine a permanent, high signal-to-noise stream of podcast activity. They could correlate show growth and ad success with publishing frequency, day, time and length, going back in time.
if you think more a little bit beyond the immediate technology of it, you can see how powerful it becomes.
Episode 74: Confetti Canon (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:43:00 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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Things usually centralize to make discovery possible. Dave says Podping breaks that pattern: everything stays decentralized but remains discoverable, permanently. He credits Alecks Gates with calling it a distributed message bus for podcasting that anyone can hook into.
But this with POD ping, you end up there. Everything is decentralized. But it's still discoverable. And it's it's discoverable in a permanent way.
Episode 74: Confetti Canon (episode page, opens in a new tab) 00:35:53 (play audio from this timestamp, opens in a new tab)
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