How are people getting their slop?
People were posting about looking into setting up a system, but what happened to shammu might have put them off maybe.
The comics people, those people, have weekly torrents containing all the week's releases, since prehistoric times. Just download the files you want from the weekly torrent. Average comic filesize is in the same ballpark as average pod mp3 filesize.
Why not us?
Almost all of the weekly comic torrents are pretty ephemeral, they're not seeded after a couple of weeks. It is possible to get reseeds tho.
The point is that the weekly torrent delivery system would be ideal for pods - a very active torrent (with 20 70MB files) for about a week or so, that then dies off naturally after a few days when the next comes along. Torrent clients can automate download.
Totally agree some evergreen pods are worth the trouble. There's a 10GB torrent of past Radio War Nerd episodes out there.
it's not only the seeding but the consumption habit. Few people are manually downloading individual episodes as files and opening them in a media player, the convenience of an rss podcast app is part of the experience of listing to topical podcasts. I don't have any real objection to making a torrent mind you, I just think this is why it hasn't been done already.
But I'm talking about the paywalled episodes. A torrent is a lot better than no slop.