Ask HN: Would an open source podcast rating/review system help podcast discovery

4 points by yyyyip 7 years ago | 2 comments

It seems that the sluggishness of apple podcast software combined with the splintered nature of the podcast player market makes rating/review/recommendations of podcasts really difficult. As such there is no central place to find individual episodes of podcasts based on your listening habits/tastes which is frustrating.

Would a non-profit, centralized aggregator of ratings and reviews (with appropriate privacy controls) as well as potentially a recommendation system be useful?

ddingus 7 years ago |

Could be.

What I would like to see is snippets. Someone takes a space, gets samples, combines them with reviews.

Others meta review, wash rinse, repeat.

Cycle through different snippets as regularly as makes sense.

There was, and maybe still is, a politics podcast "best of the left" that would take a topic, and then air bits from all sorts of shows, ending with the authors own commentary.

Frankly, it was great. Introduced me to shows I continue with to this day.

I think the key insight is a podcast is like music. Ever notice how having someone introduce a tune, explain why it is great, tends to make it more compelling, easier to identify with?

We share between ourselves for these, and other reasons.

Podcasts have similar dynamics, in my view.

ggm 7 years ago |

I think it would be, if you could do some kind of group/context sorting and trust markers against raters. I had a friend who brokered casual book reviews into a pretty awesome online presence, because his reviews were self-consistent and became trustable.