Listen & Draw - My Website Dethroned YouTube!
Listen to this episode, or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Rory Sutherland said something interesting in one of his many interviews on YouTube: Google used to have this “I feel lucky” button that brought you straight to a page related to your search. His observation was that no one ever clicked on it. I think it's even been removed now.
People preferred to browse through the list of search results instead. And then click on the first one anyway. But they want to see the choice first.
People like choice.
And I am now starting to realize that some parts of the Practice Drawing This website don't take that into account. For example, in the Morning Sketches APP, it chooses a warmup for you, and then it chooses reference images to work from for you.
The idea was convenience. You didn’t have to search for an image and could start drawing immediately.
The Morning Sketches APP now does have a widget at the top that allows you to choose your reference, so that has already been changed before.
I had made a podcast player around the same philosophy: it downloaded podcast rss feeds every day and composed random playlists from them. You would go onto the page, you did get to choose a category, from Art, Ambient, Design, Interviews, Comedy, Business, Writing, Fitness, basically topics that are likely to be of interest to artists, or at least myself I guess, then press play, and the episodes would play one after the other. You couldn’t see the playlists, they were hidden.
But it didn’t work in the sense that it wasn’t enticing to use. Even I wasn’t using it. I instead went onto YouTube to browse for videos on Youtube to listen to while drawing. I craved the browsing experience.
Hi. If you’re new here, welcome to the PDT podcast designed to listen to while drawing.
I myself like to listen to people talking because I find that a soothing background to listen to while drawing. It’s like you’re in a meeting. People are talking, and for some reason, it’s pleasant to doodle while you listen to the conversation going on.
Music can be that, too, I found, but music is also about evoking emotions, and it can work against you if you listen to upbeat music that pumps adrenaline into your blood while you try to draw calmly. Calm music is possible, but can get boring after a while. Conversations tend to be calm, while hopefully remaining interesting if the people being interviewed are interesting.
You may be using YouTube differently, by the way. Maybe you use it to look up drawing tutorials. That can be a great use of YouTube! But I wanted it to be something in the background to listen to while drawing. I haven’t tried iTunes or Spotify for this. Those could have been options, too.
So I changed this podcast player that is on the website somewhere in the past few weeks; I changed the interface so that you can now see the playlist, and choose which episode to listen to yourself.
And that seems to work! I am more often listening to these podcasts now instead of going onto YouTube!
It’s weird, because I just tend to play it from the top anyway, just like I usually click on the first link a Google search comes up with. But I never clicked “I feel lucky”, and didn’t use the equivalent button in the podcast player. I like skimming over the playlist first before hitting play. And maybe I do see an episode that appeals to me more.
So given a list of options, we select the first anyway, but if there’s a button saying “shall I give you the first option?” we balk at that!
This is not always true. It also depends on how big the commitment is to that thing that will be chosen. Listening to the beginning of a podcast at least, or following a link to look at a web page for a few seconds is a low-effort thing, it doesn’t require a big commitment.
When there is a big commitment involved, it works differently. When you have many options, you can’t choose, because you’ll be afraid you choose the wrong option and be stuck with it, and maybe there might be a better option, and so you keep looking. In those situations, it hurts to have many options, because it will induce you to not choose.
Take gaming for example. If you have a game console with one game, that is the game you play and you play it endlessly. But when you have many games, you don’t know which game to play because fear of missing out kicks in, and you hop from game to game, trying it for a bit, then wondering if another game might be better, more worth the hundreds of hours you are going to potentially invest time into. The same holds for drawing tools; if you have too many, then you can be tempted to jump from one to the other, whereas if you only have one type of sketchbook and one type of pen, that is what you work with. This plays out especially when there is an art supply store where you can easily go and choose other drawing tools. You’ll procrastinate, waste time choosing new drawing tools there instead of working with what you have.
With choice, especially when a choice involves a big time investment, you often have to consider whether you are going to invest a lot of time into that chosen option, or consider whether there is an even better option out there, and so you are tempted to keep browsing some more, in search of this elusive perfect option.
The same with online tutorials; we love having choice and looking for tutorials, but fear of missing out on That One Great Tutorial makes us keep searching, instead of choosing one tutorial and doubling down on it, investing a lot of time into it, committing to it, and practicing that one tutorial.
It is kind of the same thing, though: we love having choices, being able to choose, but that can also prevent us from committing to one option, to sticking with one option, if it requires a big time investment, causing you to fear there are better options. Being able to browse tempts you to do so, but prevents you from jumping in.
So that’s why you should eventually stop browsing and commit to one thing.
With YouTube, the time investment is small. If you don’t like the first thirty seconds or so of the video, you just go watch the next one.
So, that said, I am now enjoying listening to podcasts through the podcast player I created! I do still browse YouTube, but to be honest, it’s all very clickbaity compared to the in-depth interviews you find in these podcasts that are audio-only, where you hear normal people talk in normal ways and you feel like you get to know someone better.
The people talking are a perfect background sound to doodle to, just like we doodle during meetings, listening to other people argue.
I was saying that tongue in cheek, of course, that my website had dethroned YouTube. YouTube still has an enormous amount of useful videos that I listen to learn from, and great tutorials to boot on every subject imaginable, and it is the second-largest search engine. But I found it exciting that I can now just as easily listen to the podcasts on my podcast player if no video on YouTube inspires me. And the audio-only podcasts have a very different, more calm vibe.
They aren’t optimized as much for an algorithm. That is probably because people engage with podcasts differently: they subscribe to the rss feed of a podcast, and they just listen to the podcast while working out or driving or doing household chores. They will not be looking on their mobile screen. Listening to podcast episodes invites you to do something different in a way YouTube, with its visual aspect, does not. It is easier to unglue from the screen with podcasts.
I should discuss the algorithms a bit, because the podcast player is also governed by an algorithm, of course. It creates playlists, which means a computer program does that, and computer programs execute algorithms.
The YouTube algorithm is rather advanced. I you pay attention, it has heuristics. On your main feed, it will show you things that are on your Watch Later playlist, it will show you videos from creators you have watched videos from before, it will show you videos that other people that watched the same videos also watched, it will notice that you tend to look at specific types of videos on specific moments of the day and choose videos for you based on that (for example, I tend to watch more animal and funny videos in the evening, YouTube found out and pushes these to me in the evening), and it will show you video categories that are potentially addictive, that people binge-watch, and it will randomly throw in new videos by unknown creators to see how an audience responds.
Those are just the things I observed. The algorithm is probably even way more sophisticated than that. It can be pretty good at coming up with videos you like to binge-watch. Until! Until you get bored with a subject. And it doesn’t learn that easily. You stop watching these videos, but it keeps on flogging them to you for a while.
The algorithm for the podcast player on my website works differently. I have a curated list of a few hundred of the best podcasts that are just great, where each and every episode itself is great, so it doesn’t matter which one you listen to. You do NOT have to listen to the latest one! An episode from years back can be timeless and still as great, and it is new to you. Some episodes are not timeless, though. They sometimes refer to events that are long gone by. But it can still be pleasant to listen to these episodes, to these people talking while you are drawing.
So what my podcast player does is come up with a new playlist for each category every day, by choosing random episodes from the curated list of podcasts. That’s it. Their function is to be in the background while you draw, and to hopefully be interesting conversations you also learn from, and honestly, most, if not all, of these episodes are suitable. This also prevents you from falling into a rabbit hole of constantly listening to the same type of thing because an algorithm hasn’t discovered yet that you don’t want to listen to that type of thing anymore.
It’s constantly something new. And there’s a serendipity aspect to it: you might accidentally discover a podcast you want to listen to solely, want to get more episodes from. That is possible in the player on the website; just click on the link of the podcast title itself. Or you might become interested in a certain creator. I know it works like that for me; if I hear a person say interesting things during an interview, that makes me want to look them up online, see what they are doing, what they are making.
It’s like when you go to a book store. You might have an idea for a book you want to buy, but when you’re in the bookstore, you might discover new books that you might be interested in and that you didn’t even know existed. My podcast player works like that, too. There are hundreds of podcasts loaded up in there, and with loads of episodes, all presented to you and you might serendipitously discover something new you didn’t know existed but discover that you like.
This doesn’t happen as much with the more sophisticated algorithms like the ones used by the likes of YouTube or Amazon; these algorithms analyze what you liked in the past, and try to present you with more of the same. But we people are not one-dimensional like that. We have lots of different interests, and we’re all different and unique human beings. The sophisticated algorithms tunnel you towards a narrow patch in a way that a more simplistic algorithm doesn’t, one for example that just picks a few random items from a vast cache of excellent options, like my podcast player does, or like a book store does.
And with the big-platform algorithms, what can also happen is that they discover something you like that you had preferred to not like, and it starts serving you that, and it becomes irresistible. For example, YouTube has figured out that I like to watch cute animal videos and also spectacular boxing videos in the evening, so it tries to serve me that - and I can see how these two can be highly bingeable niches and why it would try and suggest it to many people randomly, even though I prefer to listen to and look at something more cerebral or useful. These videos are just too tempting, and so I end up clicking on just one more. It is as if you resolved to eat healthily, but someone keeps shoving a Big Mac in your face because they know you love it. Just one more, final Big Mac, you think... It is just easier if you are not tempted in a direction you don’t want to go into.
It’s as it you regularly go to a restaurant because you know they serve delicious and healthy vegan meals, but that they occasionally shove a greasy kebab in your face because they know you can not resist the temptation and will come back for more. It’s just easier to go to a restaurant where they ONLY serve healthy meals.That is why I am trying to limit my time on YouTube, and that is why I wanted to create my own podcast player with solely audio I was interested in listening to, without the irresistible content I don’t want to consume being presented to me.
Because for me, it worked like this: I’d start the day going through the videos YouTube proposed, and I selected ones that appealed to me and put them on my Watch Later playlist, and then I listened to that playlist while drawing. It did serve a purpose as a trigger for my creative habit; choose videos, and then draw after that. But I easily lost half an hour to an hour just selecting videos I wanted to listen to, because most weren’t really suited to just listening to, many were informed by my previous watching habits, not listening habits.
With my podcast player, at least, that is not the case. The playlist is already there. Almost all, if not all, episodes suited to listen to while drawing.
I do of course still listen to YouTube videos. For one, it is second to none when it comes to free educational material, especially material you can listen to while doing something else, so I find myself still using YouTube for that, specifically. For that, it is still the best. But I now try to avoid the clickbait stuff on that platform and prefer to go for the for entertainment or human interest value that podcasts offer instead. Podcasts also go at a much calmer, much more pleasant conversational pace.
So, wander into my bookstore-like podcast player, refreshed with new items every day, almost all of them good, and listen! See if they suit you. It’s free, what do you have to lose. It’s not a big time-investment! And, arguably, and amazingly, the simple randomizer algorithm I am using is better than the advanced algorithms that use heuristics and advanced statistical models that the big platforms use. But see for yourself!
You can check out the podcast player on the Practice Drawing This website. There, you can browse through the episodes, and have one episode play for you! Unironically, you can also listen to my podcast episodes like this one on YouTube. It’s not a competition, really. But I was really happy to discover that that one change to the podcast player, where I can see the playlists first, and theoretically choose an episode, made me want to use it and now I have an alternative.
Yours sincerely,
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