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Comment by Thlom | Hacker News Reader

Best part of PocketCast is the stats. It can tell me that since 2016 I've listened to 135 days worth of podcasts and apparently I've "saved" 46 days by increasing the playback speed and 3 days from trimming silence. (I also have 350 hours in my "up next" queue ...)

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I like Pocket Casts and I’m not knocking the fact that they have them or that other people like them, but stats like these make me feel existential dread.

That's so interesting, I never considered it but think I understand how you feel.

I've always wanted more stats like this. I expected/hoped Google Play Music (and now the inferior YouTube Music) would provide amazing overviews of what you listen to. I wish I had stats on the music I listened to in WinAmp in the 90s and a way to see the change in my musical tastes (and the consistent threads through the years). I bet I could track relationships very easily by the playlists I listened to.

I used last.fm back in the early 00’s. I don’t think it logged playlists, but it did log every song you listened to. It kind of faded away when streaming services took over which he no or variable support for last.fm.

https://listenbrainz.org/user/<musicbrainz user id>/ is what I have used and it has been pretty good so far.

yea... reminds me of seeing the number of hours a friend had put into EverQuest. I'm sure I'd be appalled at many of my own stats for my own activities

Steam's play hours is the worst one for me

Wow, I've been using PocketCasts for a couple of years and I didn't even notice this feature before. Nice to learn that I've hit the "advance 30 seconds" button enough times to have missed out on over five hours of ads. What a fantastic non-use of time.

AntennaPod also has those stats :) I was a pretty hardcore fan of pocketcasts but eventually switched to AntennaPod and I couldn't be happier.

Why?

PocketCasts is a superb app but I saw AntennaPod on f-droid, so I thought to give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised, the interface is very nice and syncs with gpodder.net

I think the question is: is AntennaPod better? Or did you switch because it was open-source and good enough?

I've been using AntennaPod for years, my question is, is there any reason to switch to Pocket Casts? Aside from the sync-feature which seems nice. Everything else in the feature-list seems available in AntennaPod as well.

I don’t know if AntennaPod has it, but with syncing you also get a desktop (macOS/Windows/web) app. I use this to I listen while work, and switch to my phone at other times.

Open source and without tracking. That is better than good enough.

https://github.com/Automattic/pocket-casts-android/issues/42...

With Pocket Casts' release as open-source, this now applies to both, so I am asking whether this was the only deciding factor back then.

These same stats are also present in Podcast Addict[1]! As an aside: my own listening stats show that since 2017 I've listened to 149 days worth of podcasts.

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[1]: https://www.podcastaddict.com/

Completely agree, I've also started buying DRM free audiobooks and storing them in the pocketcasts files, at 116h in my "up next" queue

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Since 14 October 2015 you've listened for:

*143 days 4 hours*

Skipping 6 days 17 hours

Variable Speed 17 days 10 hours

Trim Silence 7 days 10 hours

Auto Skipping 12 hours 17 mins

In Overcast I have “Smart Speed has saved you and extra 252 hours beyond speed adjustments alone,” which is gnarly. But I don’t see any total listening stats bummer.

Imagine how much time we can save by skipping ads and sponsors.

Maybe someone can make a SponsorBlock fork now that it's open source.

I hope uBlock Origin integrates it. The real feature is the database of time stamps relating to sponsored content, just like ad blocker filter lists.

Is it based off of a database? Even fairly small YouTube channels seem to work with sponsor block as soon as the videos are uploaded. I always assumed YouTube requires creators to mark which sections are sponsored, and sponsor block has some way of looking that up.

According to Wikipedia, the data is sourced from users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SponsorBlock

> The extension relies on a user-submitted database to identify sponsorships in videos.

> Extension users can submit segments in videos and vote on segments others have submitted.

Yeah, it's crowdsourced and user-moderated. It's open source, including all of the data.

https://sponsor.ajay.app/about

https://api.sponsor.ajay.app/database

Now you are making me feel like a listen to too many podcasts. I have 306 days since 2015. They are just so convenient to slot in. I listen during household chores, walks, and drives.

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