If your content is viewed by 100,000 people, making it more concise by one second saves an aggregate of one day across your audience. Respecting your audience means working hard to make your content shorter.
When the 80k podcast describes itself as “unusually in depth,” I feel like there’s a missing mood: maybe there’s no way to communicate the ideas more concisely, but this is something we should be sad about, not a point of pride.[1]
This is a thoughtful post and a really good sentiment IMO!
When the 80k podcast describes itself as “unusually in depth,” I feel like there’s a missing mood: maybe there’s no way to communicate the ideas more concisely, but this is something we should be sad about, not a point of pride.
As you touched on, I’m not sure 80k is a good negative example, to me it seems like a positive example of how to handle this?
In addition to a tight intro, 80k has a great highlight section, that to me, looks like someone smart tried to solve this exact problem, balancing many considerations.
This highlight section has good takeaways and is well organized with headers. I guess this is useful for 90% of people who only browse at the content for 1 minute.
Thanks for the push back! I agree that 80k cares more about the use of their listener’s time than most podcasters, although this is a low bar.
80k is operating under a lot of constraints, and I’m honestly not sure if they are actually doing anything incorrectly here. Notably, the fancy people who they get on the podcast probably aren’t willing to devote many hours to rephrasing things in the most concise way possible, which really constrains their options.
I do still feel like there is a missing mood though.
To me, economy of words is what’s important, rather than overall length. Long can be wonderful, as long as the writer uses all those words well. Short can be wonderful, if the writer uses enough words to convey their complete thoughts.
Longform’s missing mood
If your content is viewed by 100,000 people, making it more concise by one second saves an aggregate of one day across your audience. Respecting your audience means working hard to make your content shorter.
When the 80k podcast describes itself as “unusually in depth,” I feel like there’s a missing mood: maybe there’s no way to communicate the ideas more concisely, but this is something we should be sad about, not a point of pride.[1]
I’m unfairly picking on 80k, I’m not aware of any long-form content which has this mood that I claim is missing
This is a thoughtful post and a really good sentiment IMO!
As you touched on, I’m not sure 80k is a good negative example, to me it seems like a positive example of how to handle this?
In addition to a tight intro, 80k has a great highlight section, that to me, looks like someone smart tried to solve this exact problem, balancing many considerations.
This highlight section has good takeaways and is well organized with headers. I guess this is useful for 90% of people who only browse at the content for 1 minute.
Thanks for the push back! I agree that 80k cares more about the use of their listener’s time than most podcasters, although this is a low bar.
80k is operating under a lot of constraints, and I’m honestly not sure if they are actually doing anything incorrectly here. Notably, the fancy people who they get on the podcast probably aren’t willing to devote many hours to rephrasing things in the most concise way possible, which really constrains their options.
I do still feel like there is a missing mood though.
We also offer audio version of those highlights for all episodes on the ’80k After Hours’ feed: https://80000hours.org/after-hours-podcast/
To me, economy of words is what’s important, rather than overall length. Long can be wonderful, as long as the writer uses all those words well. Short can be wonderful, if the writer uses enough words to convey their complete thoughts.