Last night we were watching an episode of Lego Masters as a family and Evil Will (Will Arnett the host) appeared. At the end he left to “go do a podcast” with normal Will exclaiming “Noo — there are too many podcasts already”.
As I’m starting to develop more and more content (and learning how hard it is to do it really well) this feeling comes up quite a bit. At the same time, the power of the small audience with YouTube has constantly amazed, and uplifted, me as I search for something that is an obscure maker interest of mine, and find some wonderful, useful YouTube video that already exists to help with this.
I must confess, though, that I’ve often gotten overwhelmed with podcasts and video offerings. There are lots of ways this can happen. It mostly happens when I “subscribe” to rather than search for videos or podcasts. In general, I get instantly overwhelmed — there is so much content already on most channels, and I don’t have time for it. I consider this massive volume of content offerings an anti-pattern that ‘keeps noise-levels high’. (An anti-pattern is a commonly offered solution to a problem that superficially looks helpful, but actually generates negative consequences; in this instance, I think that serving people truckloads of content seems initially “helpful”, but actually creates a burden of visual noise and cognitive overwhelm.)