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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

I do think that podcasting is ripe for disruption and a great candidate for a "super app" that can end up being people's go-to to listen to podcasts and be exposed to new ones.

Spotify did literally nothing to actually support podcasting as another vertical--which it 100% is. Podcasting isn't just "music" and it's a profound misunderstanding to believe that it is. It's honestly embarrassing that their biz dev people were like: "just buy out Joe Rogan, that should do the trick." To this day, I mostly listen to podcasts on YouTube. Spotify doesn't have transcripts, scrubbing, chapters, discoverability, "shorts," etc., etc. I run an open source Spotify player[1] and their API doesn't even have a podcast type/category (lol, they are actually "music videos" in the JSON payload). It's like podcasts don't even exist.

[1] https://github.com/dvx/lofi/

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> I do think that podcasting is ripe for disruption and a great candidate for a "super app" that can end up being people's go-to to listen to podcasts and be exposed to new ones.

What would a disruptive new "super app" bring to the table compared to every other podcast app that already does this?

I'm partial to Pocket Casts personally.

Same here. I don't use Spotify for podcasts, even though I pay for premium, because I have Pocket Casts.

I listen to podcasts at 2.7x. Not the 2.5x or 3.0x speeds Spotify insists I have to choose among.

I have podcast-specific settings. Podcasts like Lex Fridman start at exactly 7 minutes in, so that I avoid predictable ad segments.

The player cuts out silence and skips pauses automatically. It's nice that it tells me how many hundreds of hours I saved last year just by skipping silence.

Pocket Casts doesn't put up one banner after another warning me to learn more about Covid, just in case people in the episode say something that the official narrative won't catch up to for 6~18 more months.

Also Pocket Casts doesn't put banners on its home page reminding me to tamp down my assumed racism and avoid beating up Asian people.

If Spotify made a podcast player better than Pocket Casts and stuck to letting me listen to podcasts without US-centric political banners, then I'd be using Spotify.

But I don't see how they ever can do that.

Has pocketcasts added the ability to replace all silences with a fixed length one? While I like the silence skipping feature, I've found that sometimes its a bit TOO effective, and you lose a little bit of speaking cadence. I'd love to replace all silences longer than 1s with just a 1s silence

No idea, but that's really clever! I hope someone from Pocket Casts is reading this.

> I listen to podcasts at 2.7x

Jesus lord. And here I go at 1.25x and sometimes 1.5x and think that's fast as fuck.

If you're a native speaker listening to native speakers, you can probably easily do 2x after a few hours of getting used to it.

If you're listening to someone with an accent you might have to slow it down a lot.

Likewise if your audio quality isn't very good or if you're concentrating too much on another task.

E.g. when I'm walking in familiar neighborhoods 2.7x is easy but when the area is even somewhat unfamiliar I either slow it down to 1.x or turn it off, because I suddenly find it hard to grok the content.

I first started speeding up my podcasts when I heard that blind people can listen above 4x ~ 6x speed without missing a beat.

I'm still trying to break the 3x barrier.

This is an optimization I am happy to live without. I usually digest podcasts in pieces, and very rarely, outside of driving, listen to one from start to finish. I consume audio books the same way.

By contrast, Spotify's Episode Search is the best in the business, bar none. At least on Android. All the other options are so fucking bad, it makes me mad. Let's say I want to search not for a podcast, but all podcasts featuring "Alex Honnold". Well, when I type that in to Spotify, it gives me loads of podcasts he's appeared on, with the option to start playing the episode immediately.

All the other apps that I've tried, AntennaPod, PocketCasts, Podcast Addict, are in stone age. How do these other apps expect me to discover podcasts? They are just glorified RSS feeds, these other apps.

Having said that, I don't want to pollute my music with my podcasts, so I don't use Spotify for podcasts anyway :)

The Google Podcasts app has search like that on Android as well. I agree that it's amazing that there is such a dearth of usable podcast apps out there, especially on Android.

The problem there is you need to install the Google app in addition to the podcast app, something I refuse to do. I just don't get why podcast search is so appalling, and why it's not a bigger deal. It drives me bananas.

Pocket Casts has a whole “Discover” tab with both algorithmic and human-curated recommendations, as well as browsing by category. I’m not sure what more you could ask for except for maybe user-generated shareable playlists.

Pocket Casts even has this excellent feature where you can share a link to the current time stamp in an episode and share it. The recipient of the link doesn’t even need to download the app; the shared snippet is playable right in the browser.

Read my lips: "Episodes". I want to search through bloody episodes! I want it to go through it's entire index of ALL episode titles, show-notes and transcripts and find me relevant podcast episodes where the phrase I searched is relevant.

I don't want discovery, I don't want AI, and I certainly don't care for any sharing things. I want to be able to find content. And I don't want to go join a series on Episode 592 and go backwards. I'm interested in a topic: Jennifer Aniston, Alex Honnold, Dieter Rams, GUI libraries in Rust, C++ game development, Financial Independence. I just want it to show me individual episodes!

It'd be like searching google for "GUI library in Rust" and it showing me the Rust website and saying "good luck out there!" It should just search the bloody websites and show me the relevant webpage.

Hmm. You can search episode names and show notes on Pocket Casts on a per-show but not a global basis. I guess that is a shortcoming.

I used to use Player.fm as my main podcast app, and it had a pretty good episode search feature.

> All the other apps that I've tried, AntennaPod, PocketCasts, Podcast Addict, are in stone age. How do these other apps expect me to discover podcasts? They are just glorified RSS feeds, these other apps.

I didn't know PocketCasts was lacking this too! When I switched to AntennaPod, this was the only feature I really missed. But by now, I've gotten used to just websearching for podcast episodes and then opening them in AntennaPod after the fact.

Podcasting 2.0 and PodcastIndex.org are helping a lot. I use the Fountain.FM app and get lots of new features through it that Apple Podcasts doesn't have.

https://podcastindex.org/

https://www.fountain.fm/

Chapters, chapter art, support producers directly through streaming sats and tipping extra through "boosts". It's great! I don't make much use of it, but there are cross-app comments, live stream notifications, and more.

Just learned about this:

https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/podcasting20/

You mean Apple Podcasts? The app that every podcast feels compelled to publish on and is by far the biggest review and discovery platform.

Apple Podcasts is atrocious from a usability standpoint and unless you know exactly what you're looking for, discoverability is extremely opaque. No "trending," no "new podcasts," no "shorts." Compare the Apple Podcast experience to something like TikTok or even the YouTube algorithm.

Am I missing something? Apple Podcasts is nothing but discovery -- It's 3/4 of the main tabs. On "Listen Now" you get popular and personalized suggestions, on "Browse" you get new, trending, top shows, top episodes, top channels, and a bunch of categories. If that's not enough if you go to "Search" and pick a genre you get top, new, and subgenres.

Maybe it's just me, but Apple Podcasts only shows me NPR and NYT podcasts on listen now, and Browse is pretty much the same but with some republican outlets thrown in. I've never discovered a great podcast on there.

> Compare the Apple Podcast experience to something like TikTok or even the YouTube algorithm.

I've compared these and Apple Podcast, as bad as it is, is miles better. YouTube shorts is a waste of screen real estate and TikTok is a waste of time altogether. I want a tool for finding things, not a funnel for delivering ads.

> No "trending," no "new podcasts," no "shorts."

Why would I want any of that garbage? The only one of those suggestions that's remotely worthwhile is "shorts" for podcasts to post best-of clip shows without requiring you listen to full episodes.

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