What Are the Top Podcasts Right Now?

[just444]

What Are the Top Podcasts Right Now? https://t.co/6iFH7Fx48w
- pajiba (@pajiba) December 16, 2023
podcast charts are actually pretty hard to define, since some podcasts are platform exclusives and certain platforms only relaease data for some locations

Comments

[handsomejin]

Read this NYT article from the perspective of a family member of a murder victim whose case was covered by a true crime podcast and I thought it was really eye-opening and moving. It made me want to reevaluate how I consume true crime content.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231205170651/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/magazine/murder-podcast-debbie-williamson.html

[handsomejin]

ps the new external link warning bullshit lj pulled on us will be my villain origin story

[therearewords]

It has to stop, and soon.

[mulholland]

Seriously, the only people left on Livejournal are 30+ I think we can handle an external link

[jontargaryen]

In a self-published book she and Jared later released about Debbie’s murder, the two investigators outline a number of “social media tactics” they use to get others invested and actively participating in their Facebook groups, including, in a previous case, planting a “heel” - a wrestling term for someone who plays the villain - within the group.

“Our heels would pose provocative questions at our behest,” they write. “This frequently resulted in the person we’d hope to connect with sending us a private message expressing their outrage. In turn, this allowed us to start a dialogue with those people, which was our primary goal. Information continued to flow.”

It gets much, much worse as the story goes on, but I'm stuck on this detail. They're antagonizing people who know a murder victim in order to trick them into talking. They obviously didn't want to talk to you, and you're forcing their hand by using sockpuppets to say horrible shit? Someone was murdered. Jesus Christ...

[handsomejin]

The self-righteousness of the podcasters who had no connection at all to the victim, insisting they knew what the victim would have wanted or how she would have felt - to her actual family no less- was just MIND-BOGGLING to me. Just unconscionable.

[ninasafiri]

Yeah, I stick to podcasts that either report from official, public sources or are made with the blessing of the victim's family nowadays.

Your Own Backyard - about the murder of Kristen Smart - is one of the best imo. Respectful, informative, victim-focused and sparked renewed interest and new leads in the case. Her murderer was arrested and found guilty after the podcast aired. I hope they will be able to bring her home soon.

[kaenallaoi]

I hated this one! I do give him a lot of credit for bringing attention to the case and having it go to court and get the conviction, but it has issues. The very first episode the podcaster says he cares about Kristin, a women he never met, almost as much as her parents! So much self-insertion, as if he could ever be on the same level of caring as anyone who knew her. He spends an episode talking to a quack forensic scientist who thinks he can dowse for dna with a magical machine, whose main credit given is being part of the Casey Anthony prosecution which famously failed to convict, and he never questions it. There's an episode about a woman who saw a shoe in the woods once that might not have even been Kristin's shoe! A woman talks about the blood stained earring she found, shows the podcaster a similar earring, and the podcaster never goes any further with it - go back to the family and friends of Kristin and show them the earring to confirm if she had a pair like it or something, yeesh