One of the more distressing qualities of humanity, in my mind, is the emphasis we collectively put on “efficiency.”¹ It saturates our professional existence. It haunts our socioeconomic barometer. And it drives our current approach to both creating and appreciating art. It’s insidious, the inordinate amount of power “efficiency” holds over our daily lives, without even drawing much attention to itself, creeping up in unanticipated ways: the life hacks bombarding us on TikTok; the large language models we use to reduce the amount of effort we need to put into writing an email to our colleague; the Trim Silence feature on our podcast player of choice.
[…]I will admit that this is perhaps a weird hill to die on, but I truly believe that Trim Silence is an abomination that should be fully eradicated from existence, as it not only spits in the face of the people who take the time and effort to produce their shows, but also, more broadly, encourages a way of interfacing with art that can only be described as gluttonous.
I had no idea that Trim Silence is a thing, but I can see how that would make audio recordings sound janky. There are times when I’ll speed up playback to 2x, but that’s usually because the person talking is taking too long to get to the point. Sounds like overkill to me.
I went back to using RSS after I ditched corporate social media in part because I like that the content is just there until I’m ready to read it. I use the Top Day sort on Lemmy and the microblogging platforms are constantly putting new posts in the feed; this is fine for casual scrolling, but I can see how this would be exhausting to people who are trying to keep up with everything. I get the author’s need to take a breather every so often. I also find myself wishing that people would chill a bit.
I find that for recipe or how-to stuff, if I have a choice between video or blog post I’ll almost always choose post so I can scroll to the part(s) I’m looking for.
I wonder how much SEO and promoting sponsors/“please like/subscribe” (and monetization of content in general) has increased people using efficiency tools to be able to get to the main content. I know the podcast app I use has a setting where it’ll auto-skip X seconds of the start of podcasts.