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Podcasts are my new Wikipedia
- sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y agoPodcasts are nice but for me definitively not comparable to Wikipedia for how I use them at least. Podcasts: bring people of knowledge to talk about subjects. Wikipedia: Brings the end result of all the talking to one written place.
- m463 6y agoactual link: https://www.listennotes.com/blog/why-podcasts-are-my-new-wikipedia-the-perfect-41/ https://www.listennotes.com/blog/why-podcasts-are-my-new-wik... What I hate is that I listen to audiobooks and podcasts all the time. And no car or portable audio device acknowledges this fact. Why doesn't anyone do skip-back and skip-forward and pause and where-i-am-in-the-program-robustly ??? I need dedicated buttons for skip-back/forward and pause. I need my place to be saved, maybe the last 5 places. sheesh.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThe mpv commandline client is quite frankly one of the best that exists (though I'd not recommend it for driving). Podcast Republic has proved reasonably un-sucky.
- m463 6y agosoftware is fine (and thanks for the tip I will check it out). the audible reader repurposes back to back 15 seconds for example. what I was wondering about though was why don't (for example) bluetooth headphone manufacturers have a prominent, dedicated skip back or skip forward button?
- weeksie 6y agoI'll never understand the drive to bury so much good information inside video and audio. Consuming info that way gives the impression that you're learning something but without organized text it's quite difficult to contextualize new information. Lectures can be a great adjunct to study but it's just not the same thing. I feel like I should mumble something about regression to oral tradition from literate society but hey.
- udfalkso 6y agoYou may enjoy https://podcastnotes.org https://podcastnotes.org which in a way is an attempt to solve this problem that you describe. Disclosure: I work on PN on the tech side.
- cuspycode 6y agoAudio/video is also very inconvenient when you need to slow down your processing rate. You have to tweak playback controls for this, while dealing with pure text only requires a slight adjustment of your eyeball muscles. And similarly when you encounter parts that can be skipped forward easily: text just requires some more motion of your eyeballs, while recorded audio/video is a lot more awkward to deal with. Nota bene: A great lecture is worth a lot. But a great text that delivers the same message is worth a lot more.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- runevault 6y agoUpside, audio you can consume while doing other things. For super deep dives I certainly agree text is better.
- jolmg 6y agoSo what about having a text-to-speech program read a book? Doesn't that satisfy both?
- gxqoz 6y agoI'm probably in the 99th percentile of listening to articles via text to speech but the book experience (especially fiction) is not nearly as good in this form. One difficulty is you're at the mercy of the text quality--visual artifacts and things like that which are easily ignored in visual form become a lot more annoying when listening to them. If you have a clean source, great, but most books you'd want to read aren't in this format.
- TuringNYC 6y agoI love podcasts, but I find annotation and pinning very difficult. So many gems are lost once I hear them. I do absorb it, but I cannot reference where I heard it. How do you save the snippets, how do you tag them? Same problem with Audible/audiobooks -- I write notes on the app's note-taking feature but those are mostly lost w/r/t context. For non-audio, I use EverNote heavily.
- empath75 6y agothat seems like an A+ app idea. There’s lots of times I think of something I want to look up later and never remember to get around to it.
- kd5bjo 6y agoIt took over a decade, but I finally realized that this is the original purpose of the dialectical journals I was required to write for my high-school English classes, before they were coopted as an assessment tool. As it’s a record of your own thinking about the various things you’ve read, it provides a way to figure out where ideas came from in a way that full-text search can’t handle. These days, I use a traditional index card system combined with a spaced-repetition flashcard system. Each concept that I feel like collecting information about has a small stack of cards that starts with a 1- or 2-sentence definition, in case I’m using a term slightly differently from other people. Below that are cards that represent quotes, notes, summaries, and recommended reading on that topic. The flash card deck is to make sure I know what things exist, and what words are used in the literature to refer to abstract things. If I need more detail than I can remember, those keywords will get me to a relevant wikipedia page, at least.
- fredsir 6y agoIs that the zettelkasten method?
- kd5bjo 6y agoNot exactly; it’s more modeled on a library card catalog. Instead of indexing a physical collection, it’s indexing the things I’ve read. If I need to take detailed, long form notes on something, I’ll do it in a notebook which will then get its own entries in the card index.
- uoaei 6y agoPodcasts are nice but too often I'm already familiar with the basics of the subject and don't need the 5-10 minutes of introductory framing. I find it more efficient to skim a webpage where I can focus in on the stuff I haven't internalized yet. The exception is stuff I have no idea about. Then all that coverage is useful. But for (I assume) some on HN, who are naturally curious and have a surface-level understanding of most topics, that 5-10 minutes of time out of a 25-minute podcast (with 2 minutes of ads each at the front and back) means you only get to scratch at the next level deeper without actually getting into any details, which doesn't seem worth the time when there are still Wikipedia articles about it.
- seph-reed 6y agoIt'd be cool if there was something like Q&A mixed with mini-podcasts. You could be listening, then have a question, ask the computer, have it start up a mini-podcast at the segment that answers, then say "go back" and keep running the original.
- warranty 6y agoYou can pause & google (which is akin to ‘ask the computer’) & resume listening.
- uoaei 6y agoThis still relies on content curation rather than on-demand generation, which means you will encounter the same issues as if you were Googling about it. Principally, you won't find what you're looking for if no one has mentioned it or someone used a different concept to describe it. But it does sound promising as an exploratory tool if you understand that the Qs will be basic and the As straightforward.
- metakermit 6y agoAnother podcast player I quite enjoy discovering new shows is Breaker: https://www.breaker.audio/ https://www.breaker.audio/ (though it can get a bit unstable at times…)
- polote 6y agoWell it is clearly the opposite for me, the more I consume video or audio content the less I build things. Audio and video put you in a position of comfort in which 'virtual' learning is easy. Learning can't be easy, that's the point of learning, and often the best way to learn is to experience and test by yourself, which is clearly the opposite of listening to podcasts. Also I do find that the content in podcast is almost always the same and only less than 5% of the talk is actually interesting As for people who explains that they are as much productive when coding only than coding and listening podcast at the same time, this is probably wrong, humans are not very good at doing two things at the same time
- dekervin 6y agoI think listening to audio is more conducive to "drive by learning". It allows your eyes to get distracted and you can maintain some level of attention for a longer period. Our brains are also simply better at picking clues signalling the important stuff, when listening to someone speaking. I have turned HN into a personal data-oriented wikipedia and I want to test consuming the resulting feed through audio (like a npr for data-based facts) [0]. If some of you would like to take part into the experiment, leave a comment below ! [0] http://datum.alwaysdata.net http://datum.alwaysdata.net
- alexilliamson 6y agoPodcasts can certainly be fun, but audio is so inferior to written text. Am I the only one that gets inexplicably annoyed with most podcasts and podcast culture? I know I shouldn't be so grouchy, but dammit I don't want to hear about your podcasts or listen to them.
- bananamerica 6y agoOne could argue that audio is superior for comedy, just to give an example.
- jonny_eh 6y agoAudio is superior for multitasking. It's hard to read while doing the dishes.
- totemandtoken 6y agoUsing the apple podcast app as a search engine is very underrated for me. You find all sorts of ancillary sources and takes that you wouldn't find through something like google or youtube
- BjoernKW 6y agoI like podcasts for discovering new subjects, opinions, and perspectives. I'm an avid consumer. For me they're by no means a replacement for written information, though. They're complementary. They fulfil a different purpose.
- jkingsbery 6y ago> Well, other than writing "if... else..." logics, there are actually a lot of "low thinking" tasks in modern software engineering, e.g., writing unit tests, refactoring code, copying & pasting code from Stack Overflow, tweaking CSS styling, tweaking config files for some server software, playing with 3rd party APIs, messing with HTML, configuring IDE, setting up dev environment, waiting for CI to finish, writing throwaway code to test out new technology, experimenting some low risk DevOps tasks on local dev or staging, testing coworker's code locally for code review, manually doing QA for certain product features... If you can learn that way, great. My experience though is that a lot of these tasks are high thinking (and high-risk) tasks. Config changes can cause production outages. It's easy to miss something in refactoring and introduce a bug. The point of writing throwaway code to test new technology isn't the code, it's the understanding that comes with it.
- dzonga 6y agoeven though podcasts are great. nothing matches written content. easier to search, archive n create a copy. faster to consume too, if you're a faster reader. n I would say, personally I remember more when I read compared to passive consumption on podcasts | videos etc
- the_af 6y agoI can't tolerate most audio/video information except for very narrow fields of interest (hobby stuff on YouTube, mostly). I find the pace and editing irritating, and the format distracting and long-winded. I don't see how the use cases of podcasts and Wikipedia, as described, are at all similar. For "informal information", someone mentions a topic and I look for it in Wikipedia. This takes me a few seconds, more if I want to delve a bit deeper. How would that work for podcasts? Google a podcast on $TOPIC, pick one that looks (or is it "sounds"?) promising, then fast forward it until someone mentions what it is in few words? I understand an in-depth, long-winded description of $TOPIC in a podcast, but that's very different from quickly looking in Wikipedia to get the gist of it. So no, podcasts cannot be my new Wikipedia, even if I tolerated audio/video explanations better than I do.
- nefitty 6y agoYou made me realize that podcasts do take the place of Wikipedia for me, especially when I have a lot of busy work. For example, someone mentioned Jurgen Schmidhuber in an AI thread here the other day and I was able to find a bunch of podcasts interviewing him or mentioning him. I threw them in a playlist and got a lot of what I wanted, passively for the most part and while multitasking.
- the_af 6y agoBut the time investment alone makes this not a Wikipedia replacement...
- banmeagaindan2 6y agoListening to Samuel Pepys doesn't give me a deep dive into history but it goes go wide in a way reading the Wiki entry for the great fire of london does not. That information is compressed does not mean it is more useful. Suppose there is a second great fire or flooding - I believe locating friends with secure lodgings to store consumer goods would come immediately to mind after listening to Pepys but this would not occur by just having read the wiki.
- kyle_morris_ 6y agoA recent change I made to podcast listening was to stop playing at faster speeds. I noticed that my natural speaking pace increased so much that it was confusing people who are used to slower cadences and listening to others who speak at a natural pace was grating to me. Switching to 1x speed has helped me slow down a bit and digest as I go instead of racing through everything.
- TheGallopedHigh 6y agoReal depends on the content. If there is no structure to a podcast I think you can speed it up.
- lcnmrn 6y agoI prefer Reader Mode in Firefox and the Narrate feature, it turns every web article in a podcast. Samantha voice on macOS is real enough and speeding it up to 150% is faster than reading the article.
- choward 6y agoSo basically he puts the individual podcasts into a playlist and also can play random podcasts and search for podcats? I'm still not getting how this is like wikipedia at all. It's just listening to a playlist. What am I missing? They seem completely orthogonal to me. > Of course, I use AirPods to listen to podcasts! Of course, you would mention that!
- vincentmarle 6y ago> Why'd it take me 10 years to realize I could listen to a podcast or audio book and code at the same time without losing much productivity or comprehension? I absolutely can't listen to any podcasts or audiobooks while working, I will simply tune out all the noise and focus all of my attention on the task at hand. Then the podcast simply turns into background voices that I don't listen to (I also easily tune out any nearby conversations in open office settings). By the time I'm done with my task, I have already lost too much of the conversation so might as well just stop listening. The good thing is that any noise doesn't hurt my productivity, because it just bypasses me completely.
- umvi 6y agoI can only multitask with audiobooks if the other task is fairly mindless. I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes, for example. But coding takes too much cognitive load for me to multitask. I even find music distracting when trying to think deeply about a problem.
- jeffreyrogers 6y agoSince most people who produce information of any form written, spoken, visual, musical, whatever, produce very little that is novel or interesting, and since I can skim to find the interesting parts or new-to-me parts in written material much easier than I can in any of the others, including podcasts, the bar to me listening to a random person's podcast is much higher than the bar to me reading an article on some random person's blog. There are some great podcasts out there, but the standards are much higher than for writing and it's way harder to get noticed if you aren't already known for something else[0]. [0]: I mean, you can get noticed for courting controversy or being super political or something, but that is entertainment.
- throw7 6y ago"Turns out I'm not the only one who listen to podcasts while writing code" I doubt this person is producing good code or learning anything from the podcast.
- HugoDaniel 6y agobut at least the conscience is cleared
- jasonv 6y agoI keep collecting podcasts and audio books but when I have downtime, I tend to listen to music. I used to listen to podcasts on public transit, but somewhere along the way I stopped and haven't picked up the habit again. I don't have a commute... and, at the gym, again, I listen to music. I'm running long distances these days, but I prefer to listen to nothing when running, esp since I run with my partner.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y agoWhy can't podcasts just be podcasts - and Wikipedia be Wikipedia? I fail to see the point in trivializing these two communications technologies from the vantage point of this senseless apples-to-oranges comparison. There is a nice connection shared between the two in that RSS and Wikipedia are both strongly associated with Aaron Swartz, though that's never addressed in the article.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThe author uses podcasts as an audio Wikipedia, and the article explains what benefits they see and how their system works. I don't see how this trivializes anything, nor is there a need to detail the history of the systems.
- OctopusSandwich 6y agoIf I find a podcast really informative, I get a transcription and then save it to Evernote. It's good to have a reference to go back to. I use http://podcasttranscribe.com http://podcasttranscribe.com for converting it to text.
- swyx 6y agothis is really good content marketing, with an approachable personal tone. kudos.