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Comment by nbardy | Hacker News Reader

At the same time we have the rise of long form podcasts. Producing quite the opposite effect.

Podcasts that many people have playing constantly. In the car or on the train. In the elevator. At work. In the bathroom. At the store. At home. For many people, it's mindless banter they put on in the background while doing other tasks. Youtube, but you can use your eyes.

But when do you get a free thought that's entirely your own? Just a moment when someone or something isn't barking at you to listen to this or buy that. I at least can't think clearly about something else if someone is reciting a story to me. Scary when most podcasts also have advertising, so you are getting a subconscious dose of that during all your waking hours.

This reminds me of that "alarming" picture[0] taken on a Philadelphia train used to scaremonger people about how everyone is addicted to the newspapers and how it degrades the fabric of society and thought by making everyone antisocial.[1]

Yes, there are many arguments that can be brought up about differences between newspapers and social media, etc., but I strongly feel like it is essentially the same kind of neo-ludditism that will play out the exact same way. Something new will come up after social media, and then people will jump on that as the next thing that "degrades the society". We can already see a micro-version of that, with people lamenting how "back in the old days, blog posts were long form and meaningful, not like those tweets and instagram posts".

0. https://imgur.com/gallery/WkHHpZ1

1. https://xkcd.com/1227/

Just like all of the people pushing FUD that Tinder/Grindr and one night stand culture would kill true relationships (or worse implications on wider society). Even though everyone I know who used those earlier in their life and are now in serious relationships with people, often one's they met online.

People are always looking for the 'surprising' reasons why society is really in decay and everyone's living their day-to-day lives completely blind to it - except us few who know better.

There's huge demand for this sort of thing to be true, it's been the basis of every cult ever, plenty of extreme political movements, religions, and a million think pieces through history. Yet life and culture always ends up being far more boring and resilient than predicted.

>Just like all of the people pushing FUD that Tinder/Grindr and one night stand culture would kill true relationships (or worse implications on wider society). Even though everyone I know who used those earlier in their life and are now in serious relationships with people, often one's they met online.

Oh wow, I haven't even thought of that one until you mentioned it, but it certainly seems to ring true for the people I know as well.

> But when do you get a free thought that's entirely your own?

When you're recording your own podcast.

You're a person. When do you get a free thought in? In the absence of overwhelming evidence you should assume other people are probably more like you than you think, rather than making grand claims about "many" people that aren't you.

> But when do you get a free thought that's entirely your own?

You come on a discussion platform like Hackernews to voice your own thoughts and opinions?

So is a discussion platform better for the mind in that sense?

Now weigh (e.g. multiply) the number of each with the number of people actually consuming it. Just look at Youtube: If a serious video that teaches you something interesting has a thousand views it can be called "very popular". The latest useless joke video easily gets a million views.

Except that the "useless" jokes will always win the view battle since they are very easy (i.e short) to consume. However, that doesn't take away from the fact that people are consuming long form videos and podcasts

The most amazing math textbook in the world may sell maybe 100K copies tops. 50 Shades of Grey sold 125 million. Does this mean books are bad, or does it mean people aren't always exclusively interested in intellectually challenging topics?

The Gutenberg revolution had its critics. I think criticising the Internet as a medium has parallels to that. That's not to say any arguments made are idiotic, just that they may miss the point. I think there are reasons why the view counts are so different that don't imply the Internet is a shitty medium.

Firstly, a 3 hour podcast takes 3 hours to listen to, generating one click per three hours of listenting time for that podcast. TikTok videos take a few seconds to watch, so in 3 hours you're doling out thousands of views.

Secondly, views are distributed differently for those types of content because everyone finds roughly the same things funny, but only few find the same things interesting. If you want to watch something funny, you're probably not gonna spend much time finding suitable content, instead just consuming whatever is popular, so a handful of videos end up with insane amounts of views. But if you want to take up a hobby project you'd pick something that interest you, which is very different from what might interest me, even within the domain of CS and maybe even within subdomains of CS, so views are distributed more evenly for instructional videos.

And now we're here comparing the view counts of popular funny videos to instructional videos. I think it's clear why that might not be a good data point.

Just some counter examples: Joe Rogan, Veritasium (science), vloggers in general, Pritimive technology.

I think things have flipped. TV used to be for serious content, Internet for cat videos. Now it's going the opposite way.

And why is that a problem? So what if I scroll through 200 Twitter memes on my lunch break and then throw on a 2-hour educational YouTube video in the evening? Sure, I've given 200 impressions to the bad kind of content and only one impression to the good kind, but I don't think I've disastrously eroded my ability to focus on things.

90% of podcasts these days are just people rambling on without much thought while trying to sell you something. I have a feeling that most people who listen to podcasts do so for background noise, as a way inject some dopamine into their boring commute or routine chores.

I used to listen to podcasts a ton but switched to listening to lectures or conference talks.

I'm not sure why you've picked up downvotes, it's exactly right. Most podcasts, just like youtube videos, have matured to specific lengths optimized for interspersed advertising opportunities.

At the same time, the criticism is useless without knowing the podcasts someone is listening to.

Pretty big difference between listening to Wendy Williams vs, I don't know, philosophical debates and deep dives into history and all sorts of intellectually stimulating things. Most people I know including myself listen to the latter which is nothing short of welcome mind-expansion and I'm a more interesting person as a result of it.

People listening to podcasts or reading books really aren't the people I'm worried about in the modern era.

I mostly listened to software engineering radio, software engineering daily, talking machines, this week in machine learning, village global, freakonomics, econtalk and other similar tech and business shows.

Most of the content in those shows is still fluff and nowhere near as information dense as a lecture from Stanford or MIT. Take talking machines as an example, an interview with a guy like David Blei will be very shallow and watered down for the general audience, I'd much rather listen to him give a lecture at a machine learning summer school.

What? My podcasts are all on subjects that I'm interested in and rarely (other than sponsored 1 or 2 minute ads that I can fast forward through) mention a product. What are you on about?

I mostly listened to tech podcasts like talking machines and econ/business stuff like freakonomics or village global. They all mostly follow an interview format where the guest is only there to promote something that they work on.

They are there because they have insight into a phenomenon they have studied and is being discussed, and they may have a book or something that further explains what they are talking about should the listener be interested. Should they not mention or promote their work?

Almost always the main guest is there to primarily plug something. They almost are never there just to discuss some findings.

There are also more high-quality documentary series than ever before. And more books, and more of everything.

I don't know what GP's expectation was - that the internet would turn everyone into Aristotle?

I would suspect two very different demographics.

I would not suspect so, and I think this is our time's video game violence. It's such a trope for the newly adult generation and up to start worrying about the latest fads. Sometimes justified, like vaping is legitimately a terrible habit, but ultimately hard to gauge until it's too late, i.e. until the consequences are a fact.

Relevant crosslink in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21575365

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