Hacker News Reader

This may well be beyond the etiquette of HN but listening to podcasts/YT/audiobooks on fast speeds and omitting silence breaks is really stupid. Slow frying your brain to save 5 minutes here and there doesn’t make you smarter.

View on HN

I don't understand this, especially with podcasts - it's not frying anyone's brain to listen to 2x speed. I listen to podcasts at 2x because I (and everyone else) can hear and understand way faster than people normally speak. The only difference between 1x and 2x speed is that I find the people sound more intelligent and engaged. They sound passionate and focused at that speed, that's really the biggest difference.

If I could not speed up podcasts, I would not listen to them at all. As a matter fact, before I had access to a podcast player with this feature up I did not listen to them at all.

There’s way too much fluff, even in a good technical podcast (these actually seem to be the ones that neglect all editing, so many speakers are half ‘ums’ or long pauses while they come up with what to say next) and of course the “fun” podcasts are mostly made of fluff and are largely unlistenable at below 2x

Reply on news.ycombinator.com