Paywalls didn't work really well for online publishing, but in audio, I can see it. I would rather pay for quality content and give the content producers all the freedom to make really interesting and cool stuff than to have it ad sponsored. Even though you can always skip.
@replyall - congratz on the acquisition! I want to say this - as Spotify was one of the pioneers of the subscription model for music, this would be a great time to have a subscription model going for podcasting as well. Not that I find the ads so annoying, but it's a better model
@acfou This looks more like a massive account takeover problem (or access key abuse) than automated accounts, so I wouldn't exactly call it a bot issue. Having said that a decent bot detection system could probably flag the fake streamings.
There are theorems that turns out were proven by Russian mathematicians years before they were proven in English. Maybe you could use this for a short? I'd listen to that!
@Radiolab - idea for an interesting story: In mathematics (and academia in general) there are Chinese professional journals that there is no feasible way to translate to English, creating two branches of mathematics basically. Same situation was with Russian in the cold war.
@AdContrarian@acfou That number mostly represents rejected signups, not banned accounts, so hard to estimate how many afs were served. Probably not many.