James Cridland on Nostr: I'm agreeing with you. Those should be removed from public view. Absolutely they ...

I'm agreeing with you. Those should be removed from public view. Absolutely they should. They shouldn't appear in search, nor should they be polled. Flag them as hidden. Never show them in the APIs unless specifically requested.

But the utility of the Index is lessened by *removing* the shows altogether. Being able to request *all* shows, including hidden ones - especially in the downloadable database - has been a big benefit to researchers of podcasting.

Now, the entire Index is just a list of shows deemed acceptable by an algorithm. That's a shame, because we can't actually now know "how many cloned podcasts for Stuff You Should Know are there?" or "how many Inception Point AI podslop shows are there?" because an algorithm censored those shows.

In other words: while the normal API would run SELECT * FROM podcasts WHERE spam=0, researchers and others might occasionally want to run SELECT * FROM podcasts WHERE spam=1.