Parasocial
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Podcast playlists you can share with strangers. What would you curate?

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Parasocial launched here yesterday as a podcast player. Thank you for the comments and the upvotes. The next major release adds the second social layer, and I would rather shape it with you than announce it as finished.

What is coming:

  1. Public playlists. Any playlist you build in the app can be published as a page anyone can open, follow, and play from, with or without the app.

  2. Curator profiles. A handle, a display name, a short bio, and the playlists you have specifically published as "public". Follow a curator and their new playlists show up in a Curate tab: Following, Curated by You, Discover.

  3. No likes, no comments, no algorithmic feed. Curation is the whole feature: a person with taste pointing at episodes.

Two things I want to hear from you:

  1. Would you publish a playlist, follow one, or neither? What would the first one be about?

  2. What has annoyed you about shared playlists in other apps? Have you found any you really liked? Anything we should take into account?

I will answer every reply here.

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Follow, not publish. The thing that has always killed it for me is that a shared playlist is a snapshot, so the curator adds 3 more episodes and I never hear about it. If following means new picks actually arrive, that is the whole difference between a link someone sent me once and something I keep.

 Yes! Actually, we've built a lot of choice into it. The curator will be able to create a static playlist of just their favorite episodes in a particular topic, or their favorite entire shows on a particular topic. They can also create a smart playlist that follows along with what you're listening to. As you add more episodes to it, your followers get the same. So it's "yes and".

  The dynamic one is the version I'd make the default. A static list gets sent once and then sits in someone's messages, and the one that keeps updating is the only reason anybody opens the link twice.

 I'm excited to see how it turns out. We're going to give all of the options, and we'll just see what people really latch onto. Then we'll reorganize the screen around what's most popular.

I'd probably make a playlist for long walks. Just random episodes i actually enjoyed instead of trying to make it too polished.

Can you edit a public playlist after publishing it?

 sure can. You have the option of keeping it static, like "hey, these are my favs," or dynamic so that your followers see new episodes as you add them.