New Sequences and General Update From Castify
You may have noticed the announcement last week of Less Wrong’s partnership with Castify to create Less Wrong podcasts. We’re happy to announce that we now offer three new sequences. For those who want to try us out, we are also offering Eliezer’s seminal essay, The Simple Truth, as a standalone 99¢ purchase (it’s also part of the Map and Territory sequence).
Our channels:
and our pilot sequence, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
We have audio samples on our site if you’re curious.
In other news, we’re still working to make the promoted posts available as a monthly subscription. We’ll keep you up to date with the progress on that. It’s still a few weeks away.
Side note: Because of user feedback, we have removed the one year download restriction for sequences purchased. However, we have added a clause in our terms of service that gives you a minimum of two years to download the audio, if only because living forever is hard, even for digital goods.
See you in the comments.
Listening through the sequences available now, a couple issues:
1: The podcasts available, when loaded in iTunes, aren’t in proper order; the individual posts come through in a haphazard, random sort of order, which means that to listen to them in proper order means consulting with the proper order in another window, which is awkward. I am inclined to believe that this has something to do with the order in which they are recorded on your end, though I don’t actually know enough about the mechanics of podcasting to be certain of this.
2: It is insufficiently obvious that The Simple Truth is bundled with Map and Territory. After finishing Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, and looking for something else to listen to, I decided to grab The Simple Truth quickly… and, about 45 minutes later, having finished it, I moved on to Map and Territory… and then promptly smacked my forehead, seeing a little disclaimer that mentioned that The Simple Truth was included (I bought Map and Territory anyways). It wasn’t until after I investigated further that I noticed a similar disclaimer on the purchase page for The Simple Truth; I’d missed that the first time around. This should probably be mentioned on the channels page directly.
1: Endovior, sorry about the order! You’re right, they are downloading out of order. We’re looking into why that is and when we solve it you’ll be able to re-download them in the correct order, I’ll keep you posted.
2: Hopefully you didn’t smack your forehead too hard. We’ll gladly refund your purchase of The Simple Truth. As you know it’s a long essay so we’ve been offering it separate to see if people are interested in smaller purchases.
I also wanted to let you know you can reach our support team at support@castify.co any time. You’ll most likely get a faster response time than posting your comments here. Thanks again for your feedback!
Great voice actor! Purchasing all of them.
Thanks for that. I hope you enjoy it.
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How much for releasing an episode under CC-BY?
Hi Cannibal, why would you like us to release an episode under that license?
I’m not sure about Cannibal, but I can tell you why I’d like that: because it would mean that more people would listen to it.
The only difference I see with releasing it under that license is that it makes it legal to distribute it for free, and worse someone could actually sell the content for their own profit. Unfortunately we can’t afford to produce and manage the content for free.
I’d be interested to hear if there is a different reason for wanting the episodes under that license.
That’s why I’m asking how much. How much money do you want? As in, total.
The reason is that the pay-per-download model is detrimental for LessWrong’s goals. As DSimon said, we want as many people as possible to be exposed to LW ideas. People who haven’t heard of LW, people who would never themselves pay for such content. But I want your podcasts be played on the radio.
Instead I propose the Kickstarter model—you name your price, the LW crowd raises the money, you then have no problem giving copies away for free because you’ve already been paid.
FYI, The Simple Truth, as an experiment is now CC-BY-SA licensed.