Sorry you're getting downvoted on this post. I found your data point useful. Even though I disagree that there are enough podcasts serving the senior developer / corporate programmer niche, being made aware of the existence of "podcast exhaustion" is valuable, and the discussion convinced me that a transcription service is worth it.
I'd hate for negative attention to result in a chilling effect on your decision to voice your opinion in future.
I can't remove your downvotes, but I can say thank you a second time.
I didn't downvote but I think "please don't do X" is really a poor way to frame this opinion. I also don't care much for podcasts and prefer a textual format, but if you think you'd prefer making it a podcast then just make it and theshrike79 and I will find other content to consume. Or maybe it'll be so good and interesting that we'll just listen to it anyway!
Deciding to start on such a project is really cool IMO, and I think if I ever attempted to do something like that I'd really find it very demotivating if the feedback I got was "no wait, not like that". But that's just me.
I agree with this 100%, and just want the parent commenter to see that at least one other person cares enough to say so to offset the toxic dismissal.
It’s easy to shit on work, but hard to create it. You created something, that’s awesome and I wish you luck! Don’t try to make all the naysayers happy, especially in this community, or you’ll go insane lol.
Given a HN post if just some persons opinion, and a podcast is just some persons opinion, aren't you failing your own logic by calling that post "toxic"?
i.e. If you don't like opinion framed this way, find other posts to consume.. Instead you're naysaying a HN comment..
I stand by what I said. The difference in my mind is that someone invested real creative energy into something, and someone else came along and said “please stop making this”.
Yes, I went out of my way to say something here. Put yourself in the shoes of the person making the podcast here. They excitedly shared their work early because it seemed like a great time and place to do it. And one of the first comments is “you should not have made this”. What people say online actually matters, I don’t speak for this person of course, but I know I would be disheartened by such dismissal of my work. I just hate seeing this maybe happening to others and sometimes try to offset the negativity I think I see.
... because that was 100% my initial reaction. I was like "oh shit, I just got internetted"
I bounced back pretty quickly... for a few reasons. I've been a consumer of podcasts for a couple years now.
I know what I like and I know what is missing for the demographic like me.
Further - I went and looked up the "podcast listener" demographic.
Turns out I'm pretty much the prototype. Older professionals in high income families, commuters.
I'm confident that both podcasting has a market, that there is a niche I can serve appropriately. Phase 1 is the part I will do for free because it seems like so much fun... but I'm also going to try to use it as an opportunity to prove that I can accumulate enough resources to support the development effort on phase 2 (as Elon Musk would say)
In phase 2, I have further ideas about how to improve the monetization model for the back catalog. I'm not 100% sure if I am going to say it out loud yet, but since I'm going to spend to night compiling the feedback I've received from various sources into a github repo, I may go ahead and in the spirit of openness just say it out loud.
If spotify steals the idea then maybe the ask to hire me so I can help. (Or maybe one of the other any other hosting platforms decides they want to eat spotify's lunch)
While those theories will need testing, I figure that IF I write the scripts to automate the process of increasing the CPM of the back catalog, I can probably move to the next logical step, which is providing them in a SaaS model to other podcasters who make their living from it as Phase 3.
IF 1,2,& 3 clear ... then phase 4 is creating a new sort of marketplace model where advertisers are directly connected with the aforementioned mid to top tier podcasters.
Phase 5 is to combine it all into a single platform, expand into video and, to crush both spotify and youtube before me , and hear the lamentations of their ad managers.
I might not make it to phase 5 - but - you know, it's nice to plan out a few steps ahead. It isn't like I'm going to try and beat Musk to driving the conversion of humanity into the role of a space-faring species, but each phase is roughly 10x on the previous.
As much as some dude on the internet "yucking my yum" was a little jarring as the first comment, the bull case on this party is ~$100B.
In another fun story... I came pretty close to closing my first $500 in sponsorships today. "I know I'll ask my boss and get back to you" is often a "no" ... the dude I was talking to sounded so enthusiastic about the idea it really lifted my spirits.
I'm not at odds with their opinion but rather with their tone and delivery. I'm not a fan of podcasts at all, and I get where they are coming from, but someone's sharing an idea they're clearly very passionate about, and I'm all for giving constructive feedback (that's probably why they picked this particular forum to share their idea, after all), even if such feedback hurts, but I also expect a modicum of positivity to go along with that, and their comment doesn't clear that bar for me.
Let me add another data point: I never listen to podcasts. Ever. I've tried it, and I hate the format. Even when I am forwarded something highly relevant to my interests, I still check for a transcript, and if there is none I move along.
You can't search audio. You can't skim audio. You can't easily hyperlink to audio, copy-and-paste audio, or auto-summarize audio. Audio is not indexed or cached by the big search engines. It's a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE and inefficient medium to convey information.
Beyond all those very pragmatic reasons, there are also people like me whose personality type (introversion) makes us find listening to audio an emotionally draining task as it simulates interacting with people. I don't get energized by it--it is work. And why should I give you my working energy when I could just as easily have skim-read a transcript or blog post with the same information and gotten energized by the self-study approach?
THAT SAID, you said that you want to do interviews... and that is something that really calls out for an audio medium. Sure you can transcribe it, and people like me appreciate the transcription, but I recognize that the audio is the original source material and transcription is an additional expense. I'd rather have the full interview available than some highly edited transcript... but I would hope that there is at least a short summary of the content in the description of each segment.
I only listen to podcasts that are well-produced and edited. Very few actually are. There are way too many people who think podcasting is just turning on a microphone and babbling away with a friend or guest for however long they can do it.
I only have a few hours a day I can spend on podcasts and I'm not going to waste it listening to some inane meandering chitchat.
"Put it on the background then" ...yea, that's when FOMO hits. What if I miss the good part? You know, the one thing that they said in the description they talk about, but can't keep on subject and keep getting sidetracked.
This is why most podcasts I listen to are from the BBC or NPR, they've got one subject for the episode, it has a clear narrative through-line and the actually get to a point. Exceptions to the rule being 20kHz (audio production professionals) and 99 Percent Invisible.
At the risk of pedantically zooming in on your choice of words:
> I only listen to podcasts that are well-produced and edited. Very few actually are.
I disagree. Good production is a nice extra, but it's secondary. I'd rather listen to Miles Davis on vinyl, than a mediocre musician on high-bitrate FLAC.
Some examples: I recently discovered the Happy Path Programming podcast. It's a good listen as the hosts are knowledgeable and insightful. The production quality is fine, but isn't at the professional standard. The hosts acknowledge this, but make no apology for it, on the grounds that they don't want their podcast to turn into a chore.
In contrast, the Security Now podcast has professional production. Again that's a plus, but that's all. If the podcast were no good, their high production budget wouldn't be enough to save it.
Good production quality doesn't turn a boring podcast into a worthwhile one, and mediocre production rarely spoils a worthwhile one.
> There are way too many people who think podcasting is just turning on a microphone and babbling away with a friend or guest for however long they can do it. I only have a few hours a day I can spend on podcasts and I'm not going to waste it listening to some inane meandering chitchat.
Sure, it makes sense to insist on good quality podcasts. The hosts need certain soft skills to deliver a good podcast. Not everyone has them, but it must be easy to convince yourself you do. People may be tempted to think I could easily do a podcast, or comedy, or acting. The skills aren't as immediately obvious as in, say, gymnastics or theoretical physics.
Podcasting may be the victim of Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crud, but fortunately it's pretty easy to filter out the ocean of poor-quality podcasts and find a few you like.
I think high production value is probably decently correlated to content; after all, people usually won't invest in something they believe to be low-quality. So in that sense it may be good enough a filter for a world awash in crud.
What I was getting at was more the fact that even if you record 3 hours of stuff, you don't need to put the unedited 3 hours out. It can be recorded on a potato microphone on a clay disk for all I care, just spend some time in the edit and cut it down to a manageable size.
There are very few podcasts that can stay on topic and interesting past the 1 - 1.5 hour mark.
The only exception to this rule are the Christopher McQuarrie Spoiler Special episodes of the Empire Podcast (now behind a firewall). The dude can keep spewing fascinating stuff about his movies longer than the movies' combined runtime =)
One more data point:
Personally I only listen to podcasts on long commutes. This only occasionally happens when regularly needing to actually go to a physical office location in a nearby city.
Even then podcasts are competing with audiobooks or long phonecalls to people I don't often get enough free time to talk to.
It's not that I don't enjoy the format, I do, but I find it harder to fit into my life.
For Episode 0 I did post the full text of my script in the description, but I do think that for the actual interviews I won't be able to afford a transcription service for a while.
For the last few years though, I've been getting a fairly significant proportion of my ongoing professional development via the medium.
I think it scales well in terms of being able to get access to some of the greatest minds I know without creating an undue burden on my guests OR myself as a father to a 2-year old with a mortgage and a day job.
I am 100% willing to commit to writing rich descriptions that address the topics discussed in advance though. As part of the editing process I'll need to rewatch my own interviews a few times anyways, so it isn't a significant amount of extra work to provide a perfectly reasonable value add that I like to see on the pods I listen to.
I use Descript for my podcast, £22 a month gets me ~30 hours of transcription. This probably sounds like an ad but really, it’s one of the best software products I’ve used in a very long time.
If you give it a try for audio editing make sure you record different podcast guests on separate audio tracks, makes the whole thing significantly better.
You don't even know how valuable this is to me at this exact moment in time.
My first interview is tomorrow night! Fortunately, it is with a friend and co-worker who has the hacker mindset and will be willing to work through hiccups in technology.
I'm trying to pick a video conference platform to try. Do I discord? Zoom? Try to find a way to set up audio line-in from my android phone.
I need a solution for tomorrow night so the blog post has found me at exactly the right time.
Thank you.
Edit: having read the blog, I thought that free zoom ended after 45 minutes! I didn't realize that one on one would allow longer sessions. Great!
The best part of zoom from my point of view is that people don't have to log in to anything to join me on a call.
If I wanted to use discord for example if have to make my guests install it or make an account there. I'm pretty sure that some of the big-time grizzled greybeards I know would probably sooner pull out of the interview than sign up for a new service.
And they're some of the ones that I'm most interested in hearing from.
100% zoom, if only because it lets you record a separate audio track per speaker. Make sure you’re both off mute when the recording starts otherwise the audio tracks won’t be the same length
You might want to try UberConference, which is free and also automatically transcribes conferences with high accuracy (note this may be a paid feature I'm not sure). It also does some extra neat NLP stuff to detect sentiment, topics of conversation, etc.
Even better if you can get the interviewee to record audio on their computer too, this way you can get proper audio without compression issues for editing.
Doesn't work for "video podcasts" because sound sync is a bitch, but for audio only it can enhance the quality immensely.
On the other hand, podcasts can be listened to in the background, while text must be actively read. There are pros and cons to each format as a consumer, not to mention differences in production workflow.
To add, I think we should leave it to the machines to start indexing podcasts automatically. They're some of the easiest mediums for speech recognition and Google has been indexing YouTube transcripts for a few years now.
This is why most of the stuff I listen to as a podcast are just random factoids and trivia. (No Such Thing as A Fish, Cautionary Tales, 99pi, etc)
If it's something I actually want to learn and retain, I prefer text so that I can go back, pause, skip etc as I please with an intuitive interface - my eyes =)
The same thing with interviews of interesting people I may want to store quotes from. With text it's just C-c C-v to copy stuff to my notes. With audio I need to transcribe it by hand, which is tedious work.
Naively I would think that there must be a service out there that auto-generates transcriptions from podcasts. Youtube already do this for (some) videos. The output isn't perfect, but it gets about 99% of the words correct.
So my suggestion to OP wouldn't be "don't do the podcast". Instead I would say "do the podcast, but consider that it might not be searchable without a bit of extra effort".
100% there are services! I believe that Azure ML/AI has a natural text transcription service.
In theory I could try and tweet at Seth Juarez@microsoft to see if I can get a sweetheart deal.
But the more I think about the previous poster's position on the text, the more I convince myself that it might be worth a few bucks an episode for me to pay out-of-pocket if it means improved accessibility for users with disabilities.
Not really because it's good business, but more because I've really come to believe in the value and power of implementing accessibility features.
I'm actually starting to get a little teary eyed thinking about that blindness activist's viral video where he broke down physically sobbing the words "thank you" when he saw all of the accessibility features that Naughty Dog added to The Last of Us 2. (I'll hunt the video for people who haven't seen it, but be warned that you will probably bawl your eyes out like a school-child).
From a cost perspective, I'll be putting in hundreds of fake dollars worth of time. The people I interview will be effectively donating hundreds of dollars worth of their own time.
The least I can do is put some serious thought into plunking down dozens of dollars of pocket money for a transcription service.
I'm more sold on the idea than I was in my previous post (5 minutes ago)
IBM Watson, Google, Azure, and AWS all have speech-to-text APIs. IBM's claims to distinguish between different voices, although when I used it a couple of years ago for Japanese it was a little lackluster. It's pretty inexpensive: IBM gives you 500 minutes free per month and is a few cents / minute thereafter; Google you gives 60 minutes free, and it's 4c/min thereafter. It's an API rather than a service, so you'd have to write a client to use it. IBM's API (and maybe the others) allows you to request time stamps on the output, so you could let people click on your transcription and seek directly to the part of the video they are interested in.
I suppose you could always do it on your own machine with Sphinx, too, although I don't know how they compare to the others in accuracy.
1. Those that are tightly written and edited. That is, there is a script (which can then, of course, be posted).
2. Are discussions (lectures, interviews, conversations) about a text (book, article, concept, etc.) which itself can then be referenced for more detail.
3. Are narrations of short stories.
Examples of these would include:
- Numerous history podcasts: The History of Philosophy (Without Any Gaps) by Peter Adamson, History of Rome, History of Byzantium, History of China.
- The New Books Network, a series of author interviews on recently-published academic books. Here you're listening to the author and an (almost always academic) interviewer discussing the topic, effectively as an advertisement for the book. It's a great way to be introduced to deeper material.
- A few deeper / prepared podcasts. WNYC has numerous professionally-scripted podcasts, as do other NPR / public radio / government media affiliates in the US, Canada (Ideas), BBC (Tim Harford, various), and elsewhere. These blur the line between traditional podcast and commercial broadcast, but are quite intelligent and informative.
- Stories or nonfiction narrative. "Selected Shorts", "Soundprints", "This American Life", "Reveal", and others come to mind. Here the idea is to simply be entertained or caught up in the narrative.
- Various interview programmes. I'm fond of Terry Gross's "Fresh Air", the Santa Fe Institute's "Complexity" podcast, and others.
None of these is the proverbial dude/chick (and optionally friends) blabbing incoherently into a mic. All are scripted, most have either transcripts, extensive show notes and references, or both (the fiction / narratives being the exception). For the record, the unorganised / low-content flavour of podcast is one that drives me nuts as well. Sturgeon's Law applies. Seek the non-cruddy end of the spectrum.
For times when I'm read out, or otherwise engaged (kitchen, chores, driving), or want to zone out, these are worth listening to.
For conveying infotech content, I'd generally agree that podcasts aren't the best medium. I also generally stray away from anything that's strongly focussed on news, current events, or current topics, and the list of academic, historical, and philosophical programmes above have been quite the useful informative distraction from the moment for me, for the past several years.
People are different, and I like to learn about other people's methods and the potential benefits thereof.
So let me ask ... when you're listening to podcasts, do you ever take anything away from them that is actionable? Do you take notes? Do you summarise?
How do you ensure that the lessons in the podcast don't get lost?
Do you "Listen with attention" or are they mostly just background?
I find that podcasts are there, then gone, and nothing remains. When I read I take notes, summarise, and use the results to enhance my personal version of a Zettelkasten. I can't imagine doing that efficiently with podcasts, and I'd be interested to know how I can change that.
Kinda depends upon if it is educational, informational or entertainment. I never use podcasts to just fill out the background, I generally use heavy metal music for that.
I tend to either remember how/where to find the information again or the actual thing. So with podcasts I will either remind myself that I can't easily reference it and therefore remember the lesson, or sometimes I will write it down later in the day.
What do you use for your Zettelkasten?
I still haven't found a notebook software that I actually like, so my notes are kinda spread between a few different solutions.
I've been using a ZK-like thing since the mid-90s, so it's very much a "roll your own" solution. Over the past 12 months or so I've started to try to de-couple it from the specifics of my setup so I can share it, but it's proving difficult.
It's essentially a wiki, but it's how I use it that makes the difference. A true ZK requires a conversation. You take notes, but then you spend time inter-weaving them into the ZK. Most people use note-taking systems as, well, note-taking systems, and never return to make the connections between the notes. Hence they get lost.
> So let me ask ... when you're listening to podcasts, do you ever take anything away from them that is actionable? Do you take notes? Do you summarise?
I can answer this a little from my perspective.
There are three major inspirations for tech podcasts that I use personally.
are both in the format of "veterans talk to each other about their careers and the things they've learned". They always roll in the format of two old friends catching up, but in a guided way in terms of their life, experiences and learnings from along the way.
These are the ones that I want to emulate, but with a focus on programming for enterprise, business and startups.
I'm personally most excited in talking to what I think of very respectfully as "cogwheel" or "workhorse" developers. I think developers are vastly under-celebrated when compared to other creatives ... like some person who can cry on demand gets a tiny golden statue and applause ... but the person who re-writes 1500 lines of SQL into a one liner and reduces a week long job down to seconds DOESN'T?! You're telling me I have to go out and buy my OWN tiny little golden statue and play an applause loop on my cellphone?
That's bullshit!
At least that's where I want to start, I've seen some interviews in the last few days with people like
After I've developed the interview skills to talk to the people who genuinely make me feel a little like a programming fanboy. Uncle Bob, Douglas Crockford, Carmack, Hanselman, Jeffrey Snover, David Fowler? I've got way too much respect for them to even ask until I look at my own stuff and say "I'm good enough at this to do them justice" (edit, not that I don't respect my friends, but I think I have enough capital with them that they'd do it as a favor and be willing to re-take any technical mistakes)
Back to your question - I don't actually learn much that I would use in my day to day. Sometimes there are nuggets, but mostly it just gives me a "warm feeling" to listen to masters talking to old friends about their craft.
NEXT there's the other type where I hop on to the GDC vault and download some of their panel discussion videos as audio files: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024856/VR-Best-Practices-Maxi... so I have 48 minutes of industry experts talking about the things they think about when they're designing for VR.
That might be directly applicable in the work I'm doing, or I might have additional questions to ask the next time we start with a VR project. I might have additional possibilities to offer the next time the creative, UX and, strategy teams come to me and say "we want to build for VR, what can we do with a budget of XYZ?"
I'll have a bit of general knowledge on hand for the next time I have to make a decision... or not ... I actually don't do that much VR right now. For some reason the idea of hundreds of people sharing a facemask in a crowded conference hall isn't selling very well right now.
At the very very least, listening to professionals talk about these sorts of things counts to me as a deliberate act of professional self reflection. Asking myself if I'm doing things in the best way I can? Are there better ways to do things? Are there things that I'd like to start working with, but can't fit into the budget of the current projects?
And so on...
Which again, is all stuff I'd like to try to help solve for with this coming podcast.
One other format that a friend and I started talking about being interesting might be to run "architectural differential diagnosis" where we formulate a problem statement and ask 2 or 3 experienced developers to come to a consensus on what technologies they'd use and why.
Though that's unlikely to happen within the first 10 episodes.
Podcasts aren't searchable, they aren't skimmable and their content isn't indexed in search engines. Text is.