Spotify let listeners comment on podcast episodes on the app in July, and now the company is rolling out a new set of controls to help podcasters moderate and manage comments.
When comments first started, podcasters had to first review and publish their comments. The platform now has configurable automated moderation tools that allow you to filter out and review sensitive or inappropriate comments, and publish the rest.
When set to the “Standard” level, Spotify's new tool will not publish comments it detects as potentially sensitive or inappropriate and will instead redirect them to the podcaster for review. When set to “High”, the tool will hold all comments until approved, and when set to “Low”, all comments will be automatically posted except those that violate Spotify's rules.
Image credit: Spotify
Spotify will still hide sensitive comments even if creators publish comments flagged as sensitive or set the automatic moderation level to “low” and users will not be able to see them. It pointed out that you need to tap “See all comments.”
Creators can also add words, phrases, and emojis to a blocklist to automatically move comments containing them to the review queue.
Image credit: Spotify
Creators can also turn off comments for episodes as they see fit.
The company said it plans to add support for additional languages for this feature.
“For now, all non-English comments must still be reviewed and approved by Spotify for Podcasters as we continue to test and develop our auto-detection system to support more languages, but in the near future. We plan to expand to more languages in the near future,” the company said in a blog post.
According to Spotify, since launching the comment feature in July, users have posted 2.5 million comments across 650,000 episodes, and approximately 44% of published comments have been liked. , and received a reply from the program's producers.
Spotify has been trying to make podcasts more engaging for a while now by adding support for Q&A, surveys, and video podcasts. The company announced earlier this year that people who consume podcasts using one of these features are four times more likely to listen to the show again within 30 days.