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Comment by personlurking | Hacker News Reader

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'.

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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 agree, It's easy to waste a lot of time on these podcasts. I hope that over time with the voting, the best stuff rises to the top

Might be enough to just tag certain podcasts as "amateur"

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.

Agree!! Mixergy does almost zero post production but has amazing content if you're in the startup space.

Can we have metadata ? Submittors can mark up "the talk starts at 1:22, topic X starts at 1:34, ..."?

This. In the "Haskell" episode of Programming Throwdown, they don't actually start talking about Haskell until 37 minutes in. ARGH.

http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2014/07/episode-35-haske...

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!

That or cases where you have several people debating and you always have a "joker" who tries his/her best to interrupt someone else with lame jokes.

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.

Now you have me intrigued, I didn't even know there was another type of podcast.

Here are some popular and excellent podcasts that have great production value:

https://gimletmedia.com/show/reply-all/

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

http://freakonomics.com/archive/

Great list! A couple more of my favorites are:

Planet Money: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/127413729/podcast/

Startup (also by Gimlet): https://gimletmedia.com/show/startup/

My favorite podcasts:

  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

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.

One of my favourites: http://historyofphilosophy.net

Oh then you must try this: http://www.philosophizethis.org

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.

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.

I really love Revolutions [1] so now I'm excited to try this one! History podcasts for the win.

[1] http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/

If you like Planet Money, you'd probably like "Odd Lots" by Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/podcasts/odd_lots

From my subscriptions list:

- Lore (http://www.lorepodcast.com/)

- Limetown (http://limetown.com)

- The Moth (http://themoth.org/)

- The NoSleep Podcast (http://www.thenosleeppodcast.com/)

- Criminal (http://thisiscriminal.com/)

- Snap Judgment (http://snapjudgment.org/podcast)

- The Black Tapes (http://theblacktapespodcast.com/)

Some of my favourites:

heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking-issues/

http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/

http://www.microbe.tv/ (home of This Week in Virology, TWiParasitism, and TWiMicrobiology).

http://www.theorbitalmechanics.com/

If you are an engineering geek you may like omega tau: http://omegataupodcast.net/. Some episodes are in German but a lot are in English too.

Although... a lot of people do like the two guys joking around podcasts, if they are joking around about great topics.

Of course, I am biased, given that I make a two guys joking around podcast.

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.

Good lord you're right. Nothing worse than two guys joking around!!

Seconded!

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