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Comment by AlwaysRock | Hacker News Reader

I dont listen to this american life anymore. Mostly because half the episodes were reruns and after listening for 10+ years there was a good chance I'd already heard the episode. The other reason was that any new show seemed to be just so... Sad? Depressing? Melancholy?

That has always been part of the show. Typically the stories are snapshots of a moment in life and often life isnt bubbly and happy. But it seemed like every single episode was just depressing.

I still listen to Embedded which is good depending on the topic and Serial and occasionally pop the local NPR station on on drives but it does feel like there was a change for the worse around that time.

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I listen to Wait Wait, which sometimes tries to promote other NPR podcasts but never in a way that makes them interesting. For like a year they had an ad that was just an out of context clip from a Matthew McConaughey interview that made absolutely no sense to me.

Anyway, Wait Wait and Planet Money have paid ad-free podcast tiers now.

The rest do seem to be serial podcasts about true crimes or otherwise why you should feel bad about someone somewhere.

Wait Wait is just so cringeworthy. It's like they don't even understand what humor is but nevertheless think they're funny. It's atrocious.

You try having to be topical and not going blue for your audience of extremely nice middle aged moms. It's funnier than SNL monologues.

Yeah, but SNL is famous for only being funny for three weeks every four years when the presidential elections roll around. I keep forgetting that SNL even exists. I would be embarrassed to be on SNL.

I don't love Wait Wait but its a specific style of humor. I wouldnt call it cringy. It's just probably not going to appeal to anyone under 30.

Yep, agreed. Most new shows seem “important” but not what I wanted to listen to at any point in time, and kinda depressing and without humor or levity. It felt like the social mission shifted and even if I agreed with some or many of the goals, that wasn’t why I was listening

> The other reason was that any new show seemed to be just so... Sad? Depressing? Melancholy?

Same. I couldn't do it anymore. I eventually realized that when I seek out specific media to consume, I need it to be less depressing than I found that show to be.

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