I wish podcasts would go away

You know what I hate? I hate when I’m reading a nice article or blog post or whatever and the author mentions something that I might be interested in and helpfully links to it. but when I click the link, I find myself staring at an embedded audio player that says “1:39:06” somewhere on it.

Well shit, it’s a podcast. Never mind, I guess.

I mean, I do want to learn about the thing, but to do that I don’t want to wade through two minutes of unnecessary intro music followed by ten minutes of two dudes humble-bragging and laughing at their own jokes, then a Squarespace ad, and then 30 minutes of stuff I’m not interested in. Or 75 minutes. Or 10 minutes. How am I supposed to know where it is without listening to the whole stupid thing?

It’s the same with video content, but at least with video I can often scrub through visually and get close to what I came for. With audio I’m stuck either click-guessing or listening at like 3x and neither of those are good options.

I want anything not intended as entertainment to be published as a blog post. That way, I can easily skim it or search it to find what I came for. I want to be able to copy the useful bits for my own use later.

Many people love podcasts, obviously, and I wouldn’t want to take that away from them. So technically I don’t really want them to go away, but on the other hand, podcasts bury good information in audio, making it hard to find and use.

Until more podcasts contain decent show notes and indexed links, I’d prefer text, thanks.