I discovered JRE shortly before the move to Spotify, and I'm still an avid listener, but honestly Spotify just freaking sucks compared to YouTube, and I would never actively search for more podcasts to watch on the platform. The load times and video display are worse, there's no ability to read or leave comments (Joe did say he asked them to work on that), I often have to refresh the page just to get it to respond again, it loses my spot and I have to scroll through 1,000 episodes to find what I was watching again, it's clunky and slow to skip forward and backward within an episode, and possibly the most egregious issue is the lack of search for episodes within a single channel.

That said, Spotify gave Joe written guarantee of creative freedom and dollar amount up front. With YouTube, every episode was subjected to demonetization or down-rank roulette, which understandably made him really nervous to be on the platform. As long as Spotify respects this creative freedom (despite complaints of some Spotify employees), I can respect Joe's choice to move.

I'm even a little happy that he left YouTube for this reason. A media platform should be accountable to consequences for its repression of speech.