November, 2019 | Chris Aldrich

👓 Festivus, for the Rest of Us | Hot Pod News

Read Festivus, for the Rest of Us – Hot Pod News by Nicholas Quah (hotpodnews.com)

Over the past month, we’ve been running a call for opinions built around a fairly straightforward question: “What are you most frustrated by?” (With respect to the podcast industry, of course.) To put it mildly, folks obliged.

Let me start by establishing what I tried to do this with this piece. Editorially, the goal was to lay out various clusters of frustrations being felt by a cross-section of the Hot Pod readership — at least, to the best that I could with the format I’ve chosen. Creatively, the idea with the format is to communicate what it feels like to live with my inbox and various messaging accounts. That’s pretentiously phrased, but you’ll see what I mean soon enough.

Some reading notes:

Different chunks represent different people, in case it isn’t clear.

The sections marked as “Deep Dives” represent entries from a single contributor who took the time to lay out an extensive, effectively-written submission.

For practical reasons, I’m not publishing every response — so don’t take it personally if you don’t see yours.

In adherence to the retweets =/= endorsements principle, I don’t necessarily agree with what’s being printed… nor should what’s being printed necessarily be taken as fully accurate. The point, instead, is to illustrate that person’s truth.

Almost everybody requested anonymity. So, for simplicity’s sake, I decided to implement blanket anonymity for all responses, including from those who listed their names.

There were a handful of very specific frustrations, which I’m setting aside for now to vet as leads for future columns.

Alright, enough wind-up. To the question: what are you most frustrated by?

🎧 @hypervisible | Gettin’ Air with Terry Green

Listened to @hypervisible from voicEd | voiced.ca

Gettin’ Air with @hypervisible Professor of English at Macomb Community College. Self described as the “The Beavis of Twitter”, we chat about how he works to raise awareness of the absurd and abusive tech practices of various platforms and companies and how he helps his students navigate this increasingly dystopian world. “There’s always material to talk about how something sucks if you’re in the ed-tech space”.

The description far undersells the great conversation here. I almost wish it had been recorded just after Halloween so we might have gotten some discussion about Ring Doorbells recording millions of children and then promoting that scary fact in their marketing and social media.

Somehow @hypervisible blocked me on Twitter, which is a painful shame–at least for me. He’s one of the few researchers to have done so and one of the few people it’s worth having a separate account just for reading his content. I’m glad that others like Terry help to get his message out in other ways!

Chris also mentions a great list of recommended reads at 11:30 into the episode including: