I'm half-joking, but I could use a "not just two guys joking around" tag. There's so many podcasts out there where I check them out because the topic sounds interesting but most of the episode time is given to 'two guys joking around'.
100% agree. And not just "the two guys joking around tag" but the "we recorded this in one take and then published straight from garage band." That would be a significant improvement over the podcasts discovery tools inside of every podcasting app.
That make it a lot easier for any of the new shows coming out that are trying to be like a Radiotopia or Gimlet style show, to be discovered.
I don't think that is such a great idea- Sometimes very professional people who are amateurs at audio production and amateurs at public speaking make awesome podcasts- The tag would need to be a lot more specific.
While we're at it, some kind of "Does not interrupt the speaker" tag would be great. It absolutely drives me nuts, listening to stuff like This American Life or Radio Lab, where the person being interviewed never gets more than half a sentence out before the narrator overdubs themselves correcting or summarizing what the speaker is trying to say.
I find it incredibly obnoxious. You brought this person on to tell a story: let them tell their story, goddammit!
I feel the opposite. With those two shows the primary focus is telling a story. They aren't really conventional interview shows. It seems to me like a lot of the time, a narrator dubbing over the interviewee can help maintain the pace and focus of the show.
By commenting here, I do not want to be that guy that just comes up to say "I second this", but, in a way, this is what I am doing. I also find it terribly obnoxious, and, in some sense, completely paternalistic.
While on a broad reaching medium, like TV, when can accept that the presenter is trying to reach the least capable person out there in terms of understanding the message, on podcasts, being as they are so specific and targeted, doing the same just does not feel right (to me, at least).
If the presenter breaks the rhythm of a guest to explain what the guest is saying is like rubbing in your face and saying "I'm sorry you can't understand this, but I'll translate it to you". If we reached the podcast, we probably CAN understand what the other person is saying.
Thank you for pointing that out. It really gets to my nerves sometimes.
Excellent:
This American Life
99% Invisible
Very good:
Planet Money
The Memory Palace [historical narratives]
The Moth
On the Media
Snap Judgement
Good:
Freakonomics
Radio Lab
Radio Diaries
Occasionally good:
The Truth [fictional radio dramas]
Criminal
Dan Carlin Hardcore History. It's not in often and when it is it can be a 21-hour series. The guy is brilliant and I could listen to him tell a story about the most boring man on the plant if he decided to.
Really good list! I'd move On The Media to Excellent, it's really cream of the crop. And I'd throw Skeptic's Guide to the Universe in there too, for anyone who likes science. If you like ancient history, add Dan Carlin's Hardcore History.
Agreed on On The Media. It's basically just meta-news, but stepping back and looking at the narratives being presented is really interesting. Their recent show about this history of political polling was fantastic.
Stephen West does an outstanding job of tracing the complete history of philosophy in the West and relating its ideas to modern thought and idioms, and uses humor effectively as well.
But usually that's because you already like the two guys. Few pairs can go off on a topic and not litter it with inside jokes that leave the new listener on the outside.
I would refer to them as a subject podcast vs. a personality podcast. A site could provide a determination on the type by allowing listeners to review the composition of a podcast (eg: this podcast is 20% subject, 80% personality).
If CarTalk were still being produced, it would have a large personality rating. If I had dismissed it based on the large personality rating, I would have missed out on Click and Clack. My life has been better because of their personalities!
Not sure how I'd feel about that, it would make it easy to miss worthwhile stuff like a lot of "Back to Work" or "Home Work" - the first in particular has a lot of wandering around on some episodes but also can have some real gems.
Seems like the scoring system could catch a lot of what you're concerned about.
or "came prepared with a topic", which is maybe what you're saying, but too many podcasts for a while were "So....episode 12...what do you want to talk about".
I don't see this as much these days, but perhaps because I started to look for "non-current events" podcasts knowing that they were recorded earlier and better prepared.
You're not going to find a list of these types of improvements that will apply directly to what you're working on, but any intro to UX book should help you get into the right mindset to identify them on your own. Design of Everyday Things is a good start for somebody with no knowledge at all of UX.
Try thinking a long the lines of "get the ball rolling", when designing interfaces where some regions must start from a blank slate, e.g. use placeholders, prompts, etc.
In my experience even seasoned designers do a poor job of this. They show you comps of with the perfect set up -- everything populated, beautiful photos uploaded by the user that are perfectly square, 100 comments on very post (or whatever the analog is for your app).
I've gotten a lot more insistent that designers show me "empty" designs where the user has just signed up and various corner cases like a photo that is really tall.
Something like this maybe: anytime an entry pass a certain threshold of votes for the first time, add it to the feed. Each user can define the threshold in his account and get the feed from there.
First impression (Macbook Air 11"): 2/3 of the page are header and filters, I can view only 2 posts at first glance. That's pretty different from the functional design of HN.
I love that it's by episode and not the entire show.
While I don't know that I'd be a regular user or start discussions (I usually listen to episodes weeks after they come out), it's a cool tool for episode discovery.
I could really use something like this. It's a recurring problem I have: finding interesting podcast material to listen to while working out.
Podcast suggestions should remain on the front page longer than articles do in HN though. Since listening to a podcast is way more time consuming than reading an article.
I agree! that's why I included the other filters as well. A good podcast is still valuable a long time after creation/recording, unlike a news article..
Very cool idea. I often struggle to think of a podcast when I really need one.
One of the challenges here is that, apparently, podcasts don't have very descriptive names. Maybe it's because HN has the same regular topics floating through, but I feel like I get a lot more of a preview from titles on HN than I do by things like...
"The Archers"
"Hello Internet #60: The Beautiful Game"
"Harmontown"
I suppose there's an expectation that podcasts don't need explanatory names because, well, they're not always about a specific thing and because they're expecting regular listeners to tune in. Perhaps find a way to automatically include the description of the podcast itself and/or encourage users to do the same manually?
I used to have this problem. It's solved 100% with a good podcasting app. You spend the time now and then to look for podcasts (not episodes) that might interest you. When you actually want to listen, they're already downloaded to your phone and ready to be browsed and listened to.
Has anyone else tuned in to Chris Gethard? His podcast "Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People" is great. It's like an evolution of "This American Life". Unedited, one hour discussions with random people, and Chris is a really good interviewer of random people. My favorite is his interview with " Ron Paul's baby" [1]. If you can get to the part where he starts talking about a carnival baby (15 or 30 mins in), it is hilarious from there forward.
This is awesome! I'm an avid listener of podcasts, because I can learn stuff, listen to great people and interviews, broaden my ideas... All during what would otherwise be downtime (walking the dog, grocery shopping, driving, etc.)
There are some podcasts which I consider vital, but for most I don't care about the podcast itself but for the content of a given episode.
This app is awesome because it detaches content from podcast and helps discover cool episodes.
Getting 500 errors on podcast comment/show pages. I get the idea though, I'm just not sure this is the best way to discover podcasts. To checkout a podcast takes quite a bit more time relative to a news article / blog post.
I like this idea, but there's no interactivity (AFAICT) with my podcast app. I use the Pocket Casts app exclusively for all my podcast listening. I'd love if clicking one of these links could open the podcast in the app for me. I have no interest in browsing some podcaster's blog or listening through my browser.
Obviously I could look up specific episodes in my app after seeing it on your site, but that's annoying enough that I don't think I would keep it up.
An alternative idea is to build an app from this idea. I know that's a lot of work, but I might pay for that if it is a really good podcasting app. Look to Pocket Casts for inspiration.
I've been looking for something like this--podcast discovery is severely lacking right now(or I don't know where to look!). Excited to try this out--thanks!
I'll be sure to get to send you some feedback once I've used it for a while. :)
Awesome, though I'd love to see a line or two under the title with the show notes (if they have them embedded). For those not already knowing about the hilarious podcast, The title is precious little to go on.
This looks really interesting. One thing I noticed is that you do not have a section for sports podcasts. Is that not your target demographic or just nothing was submitted in that area yet?
Cool, I immediately registered and posted a link (The Ray Wenderlich podcast). Two suggestions though, iTunes, Google, etc. already have decently robust search around podcasts, do you have any plans to reach out to various dev communities (reddit, iOS, Rails, whatever) and getting them to come to you? And then I think the tag system is crucial, for instance tags can't be given a space and custom tags are much less likely to get lots of content then presets.
I'm still working on the tag system but yes there could be lot's of different types of communities and podcasts. The challenge is to get the filtering and ux right!
Awesome site :) I get most of my HN info through the JSON feed. It might be something to implement in the future - I'd be delighted to add it to my script.
What about adding additional tags or attributes so we can filter by length of time, date published (vs date submitted to your site), publisher (npr, radiotopia, etc), guests (i.e., i liked this guest on Marc Maron's podcast, where else can I find him?), or sub-genre (i like true crime podcasts and sometimes I get that on Criminal, sometimes I get that on This American Life)
Does anyone have an efficient way to consume podcasts? If I want to quickly read an article I can skim certain sections and skip others etc., but there is rarely such indexing for a podcast and I would have to skip forward, listen for a lot of seconds to get context before I know if it's somewhere to skip past or not.
I like this, but I think it needs a little more emphasis on the UX of what you are going to listen to and for how long. Perhaps even embed the player under the link?
How about a play count as a measure of popularity instead of just discussions? HN works because it abstracts user behaviour to a points score.
It's halfway there for me - or at least, half of my expectations of what it would be. I was hoping it would be more along the lines of (or additionally) an HN for new podcasts. Over time, the front page will soon be a rotating list of the same selection of programmes, won't it?
I'd start submitting your site to different subreddits to ensure a diverse selection in your listings. Hold off on submitting to Designer News though, until you improve the site UX. As it is now, they will completely ignore it.
The site is a bit odd without JavaScript enabled (I have noscript) all the arrows don't work. Not a big deal for me I can just enable it back, but for others it might be. SVG's could be used instead of fonts for icons.
I agree. There are a lot of thing that are important, it's not only a simple UI.
On important part is the moderation to keep the discussion civil and measures against spam and voting rings. This is invisible and sometimes difficult to spot, most people just notice only the good quality of the discussion.
Another important point is the community. It's important to attract and keep a good and wide community. For most topics, you'll find here one or two experts that can comment to counter balance the hype of the article and answer the unclear details. Sometimes the comments are better than the article.
> Sometimes the comments are better than the article.
Yup, and the first few weeks when I first discovered HackerNews from Google search results a number of years ago, if it wasn't an "Ask HN" I'll admit I didn't know there was an article -- the comments were good enough not to miss it!
