cralder

I guess so, but sponsors are easier to skip since that are always the same length. If the ad changes length you cant use the time stamps to skip it automatically

No that's not it. As I mentioned in the post, these ads change based on my location. They are absolutely not added by the people making the podcast because they are not even in the same language as the rest of the podcast.

As far as I can tell it depends on the podcast. Some have ads in every episode and some never have any

Thank you for the explanation. Kinda sucks that a premium service like Spotify doesn't even host their own content, but that's capitalism I guess.

Sure they decide that the ad should exist, but how? When I see a mid-roll ad on YouTube for example it was put there by the person who uploaded the video but the content of the ad is delivered by youtube. Who is delivering the content of these ads?

Thanks, that's good to know! Although this seems to be more related to sponsors. Like the podcast host doing an ad-read. I don't mind them as much because then at least the creators of the podcast are getting all the money and the ad is not tracking me to figure out what ad to serve me. What I am referring to is more like a regular ad that you would hear on the radio that has been stitched on to the beginning of the episode.

Oh absolutely. I understand that. But is Spotify even the one who is adding/profiting from the ads? I seems like this is coming from someone else since the ads are also on AntennaPod

I get that. But is Spotify using the same third party server then? Because the ads are always the same regardless of platform

This happened to my Surface pro 4 with both Windows and Linux. Could be a hardware issue.

Could the open-sourcing of the other drive apps lead to an unofficial Linux app?

This is so strange to me. I hear stories like this all the time but I have hard time understanding who would not show up or not eat the food that was obviously for the party.

Did they know there would be food beforehand? Could they have eaten before because they thought there wouldn't be anything at the party? What about the other 2 people? Did they tell you they were not coming or did they say they were coming and then just didn't show up? Did they say why they didn't show up?

Its a good idea, but how would that work with federation? There is already an issue with the number of upvotes on a post differing between instances. Would polls have the same problem or no?

Edit: now that I think about it, polls are already a thing on Mastodon but I don't know if they have these issues or not.