After Luminary admits using links that hide some podcast listener data, popular creators like Ben Thompson, Owen Williams, Federico Viticci pull their podcasts
great way to make a good impression in the podcasting community! http://twitter.com/... Luminary / @hearluminary : @marcoarment This ensures that all requests go directly to the original media file's RSS feed and properly credit the RSS feed for listens, activity, and traffic. Marco Arment / @marcoarment : Confirmed, the @hearluminary podcast-masking proxy URLs are now serving HTTP 302 redirects.Glad they responded quickly. Should've been done properly from the start, but at least they fixed it.If they don't pull any more proxying shenanigans, I'd consider this resolved. http://twitter.com/... Ben Thompson / @benthompson : I still, at the end of the day, have a fundamental problem with even a proxy: you should not be able to go to a http://luminarypodcasts.com/ URL and see my content. I will still be removing Exponent. Mikey / @mikeyfowler18 : Rogan fires the first shot in The Great Podcast Platform War of 2019 http://twitter.com/... Federico Viticci / @viticci : This is better. But we'll still be pulling AppStories due to Luminary's behavior (we did not ask to be included in a closed platform), because they hide show notes, and because they won't let listeners subscribe with our own, open RSS feed. We're not interested in this business. https://twitter.com/... Luminary / @hearluminary : We will always hit the original URL provided by the actual RSS feeds URL. That is what is ensuring that the user requests are sent to the hosting provider. Amealeea / @gingerreckoning : This is gross on so many levels. Pulling from an RSS feed and hosting it locally deprives creators of valuable data about their audiences, it skews download numbers (the hosting service treats it as a bot and throws out the numbers), and potentially harms SEOs. http://twitter.com/... Luminary / @hearluminary : We mark the audio metadata to say it's being requested by Luminary user agents (instead of a generic iOS, Android, or Web browser user agent which would have no mark that it's Luminary). Marco Arment / @marcoarment : (There are lots of other reasons to dislike them, and I'm sure they'll keep giving us more, but at least this one appears to be resolved.) David Chen / @davechensky : Here's a good write-up on the whole @hearluminary fiasco. Basically: they took a bunch of podcast feeds, transplanted them to their service, & are using a proxy which fucks over everyone's stats. This is a disastrous roll-out and I plan to pull my shows. http://www.theverge.com/... Ashley Carman / @ashleyrcarman : so yeahhhhh luminary's launch week is...something. big podcasts pulled their shows, and now it comes out that they're hiding listener data from creators http://www.theverge.com/... Luminary / @hearluminary : Luminary is not caching any audio content for any open feed podcast. The Luminary audio link is simply a reference link that is marking audio metadata as the file is called through our proxy. Marco Arment / @marcoarment : I can't think of a good reason to proxy all downloads 1:1 like this.It won't add any speed in practice — most downloads will actually be slower — and adds significant costs, will be interpreted as copyright infringement by many lawyers, and makes podcasters want to opt out. Marco Arment / @marcoarment : Luminary's responding in this thread, claiming (I think) that they're proxying, not caching — still re-serving, but making a new request to the publishers' servers for each request.If so, that's still a copyright issue and still breaks most stats, which de-dupe by request IP. http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer