Nobody cares about feeds anymore.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. A good estimate would be measured in the thousands of hours spent listening to stories of true crime, trade discussion, interviews and a slew of documentary podcasts. There are a few things about the way that I find and receive these podcasts that always bothered me, and with traditional RSS not accepting new draft proposals, I'd like to respectfully detail a few of my frustrations and use that momentum to introduce you to a thing I'm working on.

What's a feed?

Let's start with feeds. "what's a feed?", I get that a lot when I'm in the wild doing undercover market research, "What's a feed?" or "A feed? You mean like on Facebook?".

A few people actually know about RSS, and the conversation seldom gets very far past establishing that fact. Sometimes I'll see someone with a podcast app installed and ask what they would do different with their podcast apps to make them better if they could wave a magic wand, but I get answers like "idk, add stickers".

Not sure whether this reflects more on the quality of the questions being asked, or if feeds are a non-topic for most folks. People use feeds every day, and almost nobody knows it.

Is this a bad thing?

My hypothesis is that feeds are everywhere, and because of that ubiquity, people just don't see them anymore.

My frustrations, abridged

I listen to a lot of podcasts that are the type where you have a topic, and they release 6 or 8 episodes about that topic, call it a season, then it's over. A week or so later a new feed item pops up by the same network as a preview episode and then if you like it, you have to go and find the new show in the iTunes store and subscribe and listen to those; repeat ad infinitum. Here is where the trouble starts..

By far, the most annoying thing about being a podcast consumer in 2021 is that there is no way for my favorite network to let me know about a new show without them bombarding me with a trailer for that new show on every single feed of theirs that I've ever subscribed to. If you have ever seen a whole list of downloads queue up in the podcast app only to find out they're all 8 the same podcast trailer for the same episode, you feel a little cheated.

I ran across this 'feature' while mistakenly syncing my podcasts over mobile data on a metered plan. This method of discovery can be inconvenient at best.

Work with me here; I'd like a notification from the podcast app to tell me when a new show comes out, instead of 8 different shows I subscribe to hitting me with the same commercial. Networks should have their own feed that encapsulates all of their shows. Don't make me hunt to consume your material, and don't beat me over the head with it either!

Where is the timestamp guy?

Something I like about watching a podcast, which sounds weird to even say, is that there is always 'timestamp guy' in the YouTube comments who is jotting down a timestamp and a small description of the convo topic at that given point in the episode. The first time I clicked one of those time links and it worked, I felt like YouTube had just "solved the universe" with that feature. Given how many podcasts I listen to that are just entirely too long but also too interesting, it just makes sense that the need for chapters is there, even if only just for me.

Maybe I'm just complaining at this point, but I'm still not done here. Why can't I define a preferred bitrate or quality level for the audio file I want to receive? Give me a HQ, SD, a Mobile link or something. I'm probably the last individual on earth prepaying for a capped data plan, but please, hear my woes, I want to be able to pull in something encoded in a format with a weird name I can't pronounce like Smogg Jorgis and I want it to be able to fit it on a Zip Disk..

Let's cut to the chase

If you couldn't guess already, this entire article is written in hopes that you feel the same frustrations and want to do something about it. Dear future collaborator, the world is about to receive a new feed syndication protocol, but this time, it's for podcasts. If you're reading this and your head is nodding, let's get this party started!

Here are the preliminary defining changes that make this yet unused feed protocol a viable contender when compared to RSS:

• the feed corresponds to a network, not a show. let the client decide if it wants to show me a list of checkboxes or something and Ill check off the ones I want. I shouldn't be limited by whatever the mytunes store wants to show me as a recommendation, and I don't want to be spammed every time a new show comes out by 8 different feeds.
• chaptered episodes. wouldn't it be cool to skip over random convos about whether an elk can beat up a gorilla and get straight to the part where Lex Friedman tells us about his AI Tamagotchi? hyperlinks already support links to specific timestamps, why aren't we using that?
• the feed is written in standards compliant JSON. this wont mean anything to 95% of you whatsoever, but it's there, and trust me it's a good idea.
• better credits. sometimes I'm listening to something new I downloaded because I just wanted to hear about this certain topic that is discussed on this one episode and I have no clue who these different personalities are. Then, in the description, I go stomping through a list of discount codes and social links and I still can't find the info for the guests on the show. I want to be able to see who were the active parties in this episode, and what their role was in it, and if its not too much to ask I'd like some means of supporting them if I want more of their stuff, so just do us a solid and put an episode credit in the feed with the episode!
• multiple audio files. Some people want lossless perfect audio, some people just want to listen to one more episode without breaking the bank on a data plan (hello!! right here!), but as a podcaster who just wants to get listeners on their content, how can you decide whether to have big files and good quality or smaller files and lesser quality? You can't, and you should be able to link your feed episodes to a high quality and a lesser quality if you want to. Why isn't this a setting in my podcast client already and enabled by the feed protocol?

Like we discussed, I promised you a feed format, and sharing with the tone of this document, I've named it LOUD. It's written in JSON, it's really simple, really cool, really relevant to podcasts, really. I'm looking for contributors, collaborators, partners in crime, and anybody who might have some comments on the matter. Most of all, I'm hoping some of you out there take the leap and implement the LOUD spec in your podcast feeds!

For more info, and maybe some live edits, check out my proposal/design doc in detail: https://readme.loud.so