@dave Apologies if this was discussed on an episode I missed, but I was thinking about the flood of slop, and how the index/hosts/apps aren't incentivized to maintain the commons.

Imagine a world where you didn't host the index, you just maintained the open-source project for other people to self-host it. Feed parsing, database ingestion, etc. and the burden of slop fell on each party's growing number of database rows. Much more motivation for contributors to find a solution.

@nathan I'm starting to pivot my thinking to the Index being a podcast classifier, as a service to the open podcast community. We find it, classify it and let everybody else make their own decisions. We've always sort of done that. But, in the past, even though we didn't censor, we did have an opinion on quality. I think AI has left us in a world where opinions aren't really useful anymore.

Ugh it’s like Whack-a-mole!

@js @dave From the app side, AI slop is specifically exploiting the podcast industry’s lack of investment in search rankings. If that wasn't worth investing in before, it'll be even costlier now, and aside from minimizing db costs, how would that investment benefit the apps?

@js @dave (From slop monetization side, they're exploiting the ad networks that don't care where the downloads come from.)

@nathan @dave

It's getting late, I'm not following. If I made an app, I would work my ass off to make sure the in-app directory was as listener-friendly as possible, removing all manner of slop and distractions.

@js @dave I would hope everyone would build excellent search regardless of the amount of AI slop out there!

But poking around a few different apps for the top news story of the day would lead me to believe that it's not a priority worth investing in unless you're a behemoth.