100% amateur stuff, no ad, nothing to sell, just humans having fun in front of a mic

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The recent reboot of the medium is more akin to the talk shows from TV, but instead of trying to reach a wide range of audience, podcasts are targeting niches.

Which allow more podcasts to exist... but make it harder to be sustainable since their goal is mostly to make money

This is why I switched to audio books. Many podcasts with real guests contained too much salad and not enough meat (e.g. a machine learning podcast but they talked about going to conferences).

Contrary to what many think, I believe AI generated content can increase the nutritional value. I've done experiments with turning technical PDFs into podcasts, e.g. summarizing machine learning papers (similar to NotebookLM).

It seems just about every celebrity has started producing one based on the new golden globe award the other day.

Thanks to the Libby app, I have "read" several thousand books over the past 7-8 years. An excellent pair of earbuds is mandatory to allow a 2x listening speed, which you can work up to in about a week.

Everyone tells me that they "don't have time" to listen to 2-3 books a week. I listen when I'm doing my morning routine, when I'm cooking, when I'm cleaning, when I'm cycling, when I'm shopping, when I'm clearing snow.

Listening to influencers and celebrities hang out, pretend to be friends and try to be funny just doesn't do it for me.

I do not think this has gone away. Yes, market saturation waters everything down to the common denominator. Podcasting is no different than any other commercial or public market. But there will be always outliers. The only difference is that back in the old days(early 2000s and 2010s), your choices were limited, which made it easier to pick. Today, you have to invest time and effort and hunt down those good podcasts that match your interests by sifting through a ton of the noise(badam, tssss).

I was big into podcasts, even started my own. Until I realised that without interesting guests to bring in week after week, there is no point in it.

But I think that the main issue is, and has been for a very ling time, that there is really not a single good user interface for consuming podcasts, especially offline, managing podcasts or discovering new ones, keeping tabs on what is going on with individual shows or even getting recommendations on and being able to purchase your own podcasting kit, so that you don't have to research and learn about audio, video and other related things that might detract someone from thinking about starting their own podcast. And also all of this in packaging suitable for different consumption situations - walking, driving a car, riding a bus, being at work or at home. Yes, there were many various apps and websites, but they all suck and lack in any useful feature. They essentially just aggregate podcasts and offer RSS feeds. That's kindergarten bs.

There's your $1B idea.

Maybe the content was better in those days, but as an outsider I'm not too keen on going back. I prefer my friends as separate people.

Podcasting is drying up because the money left. Everyone went all in on podcasts on 2020. Spotify bet the farm on podcasts. Money poured in. Marketing bros realized there's only so many mattresses and underwear you can sell through the format and left.

You really can't serve personalized ads through podcasts. The relevance of what you advertise can be about the topic of the show (that is, marketing to the type of people who would listen) or the location of the listener. Pretty much every other signal gives you nothing interesting you'd be about to decide "yeah they're a potential good customer". Spray and pray.

The money left. People realized they couldn't justify the time and money they pour into podcasting. It turns out, even if you weren't expecting to make money, you really hoped people would listen. Not enough, because podcasts faded and people discovered TikTok. No more waiting for your favorite show to drop: everything is your favorite show. If you get bored just scroll up.

Lots of folks are still making it work. But a lot more people are going into podcasting with a more deliberate approach. People are doing it because they think it's important, not because they think people will listen or because they want to get rich. I'd argue that some of the best podcasts ever made have come out in the past 2-3 years, but if you're not giving the median listener the thrill of the first season of Serial, they don't listen past the first episode or two.

I have the exact opposite problem with podcasts that the author details: I have too many that I want to listen to and not enough time. There are so many people whose opinions and perspectives I value that I will never be able to consume them all consistently. From deep dives into Roman history, miniseries on foreign policy, sports, politics, film music, there are so many people sharing their passion with the world and I want to hear it all.

But finding those people takes work. Yeah, there are a ton of losers out there with nothing to say who put out popular content, but that's not unique to podcasting. YouTube, Reddit, hell the entire internet has that problem.

Stuff like this reads to me like someone wants the internet to be happy fun time that only ever gives me an endless supply of good things to consume and filters out all the bad.