The Great Podcast Timesink

I despise podcasts. They're radio without the basic discipline of time.

Instead of providing information with precision and brevity, they tend to drone on in free form -- as if listeners have the luxury of time (and nothing better to do or get on with). And if a listener indulges the speaker(s), gets to the end, and realizes he or she has wasted 30, 20, or even 10 minutes, resentment sets in... and makes the listener leery of the next podcast they come across.

A possible rationale
For people who commute in their cars, a podcast might make sense (or, based on too many I've sampled, create a traffic hazard by putting the driver to sleep). That's one of the reasons why drive-time radio includes so many shifts in sound and tempo, however annoying some of them may be. They bring the listener back from inattentiveness.

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