We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts • Hacker News Board

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#121

Post by gwbas1c » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:02 PM UTC

loudmax wrote: post #41

spuz wrote: post #17

I am surprised that higher capacity storage on phones was not mentioned as a driver of podcast listenership. For me, when I upgraded to a phone that had 32GB of storage around 2014 I was finally able to store mp3s that would download automatically ready for me to listen to along with all the music and photos that we would otherwise fill up our phone storage with. Before this, it was actually pretty hard to be an avid…

I suspect you're correct. I find it surprising that people buy flagship phones that don't include an SD card reader. It seems that there's a belief among some handset manufacturers that storage capacity is only relevant for apps since all media is stored in the cloud. Either that or they just want to charge you for that extra storage. Being able to download hours worth of podcasts on an SD card and not worry about st…

I'll never buy another phone that uses an external SD card. It's fine when I manually copy things to the phone. The problem is that apps handle the SD card inconsistently and poorly.

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#122

Post by Mister_Snuggles » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #44

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #24

Personally, I'm not a fan of podcasts at all. I've tried, and listened to some interesting ones, but in the end I'd much rather consume the same content by reading instead of listening. It's faster, it's easier to skim and skip around, you can have hyperlinks to other references, etc. Overall, text just works better for the kinds of content I'm interested in. There's a podcast related to a product I work with that I'…

I think it depends on the type of podcast. I'm a huge fan of the storytelling style that was pioneered (AFAIK) at This American Life, continues at Planet Money, and is used in almost all the Gimlet Media posdcasts (given that one of the main Planet Money people started it). 99% invisible is also good at this, in a slightly different way. > Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines. That depends on t…

I agree that it depends on the type of podcast. Deep technical stuff, for me, is much better as text. But something like The Ongoing History of New Music[0] would be greatly degraded by switching to text.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ongoing_History_of_New_Mus...

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#123

Post by macspoofing » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #24

Personally, I'm not a fan of podcasts at all. I've tried, and listened to some interesting ones, but in the end I'd much rather consume the same content by reading instead of listening. It's faster, it's easier to skim and skip around, you can have hyperlinks to other references, etc. Overall, text just works better for the kinds of content I'm interested in. There's a podcast related to a product I work with that I'…

Audio-only medium have benefits over text and video. For example, you don't need to be fully engaged to consume audio in the same way you need to be to consume text or video (i.e. it's easy to vacuum your house or drive a car while listening to a podcast. Not so easy while reading a book or watching a movie).

>Overall, text just works better for the kinds of content I'm interested in.

You're making such a weird argument. Podcasts are not replacements for books. Books do things that podcasts can't. Podcasts do things that books can't. Don't want to listen to podcasts or music? Don't. Read your books and be happy.

>Podcasts are also completely inaccessible to search engines.

That's a problem for search engines to solve. In principle, search engines could auto-transcribe podcasts and index that.

>If I want to find the podcast where they talked about an interesting thing that I want to revisit, and it's not in the episode description, it's basically lost forever.

Again, indexing is not something that the medium needs to solve. That's for others to figure out. Text is easy to index. Images are harder to index, audio is harder still, and video is probably the worst.

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#124

Post by onemoresoop » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #24

Personally, I'm not a fan of podcasts at all. I've tried, and listened to some interesting ones, but in the end I'd much rather consume the same content by reading instead of listening. It's faster, it's easier to skim and skip around, you can have hyperlinks to other references, etc. Overall, text just works better for the kinds of content I'm interested in. There's a podcast related to a product I work with that I'…

I personally absorb some type of content, especially story types through my ears better than my eyes. This is perhaps because I enforce it through imagination. When I read, my imagination is still on but to a lesser degree. I also like the emotional impact a voice can make on my imagination.

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#125

Post by 0XAFFE » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

scrooched_moose wrote: post #81

iagooar wrote: post #50

I work for a German podcast hosting company and what's been happening in podcasting in 2018 here in Germany is pure madness. There's been an explosion of different companies and producers that have gotten into the space, bringing really high-quality content. Also, Spotify grew into the second largest platform bringing in a lot of fresh air and slowly but steadily eating into and breaking up Apple's monopoly. Now we'r…

Offtopic, but do you know of any good German fiction podcasts? I'm looking for something like LeVar Burton Reads in German. I'm somewhere around B1/B2 and trying to improve a little. I listen to a lot of IQ Wissenschaft und Forschung, but need a bit of variety. I've had a lot of trouble searching due to localization services.

There is https://fyyd.de/charts if you want a good overview of the german podcast scape.

For fiction maybe something like that https://www1.wdr.de/mediathek/audio/hoerspiel-speicher/wdr_h... ?

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#126

Post by TylerE » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

slg wrote: post #116

blang wrote: post #88

I'm actually worried that podcasts are going the way of the web. What, for a while, was a weird world of enthusiasts talking about things that interests them seems to be morphing into a world of a few big corporate entities calling the shots. I have two reasons for these worries. 1) The purchase of Gimlet by Spotify mentioned in the article. 2) The purchase of Stuff Media by iHeart. The purchase of Gimlet is problema…

I agree, we might be leaving the golden age rather than entering it. The article mentions Spotify exclusive shows and we have already seen several other paywalled shows from companies like Audible and Stitcher. Meanwhile a number of podcasters are taking control of their own shows, not joining a podcast network or content company, and moving the show to platforms like Patreon. That is great for the content creators t…

As the millennial internet company market inevitably cools (Dollar Shave Club, Blue Apron, etc), where are all these podcasters gonna get ads from?

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#127

Post by rhacker » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:09 PM UTC

I have a serious question:

For those of you that like podcasts, did your usage go way down (or even stop) when you got married?

I listened to them all the time back in the day, but mostly because they were tech oriented. For husband / wife activities only video/youtube/netflix seem to work.

Is there any notion that Podcasts are better for people not in relationship thing? I mean you have to either play it for the house or listen on your headphones and it just doesn't make sense to try to tune out the wife for multiple hours.

Also my favorite podcast, Java Posse is done anyway. It's weird to actually hear someone calling this the golden age when it was, for me, 10 years ago of listening to them non-stop.

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#128

Post by chooseaname » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

iamjaredwalters wrote: post #100

chooseaname wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why anyone would subject themselves to the awfulness of Apple Podcasts. What were they thinking?! It's just bad.

Mind elaborating? I just search for a podcast and click play. Never seemed to need much more functionality than that. What am I missing?

Let's just take the "play bar" (for lack of a better term) that hovers over the 4 menu items at the bottom. It's always there. That's sooo frustrating. It grates on my desire for tidiness. Let me clear that. Long pressing shows no option to clear it. It ... it's just not intuitive at all.

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#129

Post by Mister_Snuggles » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

bitlax wrote: post #35

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #24

Personally, I'm not a fan of podcasts at all. I've tried, and listened to some interesting ones, but in the end I'd much rather consume the same content by reading instead of listening. It's faster, it's easier to skim and skip around, you can have hyperlinks to other references, etc. Overall, text just works better for the kinds of content I'm interested in. There's a podcast related to a product I work with that I'…

You listen to podcasts like you listen to the radio: when you're driving, doing chores, working out, etc.

I think this is part of my problem. Radio was never really a thing in my childhood, so it's not a big part of my adulthood either. Other than driving in the car, or as an alternative to the TV announcers when hockey was on, my family never had the radio on or music playing.

I do listen to music on the bus, but podcasts are too much of a challenge since they're competing with all the other noise around me.

Re: We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts

#130

Post by icebraining » Thu, Feb 21, 2019, 6:12 PM UTC

blfr wrote: post #92

I remember listening to EconTalk back when you downloaded it to your mp3 player using a computer. And maybe I'm a hipster but the golden age seems to be over. It's all too mainstream now, too polished, too polite. Nowadays, I scroll through the multiple new episodes of many shows I used to enjoy to rarely find something I genuinely want to hear. Sure, you can probably dig to something like Cum Town but even then it d…

I agree that the commercialization has been sucking the air out of interesting "homemade" podcasts. On the other hand, I think the higher popularity has been helping some independent podcasters justify the time they spend on it (some can even make a living from it, like Mike Duncan).