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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. I'm sure this is worth listening to, but it's a much larger investment in time than reading over a transcript.

Having tried the automated transcription services on my own podcast, I know that they suck. You have to pay someone to at least fix them up, if not just transcribe the whole thing from scratch. So I'm not blaming anyone for not having a transcript immediately.

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This lack of transcripts really surprises and frustrates me. Wasnt Berkeley forced to take down its videos unless they added captioning? I guess it’s because they’re taxpayer funded right? But Twitter was also getting flack for introducing video without the accessibility of captions, but for a company that can afford $100 million to buy one podcast, why can’t they be compelled to provide transcripts?

Hey @AlbertCory,

How would having a transcript save you time? Wouldn't it take more or less the same amount of time (+/- 25%) to read through the transcript? Would you rather CTRL+F for a few terms? Or just quickly glance through it?

Asking, because I'm interested in the podcast space overall.

Thanks.

You would be surprised, but reading a transcript is much faster than listening, even on speedup (1.25x, 1.5x, )

You can also quickly scan ahead, or reread a sentence. Navigating audio is harder.

As the sibling says: I can skim over the boring, boilerplate stuff ("thanks for having me") much faster in a transcript.

Since I can see the whole thing, it's much easier to skip down to the more interesting stuff, or realize that there isn't any.

A typical podcast is 150 to 200 words per minute, while many on hacker news read at north of 600 words per minute.

I'm not the original poster, but I have bad hearing and exclusively read transcripts over listening to podcasts - can't tell you how many times I've been grateful when podcasters provide even a partial list of transcripts for episodes. Speed-reading is also a lot faster overall versus simple listening.

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