I wish podcasts would go away

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. On the other hand, podcasts bury good information in audio, making it hard to find and use. I’d prefer text, thanks.