Podcasts are an Antidote to the Woes of Social Media

It seems nearly impossible to have a meaningful conversation with nuance on social media. Today’s social media platforms tend to reinforce dogmatism, political correctness, confirmation bias, driving users to perceive ideas/issues in a tribalistic or binary way. These variables make conversation more difficult, removing nuance and complexity from important and consequential topics. This is not only damaging to our collective psyche, but this lack of substance I think is fundamentally boring.

Twitter, TikTok and increasingly short attention span-focused content dominates social media, leaving few spaces for discussing complex and difficult ideas, with one major exception, podcasts.

I remember getting hooked on politics podcasts when I was in high school (back then I had to download episodes from iTunes to my iPod Classic), and since then it’s incredible to see how mainstream podcasts have become. In 2012 Apple launched the Podcasts app, a major inflection point for the industry, bringing podcasts to millions of new users.

According to Apple, in 2018, there were 525K podcasts and 18.5M episodes. As of January 2021, there are more than 1.75M podcasts and more than 43 million episodes. More than 3X growth in 2 years! Today 144 million Americans have listen to podcasts, thats more than 51% of the population older than 12. Listeners are already spending a lot of time on podcasts, at a growing rate.

There are all kinds of podcasts, my personal favorites are ones that couple a sharp host with expert guests. This is a great formula for exploring thought-provoking ideas.

The long form nature of podcasts enables content creators to explore more complex and nuanced ideas and introduce new perspectives without alienating the audience. Long form audio content, whether it’s highly produced or just a conversation, has the potential to introduce new perspectives to listeners, helping bridge differences through conversation.

This is why we’re building Podacity. Podacity is a Podcast-centric social space designed for users to discover and share podcasts and have honest conversations with respectful disagreement.

Borrowing from FAIR’s Principles of Change, we believe bad ideas are best confronted with good ideas, and never with dehumanization, deplatforming or blacklisting.

We’re currently beta testing Podacity, to join or learn more visit Podacity.app