Comment by themagician | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themagician | Hacker News Reader

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This is a little quip, but IMO radio shows often are much better than today's "podcasts."

It feels like a majority of what people call podcasts today are just random people talking to each other, often impromptu. It's often by people with no interview skills and no sense for how to produce engaging radio. And, more often than not, it feels like background noise. Sometimes that's enjoyable, but honestly if that's what I'm looking for I'll just listen to Howard Stern, the BBC or NPR.

What I loved about podcasts was that it was a medium which allowed for really great radio drama and storytelling. For the longest time what a podcast was, to me, was Radiolab, This American Life, Serial, The Moth, The Truth, etc.. Something with some real sound design behind it… where someone is trying to create something both engaging and enjoyable to listen to. When podcasts started to blow up after Serial I really hoped that we'd get more of that. But it seems like what we've gotten is a proliferation of random people just… rambling.

This makes me sound pretentious AF but I really do not understand why people listen to some of this stuff. Every now and then I'll listen to something new in the top 20 list and well… I think I'm getting to the "back in my day we walked up hills both way" age now, but man… the majority of today's podcasts are really bad. Like, physically painful to actually listen to. I don't know how and why people do. It feels like garbage tier radio.

Your local radio show will undoubtedly be better than the average podcast because there's no barrier to entry for podcasts. However, the high tier podcasts are on average way better than anything your local radio show can produce.

This.

Radio is (usually) constrained by the fact that it has to appeal to a broad audience. There are exceptions, but they're rare, and are fighting the medium and its market.

Podcasts ... can be exceedingly niche. Which means that narrow-focus programmes can exist. Peter Adamson's The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, now in its second decade (it launched in 2010), and which seems quite likely to extend to three or four, with luck and funding. Truly a life's work. I'm not sure how niche it is with 25 million downloads (though that spread over more than 400 episodes). But it's truly excellent.

There's also increasingly little daylight between radio and podcasts, with many radio programmes (particularly on public broadcasting) now existing in podcast versions.

Yes, there's a lot of dreck, but the, Sturgeon was right about crud prevalence. The key is to look at the best of what's produced, not the worst or average. And for media, formats, and/or platforms in which that best can in fact thrive.

I've somewhat north of 70 podcast subscriptions, some stumbled across, some long-time faves prior to the advent of podcasting, some recommended, some provisionally subscribed to to fit some interest or goal (languages and topics amongst these).

And yes, my sense is that the best podcasts are not of the 2--5 randos just talking back and forth, but tend to be either scripted or structured in some way. The best seem to have either a single narrator, or a small number of interviewed subjects or hosts --- even in long-form discussion, more than 3--4 people seems to end up being unsatisfying other than perhaps as a series of lectures or a Q&A.

If you discover you're listening to crud, stop.

One of the main points of what people call "podcasts" (and streams as well) is creating parasocial relationships that make mind-numbing chores more pleasant by making it seem like you're hanging out with a group of friends in the background.

To that end, stuff like interviewing skills, presentation, depth of discussion, is unnecessary and maybe even detrimental. What matters is rawness, authenticity, serendipity and light-heartedness. When you listen to this stuff, you're not deeply engaging with the content.

We are trying to remove some of that noise by building a better podcast discovery and search product at JKStream (https://jkstream.com). For e.g., here's a cleaner feed for Malcolm Gladwell: https://jkstream.com/#/personality-malcolm-gladwell-Q318429. You, as a user choose to subscribe to your favorite thought leaders and personalities and you get a much cleaner, personalized podcast feed.

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