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Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

I'd actually like to see less of podcasts and more blogs or transcripted interviews. However sites like Ask HN and Quora have been good at democratising them. There's always a lot of the emotional junk that trends, especially around work, existentialism and productivity, but for the most part, it gets good questions to those who are interested in them.

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I never really liked podcasts to be honest.

Have you got any advice on doing good interviews? Or know of people who do it well?

EDIT: Also, do people do written interviews? As in, they never actually speak to one another, but just pass questions and answers back and forth?

I've done some written interviews in the past. Sometimes it's this "pen pal" format: someone asks a question and the response comes in a couple days later.

An old hobby I used to have was asking questions to interesting people I hear on radio, from talks on YouTube, or books I read. People get on radio to be listened to, so nearly all of them are happy to respond.

You do have to keep a little momentum... they're very likely to respond to something they just did a day ago, less likely after a year. And back and forth can be nice, but there's only so long they'll do it.

Some people used to insist on calls but just agreeing on a time could take days.

This is great! So happy to hear that it's possible to do written interviews, because that's definitely the most comfortable format for me, at least for now. And it's so much easier to execute. No visual audio set up, no editting etc. And it's all there, already transcribed.

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