Now having data for most of October, knowing our release schedule, and being able to see month-by-month engagement, I’d actually forecast that 80k Podcast listening time should grow 15-20% this year (not 5%), for ~300,000 hours of consumption total.
(If you forecast that Q4 2023 will be the same as Q3 2023 then you get 11% growth, and in fact it’s going to come in higher.)
That is indeed still a significant reduction from last year when it grew ~40%.
Let me know if you’d like to discuss in more detail!
For what it’s worth SBF put this idea to me in an interview I did with him and I thought it sounded daft at the time, for the reasons you give among others.
He also suggested putting private messages on the blockchain which seemed even stranger and much less motivated.
That said, at the time I regarded SBF as much more of an expert on blockchain technology than I was, which made me reluctant to entirely dismiss it out of hand, and I endorse that habit of mind.
As it turns out people are now doing a Twitter clone on a blockchain and it has some momentum behind it: https://docs.farcaster.xyz/
So my skepticism may yet be wrong — the world is full of wonders that work even though they seem like they shouldn’t. Though how a project like that out-competes Twitter given the network effects holding people onto the platform I don’t know.