The tech industry loves reducing friction, but that's not always ideal

So I just go onto YouTube, search up either the person's name that I'm interested in or the podcast. I'll watch it there, and then if I like it, it goes into my podcast app Yeah. With my regular listening. Yeah.

Yeah. And can we can we talk about that a bit? Because I think the tech industry is obsessed with reducing friction. And in some ways, it's good. Right?

A good user experience often means reducing friction. But there's also an argument for having some friction. So for example: an audio podcast, in the typical way it's consumed, somebody's driving home from work. And if I say something, or you say something, that makes them mad, they have to wait 20 minutes driving home just stewing on it. They have to park their car.

They have to kiss their wife. They have to, you know, pat their kids on the head, and then they can go to their room with their iPhone and say "Okay, NOW I'm gonna tell these guys what I think. And that means sending you an email or maybe sending you a tweet. I'd argue that in that case, actually having some friction is a good thing.

It's good for people to have to slow down; for people to not be able to just knee-jerk a reaction every time someone says something they don't like. in this TikTok video. so I'm like, if you've read the comments on TikTok videos, it's not the pinnacle of human achievement. Right? It's like They're awful. And YouTube YouTube comments are terrible too.

It's because there's no waiting period. There's no, like, "hey, just slow down." It's one of the reasons I think Jon and I were attracted to podcasting is that it's slow media. It's slow technology. It's not obsessed with, like, grabbing your eyeballs and, addicting you and then, you know, sending you another recommendation and keeping you on the platform scrolling all day. It's slow. It's like you choose a podcast, and then you're driving for a half an hour, or you're walking the dog for half an hour, or you're doing the dishes for half an hour, and there's a lot of friction in the process. Now would I like there to be better ways of discovering podcasts and finding podcasts?

Yes. But also maybe, like, maybe it's okay that it's hard work. Maybe it's okay that you see a clip of a podcast you're interested in, and it takes 3 impressions before you're like, "You know what? I'm just gonna open up my podcast app and search for that show and then add it." Maybe that's okay.

Yeah. Maybe it's okay to have people work hard because anyone who does go through the process of following your show or responding to your show, that means something. If you have 500 regular listeners to a podcast, those 500 listeners are way more committed, and I would argue more meaningful, than 500 views on a YouTube video or 500 views on a TikTok. Right? It means something. There's a show I love called No Plans to Merge. It's 2 programmers talking. And, you know, they were talking about all the stuff that's going on with Twitter, and they're like, "maybe Twitter just goes away. What would happen to all of our followers on there? Like, we'd be we would have no way of reaching our people."

And they're like, "well, actually, we'd have this RSS feed. And this RSS feed ... these are the real ones. You know? These are the ones that really care, that have been following us forever, and we could still reach them even if Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube crumbled to the ground." RSS is pretty resilient, and the people that are there, there's some meaning there.

I agree wholeheartedly.