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Ask HN: For tech podcasts do you prefer transcripts, bullets or something else?
Hi,
When it comes to show notes of tech podcasts, which style do you prefer?
1. Full transcripts with clickable time stamps whenever a guest or host switches talking
2. A bunch of 1 line summaries every 30-120 seconds with clickable timestamps (similar to what you might see on Youtube)
3. A couple of bullet points to summarize the topics talked about with no clickable timestamps
In all cases, links to everything talked about would be included in its own list.
I'm asking because I run a podcast where I've been doing #2 for 33 episodes. An example of that is here https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/33-zego-lets-you-easily-buy-insurance-by-the-hour. I also do #3 in the form of the summary paragraph near the top.
But I recently started a Twitter poll and out of ~100 votes, most people preferred #3 by itself or #1 which was surprising since I personally thought #2 was the most skimmable option. I figured I'd also ask here to get a larger sample size and hopefully start a discussion around the topic since I'm sure lots of us listen to podcasts.
I'm mainly asking because to do #2 requires a lot of effort so I'm wondering if I've been creating extra work for myself. It's about 3 hours just to do that part alone and it's not quite possible to outsource it since it depends on having an understanding of all of the tech and having an awareness of the show. Where as you can get multi-guest transcripts done from a number of services and #3 only takes about 5 minutes.
My concern with doing #3 but not #1 / #2 is that a lot of interesting talking points could be missed if you don't end up listening to the entire episode because #3 only works if you include a couple of high level things. If you go down the route of literally bullet pointing every point discussed then you end up with #2.