@kyary said:
@justin258 said:
[...]These are things that, as far as I'm concerned, exist to get my brain to slow down and shut up, not to make it more active and speed things up.
Lemme put my point another way. Why don't you listen to your podcasts/videos at 0.5x speed?
That seems like an unfair comparison. Playing things at 0.5x makes things take longer for no good reason, which I'm sure is going to be your point for why you listen at 2x, to which I would say--even if there's filler involved for algorithmic reasons or episode counts--the content has an intended duration and pace. People's speaking has a cadence that can express information or emotion (e.g. speaking faster when worked up). A thoughtful gap between sentences can be interesting. 0.5x actively ruins the listening/viewing experience for those sorts of reasons and just from an audio quality perspective. Comprehending a whole sentence at 0.5x is just adding difficulty to the listening experience, none of which would necessarily happen at >1x.
[...]
(emphasis mine)
Just want to be clear - I fully expected to be in the minority here, but I want to make my case because I think everybody is thinking about this the wrong way and it bugs me.
I never said "I watch everything at 2x" because that's not true. I love 2001: A Space Odyssey and I have never watched at 2x because I like it at 1x and the music would sound goofy if it went faster. Likewise, I don't speed up a few podcasts (Radiolab has frequent musical breaks that sound funny at double BPM, for example) and some other podcasts have fast-speaking hosts (Keep it! comes to mind) and those don't need to be sped up as much. But I also think that changing art so you enjoy it more is fundamentally a good thing to do. Like, fuck what the author thinks, I'm allowed to do whatever I want, they're not even my real dad!
If the podcast is say, just an uploaded conversation, the pace of the conversation is not intended as much as it is a product of the people speaking. I don't see how I'm committing some grave art crime by speeding that conversation up? Like....I'm allowed to consume content the way I want, and I like things to go fast for reasons beyond "I'm trying to get through 48 hours of podcasts every day" - I just like things faster, man!
The point I want to make about all you 1x or bust people w/r/t 0.5x is this - you say (and I think most people here would say) that slowing the podcast down wastes time for no good reason (I would agree!) My point is that to me, 1x feels like 0.5x and that is not subject to debate because it's the way I perceive the content. I'm not trying to be a jerk about all this, but I think it's a little ridiculous to claim that my subjective perception is wrong or immoral or that I'm somehow missing the point. We, as people who have grown up in different communities and environments perceive speech differently. Someone who learned English as a second language might love being able to slow down their podcasts to 0.75x. I also listen to some German language podcasts slowed down because my German is not very good - should I listen to them at 1x because that's the speed they're recorded at?
To the point on speaking cadence/emotion - I agree. Those changes in cadence and short pauses are preserved! The compression is mostly linear in time, so if someone slows down while speaking it's still relatively slower. Gaps longer than a few seconds are edited out because that's how I like it. If I feel like I want to stop and think about something, I just pause the podcast (or is pausing the podcast destroying authorial intent too?)
Finally, I really want to emphasize that this is not primarily motivated by a desire to consume twice as much content in the same time. It's just how I like things to go. Adjusting the speed of a podcast or video is fundamentally an accessibility setting and is basically no different than adding subtitles or descriptive audio.
Again, please understand that I'm not like, mad at you or anyone here, but I think it's really bad to shame people for enjoying stuff the way they want to enjoy it.
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