#166 - The Algorithm Behind ArtPodPlay, My Podcast Player
And why human curation is still king.(open ArtPodPlay in separate page)
ince I just made ArtPodPlay public, I should write some things about it. For example, I got to think about the best “algorithm” for selecting podcast episodes.
The idea behind ArtPodPlay was to have daily generated playlists so that you can press play and listen to amazing episodes without having to fuss about finding episodes. You can press play and start drawing.
It was inspired by TikTok, which does exactly that. It presents streams of highly addictive short videos, so apparently, it can be done. So, how do we go about that?
It turns out this works: select the very best podcasts and randomly select episodes from all of them. And that’s it.
It works. You get one fantastic episode after the other.
Young new podcasts can still be discovered. I also try to add new, promising podcasts, and each podcast has an equal chance of being selected. Thus, I reward new podcasts that hit it running out of the gate, putting out amazing episodes from the start.
The difference with social media platforms is that a human curates the playlists here.
I discovered long ago that computers are terrible at determining if a post is good. They can only look at the statistics. Many platforms reward posts if people spend more time with your post, but that may be because people don’t understand what they are looking at, for example. That doesn’t make it a good post. My most successful Instagram post got more than a half million views because of that.
We should have social media platforms where what gets shared is curated by people.