8 Comments

Thanks for this. I saw Frum's latest on Atlantic distributed on Portside yesterday. Just like my sister, who is a Maddow junkie, he starts with a Trump's businesses and plans in Russia before 2016. I guess those are true facts, but amount to little more than prejudice and guilt-by-association in this context. From there Frum's list of things "everyone agrees with" goes into the usual debunked stories. With friends and family still committed to this nonsense, I'm glad to see Mate and others still debunking it.

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Good Luck! I started at Callin two months ago and it has been joyfull all around.

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I'm not sure about Callin. We've seen this whole thing before.

Matt Taibbi recently explained on his Q&A how Callin (like Clubhouse last year) sends sponsored podcasters a lot of shiny equipment (along with the $$$), so independent content creators bring their hard-won audiences into the Silicon Valley data/attention ecosystem. Which might be fine if guys like Callin's David Sacks weren't simply standard Wall Street exploiters committed to fast turnover of brands/products with highest possible ROI.

End result is a little enrichment of podcasters, a lot of enrichment for the big capitalists and - when the latest startup-scaleup app is either abandoned or gets big enough to be open about serving neoliberal orthodoxy (censorship/deplatforming etc) - it's a net loss of trust; another nail in the coffin of non-corporate genuinely autonomous media space.

I wish podcasters weren't willing participants in pushing corporatized oligopoly. There are independent decentralized cross-platform alternatives to Callin/Clubhouse out there with better functionality, better longevity, more inclusivity and fewer pump and dump venture capitalists running the show. Platforms like Callin are here today, gone tomorrow.

It flies in the face of the implicit compact between audience and independent journalist.

Just my two cents anyways.

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I'm widja, Reese. Lots of questions about the 'latest rage' bells and whistles, and...."Oh Look! Bright and shiny!"

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Enjoy yourselves on your iPhones, friends!

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Well, color me bummed because I refuse to pay an ongoing exorbitant amount to willingly attach an NSA/CIA/FBI tracking device to my person, to wit: an iPhone. (Like my online persona actually has any anonymity at all in this universal spyscape anyway.)

This seems like a potential exercise in futility unless it has a chat feature and even if it does, how does the call volume allow for an individual's voice to be heard? Potentially hundreds, and even thousands of calls, does this really foster a more personal communication for more than a few, rather than a conventional podcast?

We shall see as time doth tell...

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looking forward to it but everyone's audio sounds terrible there.

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How about on Spotify?

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