Luminary, a much-hyped podcasting app with more than $US100 million ($142 million) in Silicon Valley funding, launched last week. Luminary hopes to be the "Netflix of podcasting", offering high-quality podcasts ad-free for an $8 monthly subscription, alongside your favourite, free, ad-supported podcasts. But the App was off to a bumpy start with some of the biggest names in podcasting, including New York Times The Daily and Gimlet's Reply All, missing from the service at launch.

That was just the start of a very bad week for Luminary. As podcasters discovered their shows listed in the app, they noticed Luminary was stripping links to sponsors from episode descriptions. Worse still, when playing a podcast in Luminary, the app would proxy the file through its servers, essentially stripping the show of download numbers and other important data podcasters use to sell ads on their show. By the end of the week, podcasting networks, independent podcasters and unfathomably popular Joe Rogan Experience had removed their shows from the service.

As shows began disappearing, Luminary replaced them with an unnecessarily petty placeholder message that read in part: "This publisher has chosen not to take advantage of this free distribution." Fans of The Daily were even given recommendations to listening to competing daily news podcasts that were available but not exclusive to Luminary's semi-walled garden.

South African comic Trevor Noah, whose podcast is one of only a few exclusives on the upstart app Luminary.

Independent podcaster Owen Williams best summed up the launch debacle with a tweet that read: "Probably would have added our show to Luminary if they had just asked, but instead I'm here making a takedown request—great way to make a good impression in the podcasting community!"