
Podcasts are my new Wikipedia - wenbin
https://lnns.co/6ArPszTwvDE
======
the_af
I 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.

~~~
nyolfen
you should try to listen to podcasts where you think the hosts are
interesting. they’re useful for uncovering new threads of information of and
modes of thought, which are more usually associated with what you gain from
personal conversations. podcasts are probably never the supreme mode of
conveying information, but they’re a cool window into peoples’ brains. they’re
great for storytelling as well, and in quarantine, they’re acceptable
substitutes for social engagement.

~~~
the_af
I've tried podcasts and the _format_ is just not for me. I do enjoy YouTube
channels on particular topics (history, warfare, hobby stuff).

My point is that this isn't at all a replacement for Wikipedia. Even the time
investment is wildly different between the two.

~~~
romwell
Yup. The title sounds like "The train is my new bicycle".

I mean, both get you places and have wheels.

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vincentmarle
> 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
I 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.

------
TuringNYC
I 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.

~~~
rlee1996
I used to have the same issue. Looking for interesting tidbits in a podcast
was like finding a needle in an 1hr long rant haystack, and I personally like
to have some snippet as a reference for later when I'm learning, but I found
this app [https://www.airr.io](https://www.airr.io) that lets me save and
share snippets of podcasts. Pretty useful!

~~~
krtkush
There goes my side business idea.

------
weeksie
I'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.

~~~
runevault
Upside, audio you can consume while doing other things. For super deep dives I
certainly agree text is better.

~~~
this_user
Consume yes, but how much of that do you actually retain when you are doing
anything that requires real attention? This seems like one of those things
that give you the feeling of getting informed, but in reality you are mostly
just wasting your time.

I used to listen to a number of podcasts regularly, but I would repeatedly
notice that I barely remembered what the key points were. In the end, I cut
down my consumption more and more, and only listen to episodes that I
specifically find interesting, and only when I have the time and mental
resources to really _listen_ to them.

~~~
cm2187
Depends what you do at the same time. If you walk your dog or play a video
game, you probably retain as much as reading. I mean it's not like people
don't skip parts or start thinking about something else when they read.

~~~
FalconSensei
I really doubt you'll retain as much as dedicated reading if you are listening
to a podcast and playing a game. Unless it's a game where you don't need to
think/read at all.

Regarding walking your dog: that's true. Walking around is a good way to
retain information. That's explained on Moonwalking With Einstein

~~~
ghaff
Why on earth would I listen to a podcast while playing a game? Though TBH I
mostly don't much care for background audio when doing other things that
involve any real thinking. Podcasts are mostly for driving, cleaning, etc.

~~~
cm2187
I don't do much thinking when playing a FPS game

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AndrewUnmuted
Why 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
The 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.

------
BjoernKW
I 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.

------
sneeuwpopsneeuw
Podcasts 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.

------
alexilliamson
Podcasts 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
One could argue that audio is superior for comedy, just to give an example.

------
jeffreyrogers
Since 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.

------
uoaei
Podcasts 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
It'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.

~~~
uoaei
This 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.

------
lcnmrn
I 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.

------
jkingsbery
> 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.

------
polote
Well 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
I 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)

------
m463
actual link: [https://www.listennotes.com/blog/why-podcasts-are-my-new-
wik...](https://www.listennotes.com/blog/why-podcasts-are-my-new-wikipedia-
the-perfect-41/)

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
The 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
software 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?

------
throw7
"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
but at least the conscience is cleared

------
jasonv
I 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.

------
kyle_morris_
A 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
Real depends on the content. If there is no structure to a podcast I think you
can speed it up.

------
choward
So 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!

------
OctopusSandwich
If 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.

------
totemandtoken
Using 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

------
dzonga
even 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

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metakermit
Another 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…)

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swyx
this is really good content marketing, with an approachable personal tone.
kudos.

