Podcasts are hearteningly enshittification resistant

Walled gardens considered harmful (to performers and audiences).

In the enshittification cycle, a platform lures in users by giving them a good deal at first, then it lures in business customers (advertisers, sellers, performers) by shifting the surplus from users to them; finally, it takes all the surplus for itself, turning the whole thing into a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/27/enshittification-resistance/#ummauerter-garten-nein

When a company is neither disciplined by competition nor by regulation, enshittification inevitably ensues. If a user or business customer can’t jump ship — because of lock-in, high switching costs or network effects — then companies are powerfully tempted to mistreat them — not out of sadism, but instead to harvest their surplus and goose the company’s profits.

Half the results on the first five screens of an Amazon search result are ads. Amazon’s business customers spend $31b/year on payola, bidding to be at the top of…