Riverside Put Me Through the Ringer. Here's Why I'm Sticking With Transistor.

For the past month I've been going through and putting the Riverside services through its paces. Mostly because I had used them in the past for other things, I wanted to see how their current lineup had grown to fit within my workflow. There were a few roadblocks that had turned the whole experience into something I couldn't get past.

In my previous podcast episode, I went over the experiences I had encountered that at least for me were some groundbreaking bugs I couldn't simply ignore. Most notably was the podcasting side of things, mainly in how for some reason I wasn't able to get my account associated with several services. YouTube had an issue in which it wouldn't connect to the playlist, and the same could be said with Apple Podcasts, which was a big deal as this is where many podcast listings get their information from.

The Support Run Around

Going through the support system of Riverside had become a run around of going through processes that continued to not get anywhere, and seemed to be the same processes over and over again. I had spent a good week going back and forth with their support agents. I eventually just gave up as things were becoming apparent that it wouldn't be working out.

There was the issue of the AI agent at the beginning, where it appears many other companies have already gone this route in being your first point of contact, providing simple walkthroughs of common solutions, and only giving you an option to transfer to a human support team member after exhausting the solutions provided. I experienced this when trying to completely delete an older account I've had with Riverside. The AI agent wanted me to follow steps that were different than what I was seeing within the website. I was even getting the same results from the human agent as it quickly became apparent their support documents weren't up to date to what the live version of their website provided.

Eggs In Many Baskets

Looking back, I could've saved myself a lot of frustration over what should've been simple fixes. Having all your eggs in one basket isn't all it's cracked up to be.

As I had used services like Transistor in the past, I'll continue to use them for podcast hosting, which proved to be an enjoyable experience in how easy things are when they just work.

Sticking With What Works

At the end of the day, this wasn't about Riverside being a bad product. It's a solid tool for a lot of people, and I know plenty of creators who swear by it. But a month of running into the same walls, over and over, told me everything I needed to know about whether it fit my workflow right now.

That's kind of the whole point of testing things out in the open like this. Not every tool is going to be the right tool, and I'd rather figure that out and tell you about it than pretend everything I try works perfectly. Sometimes good enough means knowing when to walk away from something and go back to what's already working.

For me, that's Transistor. It does what I need it to do without a fight, and honestly, that's worth more to me right now than a longer feature list.

Josh