[HN Gopher] Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations ___________________________________________________________________ Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations Author : aww_dang Score : 281 points Date : 2021-10-16 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (news.cornell.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (news.cornell.edu) | thepasswordis wrote: | Has pandora licensed their music DNA engine to anybody? | | Pandora recommendations have always been 1000x better than | anybody else. It's not even a comparison. | zz865 wrote: | Yeah I was wondering if Pandora had a patent on channels based | on likes/dislikes. | blondin wrote: | oh and for streaming platforms. sometimes, it's just because that | song you recommended (and started playing) should not be played | after the one that just finished because it ruins the mood. this | has nothing to do with the song itself. | | so again, reducing it to like/dislike buttons is missing a great | deal. | blackearl wrote: | I never used Spotify but I've been happy with Deezer, which does | have a "don't recommend this song" and "don't recommend this | artist", plus a "change mood" option which is helpful if I'm | feeling more phonk than funk | lifeisstillgood wrote: | I wrote a blog post some twenty years ago (good luck finding it) | but the basic point was I went and Googled "Martin Luther King" | and the third item was hosted on Stormfront (neo Nazi hosting | site - IIRR cos no one else would host the sort of stuff on it). | | I surmised that some academic papers were linking to this and | Google chose that as a positive recommendation. | | I remember realising then that what we needed was not just a link | but a standrdised way of conveying attributes on the link | (including not recommended). | | As everyone now infers from behaviour (time on page etc) but I | still think there must be value in "this resource has this | meaning to me and is important enough that i am labelling it" | omega3 wrote: | I've deleted my Spotify account after noticing that the | recommendations algorithm is useless.I don't understand how there | can be regression in that regard from soulseek, what.cd network | graphs, last.fm or even radio stations. Seriously, how hard is it | for Spotify to hire some music heads to put together playlists | for people. | wly_cdgr wrote: | This is the #2 feature I most want in every music streaming app | | (The feature I most want is an interface for tweaking the rec | algo to my liking - at minimum, for being able to crank up its | adventurousness. Rec algos are depressingly conservative as a | rule, I guess because most customers are the kind of people who | eat at McDonald's when they travel abroad, stay at package | resorts, and complain movies have gone to shit because they can't | find anything they like on Netflix or Hulu) | Groxx wrote: | I have really been hoping for a spotify-API-driven recommendation | engine to improve this kind of thing. Which is why I've been | scrobbling to last.fm for over a decade. | | One algorithm will never work for everyone. Even if it's one of | the best _in aggregate_ , that doesn't mean it's not awful for | me. It's not feasible (nor does it make business sense) for | Spotify to identify and build the best system for each individual | user, so I really don't expect them to do more than optimize for | the majority. | mjmsmith wrote: | Me too. I still find more interesting stuff by following | last.fm recommendations than anywhere else. Apple Music knows | the 10k songs that are in my library and its suggestions are | still meh. | capex wrote: | Won't Spotify be able to tell dislikes by how quickly someone | skips to the next song? | klyrs wrote: | An option to hide all podcasts would significantly improve | spotify's recommendations. I don't listen to podcasts (though I | have accidentally clicked on one, when a podcast interviewed a | musician I like... blech). Why is my screen filled with podcasts | multiple times per day? I like the music recommendations, "so and | so artist radio," etc., but they make me hunt for them. | | Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I only like | listening to one at a time. I don't want a rap mix to be invaded | by a Bach sonata. And yet... | oriolid wrote: | I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify and I still have | them on my home screen, so I think that it's hardcoded, not a | generated recommendation. | | The probably autogenerated daily mixes have been surprisingly | non-bad for me. Nothing like rap mix invaded by Bach, but the | "classic rock" mix sometimes has Ghost that doesn't really | sound that out of place. | [deleted] | slig wrote: | My guess is that they don't have to pay rights for the | podcasts, so for them it's a win/win if you spend your | attention on their app listening to free content. | underwater wrote: | It's probably that they can get exclusive podcasts, but not | exclusive music. They want podcasts to be something that | locks you into Spotify. | klyrs wrote: | I mean, I have a paid account... the biggest win for them is | when I forget to turn the tunes on when I sit down to my | desk. | bkraz wrote: | I agree. Spotify acknowledged the request to remove podcasts | from the home screen in June of this year: | https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Po... | Keep adding votes and pressuring them. | klyrs wrote: | Awesome! Thanks for sharing that. | fpgaminer wrote: | Seriously. I listen to podcasts, but I'm not going to do it | through Spotify, who's working to build a walled garden around | a traditionally open media. I'm also not interested in Joe | Rogan, which they _constantly_ plaster my front page with. | | I did try a Spotify podcast once. It was on my recommended list | and was called daily dad jokes or something. Figured it was | worth a quick laugh. Well it turned out to be a bot podcast. | They set up a bot to rip jokes from Reddit, push them through | TTS, and dump it into a Spotify podcast. | | No thanks. | | Meanwhile, Apple Podcasts, my go to, works great, doesn't spam | me, and even added a feature where you can pay for a no-ads | version of a podcast. Worked seemlessly. | cletus wrote: | I wonder if you really need a like or dislike button. I'm | increasingly convinced they're both being used wrong. If you're | listening to a random stream of songs there are only really two | actions by the user that matter: | | 1. They keep listening. This is about the best "like" signal | (IMHO); and | | 2. They skip to the next song. This is effectively a "dislike". | | Both can be situational not absolute too. But what does | like/dislike gain you beyond those two signals? Liking something | requires the user to do something but users only really do | something when they don't like what's happening. Requiring | explicit action to keep playing songs like the current one seems | somehow backwards. | max68 wrote: | That's not true. I like the beginning of some songs, especially | when listening to 20 min+ classical pieces, but not the end. A | skip in that case doesn't mean I don't like it, but that I | don't want to finish it. | AtNightWeCode wrote: | First, Spotify likes have been broken since forever, things you | not liked end up as liked tracks. Second, it is obvious that the | recommendations are mostly based on what you previously listen | to. Hence, all parents are spammed with kids songs. I think they | made a fix for that now though. | | People does not act according to there believes and I have a hard | time thinking that votes would beat history when it comes to mass | consumption of music. Down votes are in general also known to | cause problems. | | For me, Spotify recommendations are by far the best | recommendations on any entertaining platform I use. I use them | all the time. Compare it with Youtube for instance were music | recommendations are repetitive and mostly irrelevant. | ardit33 wrote: | Spotify had both thumbs up and thumbs down button a while ago. It | even asked why do you thumb down something: | | Wrong Rec Do not like the artist/show less Do not like this song | Heard it too many times/pause for a bit | | etc... | | It got removed... as the whole functionality (Radio) got phased | out, and the new stuff didn't incorporate it. | | Employees changed, and moved on to other companies, and the new | that came didn't think it will improve things. etc... and the | feature got forgoten. | | I think a lot of people in here are asking a 'reset my | recommendations' feature. And that did exist as well at some | point. Not sure why it got removed/it is not in production. | notyourwork wrote: | You might be on to something with the idea that it was there it | was removed. I might presume it was removed because data showed | that customers don't use it. The rest of this thread seems to | think otherwise. | | The idea of resetting recommendations is a minority feature ask | from customers as well and I wish companies (including my own) | handled that better. Sadly its a pretty expensive project for | such a minority stake. | lethologica wrote: | Radio functionality is still there but it's a shell of what it | used to be. I find it absolutely useless now actually because | all it ever seems to do is play music I've already added to my | library. | saltedonion wrote: | " Piki selects music from a database of roughly 5 million songs | and incentivizes users by giving them $1 for every 25 songs they | rate. The Piki interface plays a song, and then gives the | listener the ability to rate it after different amounts of time. | Specifically, the user can "dislike" the song after 3 seconds, | "like" the song after 6 seconds and "superlike" it after 12 | seconds." | | These people are training on a completely different set of | features than what Spotify is using. For example, listen time is | likely to be a important feature where a short time or a skip | will be a pretty good proxy for a dislike. | | In other words, the authors conclusions are conditioned on only | using the features outlined in the article, like, dislike, and | super like. And I'm not sure it will generalize for Spotify. | Oddskar wrote: | Of course they can't add this: they're too busy rebuilding the UI | so the (I assume) new Art Director can climb the corporate | ladder. | californical wrote: | Yup - cancelled my Spotify account a year ago, after they | changed the UI for the 15th time, making features that I wanted | to use harder, and pushing things on me that I don't want | (podcasts). And introducing bugs constantly in some of the non- | default features that I used a lot (eg. changing playlist sort | order was broken at one point). Add to that their shuffle | playing the same ~20% of songs in my playlists, and never | hearing the other 80%, for some unknown reason. Then being | gaslit when I tried to report "bugs". | | It was just constantly frustrating to battle them, so I | switched to Tidal, and it's been amazing. The UI is just simple | and lets me play music, and nothing has broken in the last | year. The only changes have been minor improvements that make | it even easier to do the one thing that I want: to play music. | werdnapk wrote: | Deezer has a button to not recommend tracks. | winddude wrote: | I could swear they used to have a button that allowed you to | remove songs from playlists | deeblering4 wrote: | I think spotify should just hire DJs and run live radio shows. | | Its been a long time since the algorithmic playlists provided | anything useful for me. I find most new music by listening to | different online radio streams these days. | dagi3d wrote: | I just wish they fixed the problem with the bands disambiguation. | I just hate everytime I get a recommendation in the release radar | for a band that happens to have the same name as the one I like | but stylewise they have nothing to do with the music I usually | listen. | BLKNSLVR wrote: | Gaylord! | | One is a progressive blend of funk, hard rock, jazz, | psychedelic from New York, active in the mid 90s to 2010[0], | and the other is an anti-fascist (anti)black-metal band from | London formed in 2018[1]. | | Both are interesting, but I only like the music of the first | one. Google Play Music used to mix them together. | | [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_(band) | | [1]:https://genius.com/albums/Gaylord-band/The-black-metal- | scene... | gs17 wrote: | I'm still stuck wondering if one artist I found recently had a | very different style originally, or if it lumped two unrelated | acts together. | oriolid wrote: | They do lump unrelated acts together. It's somewhat obvious | when one of them is a current young musician and other had | their career in 60s. | n8ta wrote: | You can email them and they'll fix it. I've done this | twice. It takes about a month but they do get to it. | switch007 wrote: | My Spotify Weekly is infested with Swedish songs. I don't know if | this is because I once listened to a Swedish song or because | Spotify is Swedish. Their support told me me there is nothing | they can do | endorphine wrote: | I'm deliberate about any new music I hear, that I never use | Spotify's recommendations. I prefer doing my own research and | digging for stuff that I might like. | loudtieblahblah wrote: | I actually wish most networks had a rating system than up/down. | | Including social media. | notyourwork wrote: | I work in this industry and actually we've found from online | experimentation customers generally don't want to tell you they | dislike something. The expectation is customers get what they | like (relevant) and sometimes they want to express stronger | affinity for specific things. The converse hasn't shown to be | true. | | Generally customers don't have a clear picture of how their | explicit signals impact recommendations. Though some customers | have shown desire to want to manage these signals. | | Edit: one other consideration is disliking can usually be | inferred from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20 | seconds for example can train a model as well as incorporating an | explicit dislike button. | soylentnewsorg wrote: | You are exhibiting google's mistake, caused by over educated | people with zero real experience thinking they know better. Or, | I should correct that - some code they wrote knows better than | the complex brain of the actual person. This results in "AI" | (big if/then loop) trying to figure it out, and completely | blocking any input from the customer. | | Here's the issue with "inferred from other activity." You know | how you can find out? Give the customer a way to tell you. And | no - you cannot "infer from other activity." | | >Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can | train a model... | | ..to be wrong. You know when I usually skip a song after 20 | seconds? When I've heard it too much, or just heard it on | youtube on my laptop an hour ago. In a couple of days I'll want | to hear it again. The reason I heard it too much, is I like the | song. Your AI though - if I skip this favorite song of mine a | couple of times, will now block it and all other songs like it. | The literal opposite of what I want. | | What this results in, is you have an inferior product, your | customers leave, then you leave and go screw up another | company's product without ever learning your lesson. | djhn wrote: | I don't disagree with you but that last bit was quite | unnecessary. | soylentnewsorg wrote: | That last part is the most important point - the main | point. Your comment shows the exact issue as the "you don't | need a dislike button because our AI knows better." You | read my post, you read all the comments on here with users | either jumping through hoops or ditching the product, you | read the comment like what I replied to saying "we know | what you need better than you do." | | That last bit is a person thinking some crap code they | wrote can figure out why someone doesn't want to listen to | a song at a particular time. They ignore all the inputs | into that decision - how tired they are, what day they had, | are they angry at something, have they heard it on another | medium recently. Then ignore all that data they don't have, | and have the AI make the decision: did you skip after 20 | seconds? If you did, let's cut this genre out of your | playlist. | | This little thing, destroyed spotify's recommendation | product. The people in charge of this, are going to destroy | everything they touch, because they think their little | piece of code, is smarter than the user, about what the | user wants. You know, because the user can't code. | | People making these decisions - well all I can say is I've | met them. I've been personal friends with some. They have | been passed up for jobs when I get called for a reference | check. Because once they're on your team, they'll destroy | your product, so they can feel personally superior. | | So that last part is very necessary, because it's an | extremely serious issue, exactly as I put it. But in your | opinion it's not, so let's cut that part out because it's | not necessary for what I was saying. Because you know | better than me what I was trying to say. | | <dislike> | spurgu wrote: | Not necessarily, if he otherwise were to leave and go screw | up another company's product without ever learning his | lesson. | notyourwork wrote: | > What this results in, is you have an inferior product, your | customers leave, then you leave and go screw up another | company's product without ever learning your lesson. | | I'm not sure what you're suggesting and I don't need to | qualify my experience in the software industry or within the | domain of recommenders and personalization. | soylentnewsorg wrote: | I did not suggest anything. I very clearly stated what I | stated, in plain English that is very easy to understand. | Your qualifications are irrelevant. Your point of view on | the issue we are discussing is wrong for long-term product | success, and destroys the hard work others have put into | the idea, in order to feel personally superior to your | users. I don't know how more plainly I can put it for you | if you had trouble understanding that. I do believe however | that not understanding something, is not something that has | ever prevented you from action or strong and wrong opinions | on a subject matter. | notyourwork wrote: | You're speaking as if you work beside me and have a clue | about anything in the music industry. There's a reason | Spotify doesn't but uses to have dislike buttons more | accessible. I'm not sure why you are disagreeing with me | but there's no need to speak down to someone because of | different perspective. I have real world data and work in | recommenders I'm not sure what your background is. | henriquez wrote: | You have real world data but it's not at all clear that | you've been interpreting it correctly. | didibus wrote: | Not OP, but I think they're suggesting to spend a bit more | time listening to customers, and a bit less time thinking | that you know better what they want then they do | themselves, even if you believe that your experience and | expertise would make it that you do. | | I'm using the impersonal "you" here. Don't know if you do | that specifically, but OP seems to complain about software | workers who do have this tendency, and seems to think that | eventually leads to losing the customer. | greggman3 wrote: | This and your responses below remind can be applied to | handicapped parking or handicapped ramps (ie, they aren't used | by most users therefore we shouldn't have them). | | I prefer and use the dislike button when it exists. I don't | care that 51% or 99% of users don't use it. Further, I want to | send a concrete signal. Skipping a song doesn't mean I don't | like it. It might just be that I didn't want to hear that | particular song right now. Even if I skip it 10 times in a row | that doesn't mean I don't like it. | laserlight wrote: | > we've found from online experimentation customers generally | don't want to tell you they dislike something. | | I'm curious. Can you tell what kind of experiments you ran and | what results you got? | yuliyp wrote: | It's honestly really stressful using systems which do this. I | have to worry about the signals I'm sending to the system all | the time. Did I hover over that clickbait too long? Did I alt- | tab while a song I liked was playing? Did I accidentally click | like on something? Did I misclick onto the wrong song? | | Sure I might enjoy some clickbaity content every once in a | while, but that doesn't mean I want the system to show me more | of it, _even if_ that will lead to me watching more things. | solarkraft wrote: | > Though some customers have shown desire to want to manage | these signals | | Let me be one of those. I want to be able to control the | algorithm in all of its parameters, but even the ability to | control the values for new/familiar and how far to stray from | the current genre would be very welcome. | syshum wrote: | >>>one other consideration is disliking can usually be inferred | from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds | for example can train a model | | GOD NOOOOOO | | that would be terrible, there are all kinds of time where I | will skip a song because I do not want to Listen to it RIGHT | NOW, not because I do not like it or never want to listen to it | ever again... | | Music is very emotional, some times you just do not want to | listen to X at the moment, 30 mins later you might. | newsbinator wrote: | Yesterday I tried to book a plane ticket on eDreams and no | matter which card/bank I used I got a bank authorization error. | | So I tried to contact eDreams, which requires a trip reference | number. | | Since I couldn't pay them for a plane ticket, I didn't have a | trip reference number. So all their ticketing and phone tree | systems would hang up on me. | | eDreams customers, evidently, don't want to contact them | without having a trip reference number. And they know this for | sure because they've never had a customer contact them without | one. | marginalia_nu wrote: | I had to keep deleting my Spotify account because my | recommendations kept getting contaminated with music genres I | didn't like that were impossible to get rid of. Listening to | the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my | recommendations. I would have very much liked a dislike button, | or at least a "forget everything you think you know about | me"-button. | | Now it ended up with me getting rid of Spotify, because of this | and other frustrations. | 1_player wrote: | I keep hearing from people how good is Spotify "Discovery" | playlist. I've been a paid customer for 5+ years and their | recommendations have a hit rate of 2%. I listen to a lot of | different genres, artists, mostly dictated by my mood. Today | it was some easy Dire Straits song, yesterday QOTSA, the | other day some psytrance. So Spotify recommends all genres in | the same playlist, creating an awful cacophony of songs that | don't flow into one another. | | Spotify recommendation system is very bad in cases like mine | apparently. It's so bad I keep listening to the same old | songs instead of discovering something new, which is why I'm | no longer a customer until they improve their AI. | newsbinator wrote: | Same here. I like Christopher Tin (e.g. Baba Yetu) and | therefore for 6 years I've had no way to tell Spotify I | don't like 8-bit video game music. | | No amount of skipping or "I don't like this artist" seems | to convince Spotify to stop offering me variations of 8-bit | Tetris themes or MULTIPLE 8-bit Cowboy Bebop Tank! theme | variations per every single Discover Weekly. I'd be | thrilled to even get a 2% hit rate on music I like. | | Seriously Spotify: two separate "Tank!" versions per | Discover Weekly is too many. | breakfastduck wrote: | I listen to a LOT of different genres of music and their | Discover reccomendations (not the playlists, the actual you | like X artist you might like X) are absolutely brilliant. | Got to be approx 50-60% hit rate. | | It seems to differ wildly between people - I've heard | plenty of people making the same case as you, but many that | have the same as me. It never appears to be 'its ok', its | either 'brilliant' or 'terrible'. I've been using Spotify | for 10+ years at this point, so maybe that makes a | difference? | notyourwork wrote: | Without specifics I cannot guess as to your specific case but | in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So | exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter that | most customer's have no use for and won't use. | | In general, you had to be doing something to be getting | recommendations so there is some action that when most | customer's do demonstrates a high probability that you will | like some genre and it just so happens you don't. | toofy wrote: | Each of the comments that mirror yours illustrate a major | problem we have in the tech sphere--assuming _we_ know | better what the end user needs therefor we don't listen to | the actual user. In our defense, we're _very_ disconnected | from the end users. | | I've done some work with a couple disaster organizations in | the past and we continually get massive praise and thanks | from the victims of these disasters. The actual victims | have the same praise over and over again: Unlike the red | cross, salvation army, and FEMA we actually ask them what | they (the victims) need. We don't assume they need water | and and a tarp, we assume they know whether or not they | already have those things. Often the victims need diapers, | help with flood mold remidiation, a chainsaw to cut limbs | from their street so they can get their cars out so they | can go help the neighbors a few streets over etc.... They | know what is prohibiting them from getting out to help | others much better than we. | | When people are telling us what they need, we should listen | to them and we should actively try to avoid our tendencies | towards " _I_ know better what _you_ need." | | I have a couple friends who work on recommendation | algorithms full time and in their defense, they're fully | aware how terrible the recommendations are--I still get my | music recommendations from friends, from the local music | store employees, and friends who work in music venues-- | their recommendations are infinitely better. | marginalia_nu wrote: | > in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So | exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter | that most customer's have no use for and won't use. | | A feature does not need to be used often to be useful. | | Take a fire extinguisher for example. Going by this logic, | since most people will never even touch a fire extinguisher | and most of them are never actually used, we should get rid | of them because they're a cause of clutter. | feanaro wrote: | I must say your dismissal of this is rather annoying. | Multiple users are telling you they are facing a real -- | and completely obvious and predictable -- problem due to | the feature not being available. In a comment section | regarding research showing it would be an improvement to | recommendations. | | Increased UI clutter due to a _single_ extra icon is _not_ | a good nor sufficient argument for not including it. | notyourwork wrote: | My dismissal is based on a many-million digit customer | base and online real world data. Sorry if a few | hackernews users feel they want a dislike button, most | users don't and if you give to them most users don't use | it. I don't mind disagreement but dismissing real world | data from this industry is sort of silly to counter with | 'because I want it you're wrong'. | Omniusaspirer wrote: | I think for technically minded or abnormal users a | dislike button would be valuable, but that's a minority | of the population and I understand why a company would | choose to focus on the larger market to the detriment of | the enthusiasts. Props for taking the heat and trying to | present this perspective. | | I personally had these same complaints and acknowledged | that I'm unusual and my needs are best served by my own | hosted solution. I'd encourage people who are unhappy | with major streaming services to roll their own if they | truly feel strongly about it- I did and I'm happier for | it. | feanaro wrote: | I'm not even saying you're wrong, I'm saying your | argument for not including it for (at the very least) a | sizeable minority is weak and somewhat silly. | laserlight wrote: | How could people dismiss real world data that you didn't | share? You only shared your interpretation of it and | people pointed to lots of ways that this interpretation | could be wrong. What data is this? Did you conduct a | survey asking people if they "want" a dislike button? Or | did you just measure usage frequency of the dislike | button and decided that people didn't want it because it | wasn't used as frequently as the like button? How could | low usage frequency mean users don't "want" it? | Oddskar wrote: | I disagree that your reasoning is entirely sound. It's a | bit of an elitist point of view I suppose; but | fundamentally I don't think all customers are created | equally in terms of importance. One could even in this | day and age call some of the more important ones | "influencer" or something similar. | | While the general customer base might not be served by | this feature, what if a subset of the customer base | enjoys this feature to an _extraordinary_ extent? Maybe | it fixes a lot of problems they have with the service; | and negates a lot of complaints they otherwise would have | posted. | | Would it still not be the correct choice to "clutter the | UI" with this? | | I don't think it's as easy of a choice like you're trying | to make it. | | But I could also be jaded by the fact that Spotify for | years has trying to pull me into listening to all kinds | of odd European folk music that I have no interest in | what-so-ever. | chillingeffect wrote: | What industry just out of curiosity? I see dislikes used | judiciously in youtube and reddit fwiw | notyourwork wrote: | Music but I don't work for Spotify currently. | breakfastduck wrote: | I absolutely love it when people working on a product tell | their customers that they don't need a feature they're all | asking for and that would clearly improve the experience, | just because not everyone uses it all the time. | simion314 wrote: | > absolutely love it when people working on a product | tell their customers that they don't need a feature | they're all asking for and that would clearly improve the | experience, just because not everyone uses it all the | time. | | We need a name for this, personally I call it GNOME | mentality but probably is bad name since most developers | are not familiar with GNOME (though the file picker issue | get on top HN a lot ) | the_only_law wrote: | > Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably | ruin my recommendations. | | Similarly any app or website that pulls "top artists" from | Spotify tends to include stuff I listens to a bit several | years ago, but never stuff I've listened to nonstop for | months. | 0134340 wrote: | Yes that's very frustrating. I'm scared to even listen to new | music on it because I'd try to use it for discovery but it | would mistake what I listen to for what I like. Besides that | it hardly recommends me any new music anyway. I now just use | youtube for discovery. | marginalia_nu wrote: | They should add an incognito mode or something. | | You could even do this maliciously. Send someone a Spotify | link to a Steely Dan song and a Skrillex song, and now | yacht rock and dubstep will follow them around until they | delete their account (I'm assuming the intersection between | those fan-bases is vanishingly small). | Oddskar wrote: | That already exists. | | Profile > Private Session | marginalia_nu wrote: | Doesn't that just hide your activity from other people? | Oddskar wrote: | From their support docs: | | _Note: Anything you listen to in a Private Session may | not influence your music recommendations, e.g. Discover | Weekly._ | vanilla_nut wrote: | High school me would have been very offended to be | labeled "vanishingly small." | | But you're not wrong. | | By the way, I believe Spotify _does_ have a private mode, | which at least blocks your plays from showing up in the | social pane and on your profile. But I'm not sure if it | cuts them out of your recommendations. | | Please, dear God, Spotify: just because I listened to the | Hamilton soundtrack once does not mean that I want to | hear it every week in Discover Weekly and multiple times | per Duo playlist, because Lin-Manuel Miranda is | apparently a genre of himself. | oriolid wrote: | > Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can | train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike | button. | | So, basically if I dislike a song but want to give it a chance | and then decide that you want to never hear it again, your | industry thinks that I liked it. That explains a lot. | user-the-name wrote: | > one other consideration is disliking can usually be inferred | from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds | for example can train a model as well as incorporating an | explicit dislike button. | | This is nonsense. The fact that I skip a song does not mean I | don't like it _in general_ , it means I don't want to hear it | right now. Music taste changes with mood and situation. If you | treat a skip as "I don't ever want to hear this again" you will | collect absolute garbage data, and if I know you are doing | this, it will make your app unusable because I can't do normal | everyday actions without ruining my recommendations. | notyourwork wrote: | It depends right. If you skip a song everytime its played in | a sequence is a stronger indication of dislike compared to | skip it once but listening to it a few times. The point is | there is more to context and recommenders than a adding a | dislike button and having a magically awesome recommender. | oriolid wrote: | Have you read about illusion of control (search for | elevator door button for one well known example)? If we | take the idea that recommendations are really hard and | dislike button doesn't help at face value, wouldn't it | still improve the user experience to give them the illusion | that they can directly affect the recommendations? | | I'm not really convinced about recommendations being hard, | though. Pandora could do them a long time ago, Netflix had | good recommendations at one point but not since they | dropped the star ratings and at some point Amazon wasn't | that bad either. | rednalexa wrote: | Is this within a global context or a local one? Liking a song | in Spotify is global - Spotify then adds it to a list of liked | songs. | | But from my experience with Pandora, radio stations were | localized. Liking a song did add it to a list somewhere, yes, | but disliking a song just meant that a particular radio station | on Pandora wouldn't have a song in that particular style, and | other stations did not seem to be affected by this. | | In other words, what you want to listen to, for me, seemed to | be very contextual. And since I felt my dislikes were captured | in a context (radio station), I didn't have any qualms | disliking frequently using Pandora. | | And my experience with Pandora for song discovery has always | been much better. | ics wrote: | A problem I have with the inferred dislike is that when I skip | a song it's only something I dislike half the time. The other | half I'm simply not in the mood to hear it, maybe for another | 10 minutes or another 10 months. The result has been that I've | become more willing to listen to certain genres on another | platform (say Youtube) because it won't contaminate the | prevailing mood which I want the main service to recommend. | notyourwork wrote: | That's a good point and the next evolution recommenders try | to do is to become contextual. There may be songs you like at | dinner or on weekends but not vice versa. These types of | things like time of day, device and other types of data | points can make a recommender more precise. | ozzythecat wrote: | > Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can | train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike | button. | | How do you know I dislike the song? Instead, maybe I just heard | it (or a similar song) on your platform or elsewhere outside of | your app and don't want to listen to it again right now? | | I guess you could try to build a more complex model that | determines what songs or music I like at what times of the day | or what day of the week, or based on what I just listened to. | | IMO this is rampant in FAANG companies. We create complex | solutions to problems that didn't really exist and pat | ourselves on the back when our experiment show positive | results. | | The experiment might show you some metric (total time in app, | play time at whatever percentile, etc) increased. Great! Now we | launch the model in production for all customers and pat | ourselves on the back. Meanwhile, the actual experience became | shittier. A few promotions come out of this, and we continue | living in the bubble. | | Alright, end of rant. | notyourwork wrote: | The paper is making an obvious claim. If I have data showing | positive and negative affinity, that will perform better than | a model which just has positive day. I don't find this very | surprising but my point is in practice exposing dislike | buttons to customers are a CX that is hardly ever used. So | the point that a model will perform better with data that | customer's rarely offer up to your platform makes their claim | moot in my opinion. | corin_ wrote: | I downvoted your comment to demonstrate that I disagree | with you. | | I've heard some good arguments against allowing users to | show dislikes/downvotes as well as likes, but I've not | heard your argument before and it doesn't strike me as | accurate. Less used than the positive direction, sure, but | still significantly used when available. | notyourwork wrote: | Netflix, Youtube and reddit aren't the same medium as | short lived music streaming is. Streaming music is a show | lived precision game of guessing what's relevant. There | is a lot of it depends scenarios, are we showing | recommendations on a landing page, are we sequencing | songs in a station or are we ordering results on a search | page. The CX context is a big part of how you can use | signals to benefit the customer. | | My argument isn't an argument so much as a from real | world data in this industry at a major industry | competitor that customer's don't use the dislike button | enough to justify it taking over your CX. Using co- | occurrences of playback across a customer segment and | combining that with likes or other signals is good | enough. | [deleted] | Groxx wrote: | Skipping doesn't imply dislike, though it does correlate | (because the reverse _is_ generally true, people skip songs | they dislike). But I routinely see skip mentioned as non- | downvote sources of dislike information. | | Easily half of the times I skip it's because I don't want it | _right now_. Some of my favorite songs reproduce absolutely | horribly in a car on a highway for example, because the | surrounding noise utterly destroys subtleties. So maybe you add | "but it's not a downvote if it's hearted or otherwise | positively ranked"... but many other times I'm just not in the | mood for [a song I had never encountered until now]. | anticensor wrote: | Correlation does not imply causation, and neither does | causation imply correlation. | marcinzm wrote: | The dislike button is if nothing else a sanity check for | someone to have control if your model goes haywire. | Realistically it will go haywire in a non-trivial number of | cases. If every month your model goes haywire for 1% of users | then you may see dislike used 1% of the time. That's tiny, | right? However without it those users may leave and then next | month another 1% will be hit and so on. Users remember the bad | things a lot more than the good things so they will remember | your AI f-ups and the lack of a way to fix it. | | The problem with data driven UX is that the data is often short | term (ab tests are expensive) and doesn't cover long term | complex user impact. | | Edit: For example, I've seen a lot of Etsy users complain about | their front page being filled with NSFW recommendations and no | way to get rid of them. I doubt they'll be using Etsy much in | the future. | VBprogrammer wrote: | Oh, what I'd give for a dislike button. I tend to use Spotify to | listen to nursery rhymes in the car while traveling with our | toddler. This doesn't mean I need to have a daily mix full of | nursery rhymes and there is no way to tell Spotify that. | jhoechtl wrote: | It would improve any social network. Leaving dislike out is like | voting without a Ney button | carvking wrote: | Wouldn't it be racist ? | spurgu wrote: | I'm sure a lot of artists would be offended. | hooande wrote: | I could swear that spotify had a dislike button, at least on the | android mobile app. I remember using it on songs that I found | annoying. It would continue integrating them into playlists | anyway. The thumbs down dislike was removed from the app years | (?) ago. I didn't use it very often, which is why I assumed they | got rid of it | simlevesque wrote: | I'll never use Spotify again. My account was hacked by a latino | and now my recommendations is 100% latin music. They told me | there is nothing they can do to fix this. My recommendations are | broken and my only option is to create another account, cancel my | subscription, buy it again... Not gonna happen. | soneca wrote: | It happened to me with someone that loves Simple Plan. I only | noticed in those end-of-the-year lists that Spotify prepares. A | bunch of Simple Plan stuff on most played tracks. | | I changed my password and it took me almost an year of | listening to my songs to Spotify stop recommending me Simple | Plan and similars. | bdcp wrote: | I keep getting recommended German music. I'm not German. | gs17 wrote: | Listening to metal gets a lot of recommendations for me in | languages I don't understand much of. You would think Spotify | would have a way to not change languages between songs at | least. | plorkyeran wrote: | Metal fans who listen to things beyond the mainstream hits | tend to listen to a lot of music in languages they don't | speak due to how much of the best metal out there isn't in | English. If you listen to a lot of bands whose fans listen | to music in other languages then I'd expect you to get a | lot of recommendations in other languages. | Oddskar wrote: | The algorithm clearly says that you're German. Maybe you | should just embrace it. | eachro wrote: | Hmm, I had a similar situation with an ex-partner contaminating | my recommendations. I emailed support and it was pretty easy to | reset my recs to a blank slate. | smoldesu wrote: | When this happened to me, I just changed my password. Seems to | have worked so far, though it doesn't filter out Latin music. | jcastro wrote: | I found out you can break your recommendations without losing | control of your account. | | I listened to one podcast episode and it's been stuck on my | home screen for two months. I've tried listening to it, | ignoring it, unsubscribing, deleting (you can't!). It's just | there forever now. | | And of course, that means it's always recommending related | podcasts all the time so most of my homepage is now filled with | this stuff and I have no way to remove it. | jzb wrote: | I imagine they're pushing podcasts because they aren't paying | royalties on most or any of them. | [deleted] | vanilla_nut wrote: | I've never listened to a podcast ever on Spotify. Refuse to, | given their approach of trying to wall off podcasts in their | own app. | | I've had an entire top-level list of podcasts recommended to | me for over a YEAR now. I will never use it, but I have to | constantly scroll past it and dodge podcast recommendations | in new podcast + music playlists (that aren't clearly marked) | as well. | | I used to _love_ Spotify. I got so many friends to sign up, I | discovered so much music in my Discover Weekly, I convinced | friends to switch from all kinds of other platforms, I built | collaborative playlists with friends... | | but the recommendations seem stuck in a rut for me, probably | because they can't handle the size of my library (hundreds of | artists and thousands of albums that I listen to regularly). | The product doesn't respect me. I'm actively researching ways | to host my own music library and use something else for | discovery. Recommendations welcome so this frog can escape | this slowly boiling pot. | lethologica wrote: | Argh, I've been having this exact issue too. Worse still, | it's a thumbnail and title I would really rather not be | plastered front and centre of my home screen all the time! | Absolutely frustrating. | fidesomnes wrote: | woke is broke | campground wrote: | I'm genuinely confused by people who complain about Spotify's | recommendation algorithm. I have eclectic, often obscure tastes, | and I've found it to be an incredible way to discover new music. | I think you do have to prime the engine a bit. I "like" a lot of | albums and songs. Every time I hear something new that I like I | press the little heart button. Same when I discover music outside | of Spotify (I listen to WFMU a lot). I make a lot of playlists. | And I use the radio feature all the time. Click on the ellipses | next to any song, artist, or album and you can "Go to radio" and | Spotify will spin off a playlist of related music. I'm | continually discovering new things that way. My Discover Weekly | and Release Radar playlists are always full of great stuff. | hk__2 wrote: | The radio feature is awesome to discover new music. You can | make a short playlist of a few songs you like, and start a | radio from that. You can later tweak the playlist to change | what you get in the radio while it's playing. | Yuioup wrote: | Yeah if I could dislike Coldplay a million times I would. | [deleted] | dfdz wrote: | I have seen this article before. The author are so close to | understanding why Spotify does NOT need a dislike button | | >To dislike a song is easy - to like one, you have to actually | invest time in it. | | Likewise, to detect if a user dislikes a song is easy since the | user will not invest time listening to it: the skip button is the | dislike button. | | In contrast, detecting if a user likes a song is more difficult: | there needs to be a way to distinguish between a user enjoying a | song and the user not paying attention (in that case the user | will provide no input whether they like the song or not.) | oriolid wrote: | Skip could also mean "I like this song, but I want to hear | something different at the moment". | verve_rat wrote: | But there is a difference between "I don't feel like this now" | and "I hate this" that skipping a track doesn't capture. | rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: | Surely they have some context as to what "now" means? | | I read that YouTube Music recommends different music | depending on time of day, whether I'm at work / home / in the | car, and even takes the weather into account. I'd be | surprised if Spotify didn't have some context awareness as | well. | oriolid wrote: | I haven't noticed that Spotify would do anything like that. | Instead they're pushing their podcasts and curated | playlists. To be honest, I've thought that they're more | like banner ads on websites rather an attempt at custom | recommendation. | jdsully wrote: | Sometimes your just not in the mood for a specific song or | genre. A skip doesn't imply I'd never want to hear a song | again. | didibus wrote: | No, I often have fear of skipping because I think it might | teach the algos I don't like it, when it's just not what I want | to listen to now. | | Ideally, they should let me like, dislike, skip, hate, | completely block artists, and allow me to like multiple times, | to teach them the ones I like over and over from the ones I | like a little. | greggman3 wrote: | I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who | proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account. I wanted | to remove her music from my history so spotify would hopefully | not recommend her music to me but there is no way to delete your | history | | https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/2021-how-do-we... | | Account deleted. I know I'm not the norm but Spotify has never | done a good job for me recommending music, ever | MKTSPCLST wrote: | Spotify used to have a private listening feature for people to | play their music, but I've also deleted it so IDK | krn wrote: | > I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who | proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account. | | There should be an Incognito mode on every music streaming | service for this reason. | IshKebab wrote: | Yeah I made the mistake of letting my daughter watch nursery | rhymes on YouTube a few times. Guess what happened to my | YouTube Music.... | jessriedel wrote: | FYI, Google gives you some decent tools for managing your | YouTube watch history. You can search by date or title, and | you can also turn on auto-delete. | gnfargbl wrote: | Spotify has an incognito mode. | | https://support.spotify.com/us/article/private-listening/ | onkoe wrote: | It hardly matters now, but before you do anything with a guest, | you can start a private session to make sure their history is | ignored. Still a very weird feature to omit; I'd reckon that | most people would use history deletion at some point | sam_bristow wrote: | I'm in a similar situation at the moment. Somehow Spotify has | decided that I listened to a bunch of Hindu music a couple of | months ago and now over 50% of my recommended playlists and | podcasts are in that genre. | | Their refusal to let you delete history is just puzzling. | milofeynman wrote: | I have a similar problem where I play Disney music/movie music | in the car when I drive my kid to school. Every time I have to | go find "private mode" deep in the settings. Typically I just | forget. I am primarily a discover weekly and release radar | user, so it's definitely frustrating. They have basically done | almost nothing positive for users in years in terms of UX. They | tried to git rid of dislike, but brought it back because it | ruins those suggestion playlists, when you can't hide awful | songs. | nvr219 wrote: | I feel like I'm the only one that doesn't really care about | recommendation engines because I still don't use them. I get | music recommendations from friends or music journalism the way I | did pre-Pandora and it still works for me. Maybe I'm missing out | on some sick bands though. | dgellow wrote: | I expect to be an outlier here, I also never use recommendation | because I listen to the same stuff since 15+ years, and I | couldn't be happier :) | | Elder Scrolls and Castlevania OSTs (Symphony of the Night and | Super Castlevania mostly) represent at least 90% of what I | listened to during the past decade. The other 10% is Shpongle | and other soundtrack from games I enjoyed. | refracture wrote: | I feel you. I haven't paid heed to a single recommendation | Spotify has ever given me; Most of the bands I've discovered in | the last several years were by way of Reddit or word of mouth. | stuaxo wrote: | Back when lastfm still had a radio it had a ban button and that | was essential (think it got removed after getting bought) | splintercell wrote: | I think the main issue is that sometimes you just don't want the | song but other songs like that are fine, and other times you | don't want that song or any song like it. - Don't play this song | again but others like this are fine | | - Don't play songs like this again | zizee wrote: | I'd like something similar for Netflix. Let me click a "never | show me this again" button. It would unclutter the interface so | quickly. | | I suspect the reason we'll never see such a feature is because it | would be quite revealing how little content Netflix has that is | of interest to any one person, and how much filler they have. | juanitolol wrote: | Spotify does have a dislike button on their recommendation | playlists and also, Spotify's recommendations engine is by far | the best that have ever been on the market. It managed to | discover new artists that I'd have never found unless I lost | several dozen hours on Discogs. The important part is to train | recommendation playlist accordingly. | blondin wrote: | i am actually impressed to see this come out cornell. i tend to | see like and dislike buttons as too simplistic. they greatly | reduce why a user would dislike something. | | i am annoyed at youtube only allowing me to choose from "i didn't | like it" or "i have already watched it" for example. i have | thousands of other reasons. | | that's why i don't use dislike buttons. | Bluecobra wrote: | > i tend to see like and dislike buttons as too simplistic. | | Same here. I'm still a big fan of star ratings in iTunes, | though I'm not sure if they do anything or influence playback. | I have a pretty eclectic taste in music and only want to hear | certain songs once in a while and I give those songs get three | stars. (Sorry Donnie Iris if you are reading this.) | 1_player wrote: | A dislike button is too simplistic, but having no way to | dislike something is extremely bad user experience. How do you | train a recommendation engine without a negative signal? | | Sometimes I dislike something and I don't want it around | anymore. Which is the reason I've migrated to Youtube Music, | which is an inferior product, but has a dislike button. | young_unixer wrote: | Mi problema con Spotify es que cuando le hackeo la cuenta a un | gringo y escucho mi musica, a este le molestan las | recomendaciones latinas y despues de un tiempo deja de pagar la | cuenta. | schmorptron wrote: | hue hue hue hue | vadfa wrote: | How do you even handle this? You can't both be listening music | at the same time. Are you sure the gringo doesn't stop paying | because he keeps having his playback stopped? | young_unixer wrote: | It was a joke referencing another comment in this thread, but | it got flagged, so it was probably coinsidered bad taste. | approxim8ion wrote: | YouTube music has both like and dislike buttons. I don't use them | as much as I should, but I'd be interested in the results. | spondyl wrote: | I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that Spotify used to | have explicit upvote and downvote buttons like 5 years ago? | | I assume they decided they could infer the same metrics from | users skipping tracks for example | mey wrote: | The time invested in my Pandora stations keep me on that | platform. I actually really hate that they recently removed the | downvote buttons in the Android auto interface. | jerhewet wrote: | A "dislike" button would be helpful, but what I really want is a | "I already own this album / track, and your recommendation is | completely spot-on" button. | | You recommended this to me, and I agree 100% with your | recommendation. Now _that_ would be brilliant. | unstatedAnswers wrote: | Sure, it would be useful... if users used it. | | My guess is they don't. Did you use the like/dislike buttons they | tested on Spotify radio? I didn't, too much effort. | | They probably get more signal from the skip button | short12 wrote: | I've used it extensively on Pandora for probably a decade now | and it makes a station go from great to spectacular | mey wrote: | It blows my mind that some of my Pandora stations are more | than a decade old and still listened to regularly. | MaxikCZ wrote: | I would use it, and dont understand why its only avaiable in | Spotify Radio and not everywhere. I think my dislike of a song | in an album can still be utilized to refine my suggestions. | | Whats worse, there was a song that was constantly playing after | my playlist ended. No matter how many times I marked the song | as Dislike, it was always in first of 5 songs that play when | playlist finished. Made sure the song appeared nowhere in my | playlists (had to manually search in each), and neither did the | artist. After contacting support and jumping trough few | "restart app" styled suggestion, I was suggested to mark the | artist as "never play this artist". This surprised me, as I | never seen that option before. And then I understood why: its | only in mobile version. You cant solve it on PC. | | Bleh | chiefalchemist wrote: | Oh happy days :) Spotify recommendations - at least for me - are | generally useless. It feels like "here are some palatable | suggestions. You might not actually like them but we're confident | they're inoffensive (in a not at all interesting sort of way)." | Mind you my range of musical styles is wide. But I went 2 or 3 | weeks listening to Daily Mixes and heard nothing at all worthy of | my attention. | | I hope Google does similar with YouTube. Why does it keep | suggesting things I've scrolled past 5 or 10 times? | dmitriid wrote: | You know what would improve _any_ recommendation system? | | A button that says (and does) "wipe my recommendation profile | clean, and start learning recommendations from scratch". | snthd wrote: | Listenbrainz[0] looks like an interesting project for building | better (or at least more open) recommendation systems[1]. | | [0] https://listenbrainz.org | | [1] https://blog.metabrainz.org/2020/12/24/playlists-and- | persona... | hammyhavoc wrote: | Fuck Spotify's recommendations. What counts are recommendations | from people instead of algorithms. Intent is everything with | making a recommendation. If someone I know recommends me x | because y, then I know it'll be at least interesting, if not | great. | jorgesborges wrote: | So basically they're developing a product marketed to streaming | platforms to identify what's "more attractive" to consumers. The | algorithms are still optimized for increasing sales and | engagement, not improving recommendations (for the user). | | That's exactly why I'm unhappy with Spotify lately. I feel I'm | being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on what's currently in | vogue, and not just artistically but politically, with playlists | like this-gender-race supporting this-cause. I actually just want | to listen to music. | | I still use it but stumble my way through looking at related | artists while avoiding playlists and recommendations. | rumblerock wrote: | On top of that, if you listen to a wide range of genres the | attempt to shoehorn your history into 6 Daily Mixes yields some | comical results. Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana. | | Give me a home screen with 12 or more Daily Mixes that segment | my listening behavior at a finer resolution, and I'd be a lot | happier with the service. | | I understand why all the other playlists exist, but I generally | have an idea of exactly what I'm trying to listen to, so these | low effort curated playlists are pretty useless for my | listening style. | stevewillows wrote: | I've considered getting a spotify family account, using | separate accounts for major genres and one for browsing. I | have a browsing profile for Netflix so I can freely explore | without messing up the suggestions. | | For me, I listen to a lot of 40s, 50 - 60s lounge / exotica, | early to mid 90s hip hop, 80s metal, and the standard indie | stuff... then I have a bunch of chillwave and synthwave stuff | that throws another wrench in the mix. The daily mixes I get | are a total mess, much like yours. | | The genre-specific mixes they make are pretty decent, but | discovery is low. | leppr wrote: | Then you can simply find a song that matches what you're | exactly wanting to listen to and start the "song radio" from | there. For me the problem is exactly the contrary, I can't | find enough diversity in the daily mixes, it's mostly all | songs I've either explicitly "liked" or heard a couple times | before. | rumblerock wrote: | Diversity in daily mixes is an issue for sure. I do use the | song radio feature but find it's hit or miss - they usually | start off strong, but seem to lose the thread at a certain | point. | | It's a fine balance between existing liked songs and | expanding within sub-genres, but I have at least noticed | the recommendations improving over the past few years. | | I suspect it would help to port over my entire pre-Spotify | music library into Spotify to provide a bit more data, my | current library is all post-Spotify so it fails to capture | the breadth of my music taste. I've just never gotten | around to it. | nkozyra wrote: | > Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana. | | What's inherently comical about this? | | One of my least favorite experiences is having a radio | station based on a song and getting nothing but songs that | sound just like it. | | Unless you have only played 90s grunge or 70s soft rock I'm | not sure why this juxtaposition is not considered a feature. | ufo wrote: | And for those that are actually into the sort of thing, I | recommend Doobie Brothers + Linkin Park: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cXjcKTRWcg | Strs2FillMyDrms wrote: | I will never not enjoy the lack of self awareness of the | ""apolitical"" IT crowd on hacker news, amazing. | | There are lots of things to worry and complaint about in | recommendation algorithms, but the thing that's just too much | for you (*angry high heel stomp) is "political correctness". | | It's better than comedy. | | Maybe universities need to diversify their pensum a little bit | more, because it is becoming somewhat ridicule. | tibbar wrote: | With respect, your comment illustrates the issue - a burden | to reeducate people by shaping their culture. Music can make | a statement, sure, but a world where people are force-fed | curated playlists designed to mold them into some Standard | Issue set of beliefs, this is a dystopian vision. | jcims wrote: | Typically there's another p-word used to describe this. | AbrahamParangi wrote: | I think that people bristle at it in the same way that people | used to bristle at having Christian-normative culture pushed | on them. Not everyone enjoys cultural imperialism. | sabellito wrote: | Sarcasm and belittlement are a terrible way to engage in | conversation. You seem more interested in aggrandizing | yourself than to actually make a point or bring some food for | thought. | raffraffraff wrote: | I've never used Spotify or any other recommendation service. | Music is like food: it's far too important too substitute with | junk. I won't eat Subway, I won't listen to auto-generated | recommendations. I browse (and support) rateyourmusic.com, I | use the last.fm API (to find out what my neighbors are | listening to) and I listen to music for free on YouTube before | I buy it. I also heavily use tags on my purchased music so I | can easily put together a playlist matching my mood. | amelius wrote: | The problem: you don't want to be DJ-ing at work, where your | time is better spent on more important things than what music | you will listen to. | tjr225 wrote: | "More important" :P | imajoredinecon wrote: | Disagree with the premise - you don't have to sacrifice | productivity to put time into finding good music. For one, | you don't have to do your music research during working | hours. But even if you do, it doesn't mean you're trading | off productivity in order to do it. | andreilys wrote: | _you don't have to do your music research during working | hours. But even if you do, it doesn't mean you're trading | off productivity in order to do it._ | | Trying to find music when you could be focusing is by | definition, trading off productivity. | | I'd rather have an algorithm dictate what songs I want to | listen to (in order to focus) than spend an hour wading | through junk to find something i like before I start | coding. | wara23arish wrote: | 100% | | I remember seeing a promoted playlist about empowering women | voices (this is music) | | I was so confused. In literally most of the world, this isn't | even a point of contention. | snthd wrote: | They're probably trying to offset the guilt they feel from | payola[0]. | | https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist- | in... | leppr wrote: | If the product is free, you're the product. And if the | product is paid, you're also the product. | rhcom2 wrote: | "In honor of the revolution, it's half-off at the Gap" | schmorptron wrote: | Yeah, this is the exact reason I switched to Apple Music even | though I'm on Android, since their playlists (for the most | part) seem to actually be made based on what they think will be | interesting for the listeners, not what they got paid to | promote. I might be wrong though and just getting played. | j56no wrote: | similar experience here, after 12 years with spotify I had | enough of the confusing UI and poor recommendations. They | literally know all the music I like and still I don't | discover enough new music as I did just listening to the car | radio. Bought into Apple One and will see how that goes, I | just need to migrate some playlists. | ranieuwe wrote: | Did the migration last night with tune my music[1] and it | worked flawlessly. Also, they didn't want yet another | account to spam mail me for months. | | [1] https://www.tunemymusic.com/ | jdavis703 wrote: | I use Apple Music because it works well with the rest of the | ecosystem. But the official playlists just seem to resurface | what's already popular, at least for dance, electronic and | hip-hop. Whereas Spotify introduced me to new music. Maybe it | depends on what genres you listen to? | krono wrote: | Anything that can be exploited by the user for self-exploration | and discovery is being removed - for the purpose of serving | content that generates more revenue, I assume.. At first it was | subtle, but the gloves came off with the recent UI overhaul. | | Playlist search result page is just an endless grid of images | and truncated names. For the playlist duration, description, | number of songs, follower count, etc. you have to actually open | each individual playlist. Good luck finding what you were | looking for. | | More and more Spotify-fabricated content is being pushed. Most | of which contains the same limited selection of songs that | Spotify keeps feeding you over and over anyway. | | Podcasts aren't my thing, Spotify wants me to listen to them | really badly though. Majority of the ones they're suggesting | I'm not at all interested in, and sometimes some of the | podcasts they're advertising seem to contain some pretty | disturbing content. On a sidenote: I don't know who he is, or | what he does, but I hate Joe Rogan and Spotify is to blame for | it. | | There is a setting hidden under advanced that prevents messing | with the shuffle function. It is vaguely labeled "Allow smooth | transitions between songs in a playlist" and placed directly | underneath the song crossfade slider. This was done on purpose | and none is going convince me otherwise. Additionally this | setting seems to do precisely nothing at all. | | Shuffle is not random. If this is on purpose, it's not to my | benefit. Else perhaps their devs are afraid of touching the | jank script that's holding it together. Also with the Bad news, | though, this setting does nothing - it's a placebo. | | Edit: | | Almost forgot about the new artist's pages! They used to | contain consist of a long list of all songs grouped by album. | This was far too convenient for us users, so with the redesign | they simply removed the lists of songs and leaving only a grid | of albums, forcing you to go into each individual album to find | a specific song and play it play it. | | After many complaints they implemented something vaguely | resembling what we had before, but with such odd UX that it | must be sabotaged on purpose again. But of course, adding this | overview back to the artist page was out of the question. | Instead what they implemented as the only way to access this, | and I kid you not, is a plain text link in the most random | place ever. | | No one is going to use this feature if they don't know it | exists. All this just to get a reason for removing it that is | spinnable. Machiavelli would have been proud. | blacktriangle wrote: | Get a CD player. It's what I did when I got fed up with | Spotify. | psKama wrote: | That's the exact reason I switched to YouTube Music. I remember | even about 10 years ago, last.fm's algorithm on bringing songs | I would enjoy basing on previously listened/liked songs was far | more accurate than Spotify's today. | LegitShady wrote: | I think Youtube Music does a decent job on recommendations | but its android app is annoying. How does it still not have a | horizontal screen mode? | 1_player wrote: | The iOS and web app are _bad_. And knowing Google, it won't | get any better anytime soon. | aeyes wrote: | Does the algorithm of YouTube Music behave similar to | standard YouTube? YouTube (not Music) basically always | recommends the same tracks in the same order and within the | same genre bubble. It is hard to discover anything new which | makes me not want to try YouTube Music. | notatoad wrote: | This was my experience with YouTube music - no matter what | genre station I started off with, it eventually settled | back onto the same small number of currently-trending | songs. I get much more diverse recommendations from | Spotify. | ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: | My experience is the algorithm is a bit different. I have | not been on the platform for long, but my recommendations | have been great. I've also been listening to music on the | same youtube account for 10+ years, so I assume they have | alot of data. | ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: | I just switched to youtube music, its leagues better than | spotify. YouTube music seems to have a pretty solid | recommendation algorithm, and I frequently find music more in | tune with my tastes there than on spotify. Honestly, I would | not mind seeing spotify disappear. | didibus wrote: | I'm thinking of going the other way, I just dislike how YT | Music doesn't have some small feature like saving my queue | to a playlist. But perhaps I should hold out. | sillysaurusx wrote: | Fwiw, I was shocked how much better YouTube music was than | Spotify. I turned on the trial on a whim, and now I actually | miss it (it expired a few days ago). | | It was so nice that I'm seriously considering just turning | off Spotify. It's sort of interesting to analyze why we don't | --- for me, it's become unconscious habit to reach for | Spotify and not anything else. Plus a lot of other stuff | integrates well with it. | | (What if... what if we can use both? Mind asplode, it's not a | decision.) | taurath wrote: | YouTube makes recommendations around engagement metrics only | (1 political video gets you Fox News recommendations for | years), spotify still gives me plenty of small bands - I | think if you're listening to very popular music you're | screwed either ways | harles wrote: | I get mostly small bands in Spotify and I worry that | Spotify is actually bias towards them. I assume the | royalties are cheaper for smaller bands and that may factor | into recommendations. | geoduck14 wrote: | I was at a conference the other week and Spotify had a | Keynote. They talked about the tradeoff between playing | "diverse songs" and "consistent songs". It is a hard | problem to solve. | | When you start your listening session they try and predict | how long you are going going listen (based on your past | history and time of day). If you are probably going to | listen for a while, they are more risky and might play | something "different". Playing different stuff is risky | (short term) because you MIGHT not like it. Playing the | same stuff is safe (short term) because they know you will | like it - BUT people will eventually go searching for | something new, so they have to risk diversity eventually. | addandsubtract wrote: | They could just ask. I promise my answers will be more | accurate than any AI guessing for me. | chiefalchemist wrote: | Exactly. There's no reason the "personlized" Daily Mixes | can't be built/labeled to indicate "acaccuracy" rate. It | annoys me when I'm in the mood for new or different - | which is 60% of the time - and all the new Daily Mixes | feel like the day / week before. | | I'd love a personalized playlist titled "Curveballs" that | contined things different and/or challenging. | AcerbicZero wrote: | Weird, I switched to Spotify once Google Play Music (or | whatever silly name it had when Google ate songza) became | YouTube Music because I found it such a poor experience. | | Perhaps I was missing something but the change def did not | improve the recommendations - it made them drastically worse. | vanilla_nut wrote: | In my experience, Spotify's recommendations are good for a | few months, and then stick in a rut at some point for | reasons I don't understand. So you're probably in that nice | honeymoon phase where it's actually allowing you to | discover new things instead of surfacing the same 20 | artists over and over and over again. | T00TH3M00N wrote: | Haha same. I couldn't believe how much better YT Music was. | There's no going back | ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: | Its funny how much better Googles side show product is. | Shows that the internal technology is truly advanced and | capable of swiping away another company at the drop of a | hat. | jcims wrote: | I'm just trying it out now based on the recommendations | in this thread. When you start it asks you to pick some | favorite artists. The first few rows were clearly based | on artists that I've watched recently on YouTube, so it's | pulling in history (I mean...no surprise). | | Then I scrolled down a bit b/c I wanted to give it a | strong signal of what I liked. I found an artist, clicked | it, and noticed the recommendations below changed | immediately afterwards. | | So then I scrolled some more (because there were still | 95% misses), found one I liked, scrolled to see the next | row then clicked on the artist I liked above to see if it | indeed changed. | | It did. But not only that. I _love_ every artist on the | following row. Then it quickly diffuses back to noise, | but holy cow that was a bit of a spine tingler lol. | matheusmoreira wrote: | > I feel I'm being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on | what's currently in vogue, and not just artistically but | politically, with playlists like this-gender-race supporting | this-cause. | | I feel the same way. It's not just music either. I get this | feeling every time I try to consume anything. Everything is | just so fake. Like it was made just to push some silly agenda. | | "Recommendations" are ads in disguise. I already block them on | YouTube. Wish I could block them everywhere. | onion2k wrote: | _So basically they're developing a product marketed to | streaming platforms to identify what's "more attractive" to | consumers. The algorithms are still optimized for increasing | sales and engagement, not improving recommendations (for the | user)._ | | It's possible that the recommendations are both good for users | _and_ good for corporate interests. They might not work for | you, but for millions of Spotify users they seem to work. | People listen to them a lot. | | I listen to my recommended "Discover" playlists occasionally. | They're decent. They include things I haven't heard and quite | like. Maybe record labels are paying to be on them. Oh well. | Hokusai wrote: | > They might not work for you, but for millions of Spotify | users they seem to work. | | That is the most reasonable explanation. HN users are not the | average user of Spotify. | DoneWithAllThat wrote: | I've never really understood what variations of the | rejoinder "you are not the target user" are intended to | accomplish, at least in conversations like this. | | When discussing things like product strategy it makes some | (more than a little) sense. But in a conversation about | personal preference, what do you expect the reader to take | away from it? "Oh okay, sorry, I didn't realize I wasn't | meant to like this. I guess my opinion's invalid." | | Who cares who the average user is, when someone is saying | something doesn't appeal to them? Is the sentiment some | kind of scolding for not liking it? I sincerely don't | understand. | spiffytech wrote: | I think the remark is meant to address internet comments' | tendency to jump from "this product doesn't meet my | needs", to "consequently it is a bad / mismanaged | product". | Hokusai wrote: | From the original comment: "The algorithms are still | optimized for increasing sales and engagement, not | improving recommendations (for the user)." That is an | opinion about 'product strategy'. The answers, in this | context, are confirming that 'not for the user' part. I | find relevant to highlight that HN may not be the most | representative crowd in this situation. | | I do not use Spotify, nor I had for years. And I do not | like the level of influence that all those algorithms | have on the population decisions. So, it's not about | protecting Spotify but an observation to try to add | another point of view to the discussion. | twobitshifter wrote: | That's just the appeal to the majority fallacy. People may | just use Spotify because it's free with ads and they have the | hook of personal libraries to keep you stuck on the service | as a paying member. | [deleted] | loudtieblahblah wrote: | Crap like this is why, to this day, my collection is digital | files, cds, vinyl and streaming only for radio - like pandora | mdoms wrote: | The fact that Spotify doesn't optimise for discovery and | recommendations is why you use physical media which has | absolutely no mechanism for discovery and recommendation? | echelon wrote: | I want a service where I can upload my own files and easily | access them from a player interface in the browser, mobile, | etc. | | I want the ability to rate music across multiple user- | configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists | that interpolate between these. | | I want to be able to pay a fee to subscribe to music | discovery, then be able to mix these with my own library. If | I really like a track, I'd like to buy it and add it to my | collection. | | I want an open API so desktop apps can be written to use it. | Also, let me export my annotations and music library on | demand. | | Music for power users. Don't give me a single button. Give me | hundreds of them. | | I'd pay $30/mo or more for this. | oneplane wrote: | Apple Music does this for half that price. | | - Rating and tagging | | - Upload and download your own stuff if you want to | (marketed as iCloud Music Library) | | - Works offline | | - Discovery services available | | - API exists but mostly used to implement web players for | some reason, works fine in desktop apps too, on top of that | the current state of your music library is always available | as an XML file even when you don't use the API at all. | | https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi/ | loudtieblahblah wrote: | Is it a true upload or some crappy file/fingerprint | matching? | | Most of these services aren't ever true uploads and do | matching to save time, bandwidth and space. | Omniusaspirer wrote: | It's fingerprint matching, and yeah it's poorly | implemented. Most recent complaints I've seen on this | were for the fan made explicit version of Kanye's Donda. | It was basically impossible to upload since it would just | get matched to the clean version. | oneplane wrote: | Matching is optional. If a song cannot be matched, your | own copy gets uploaded instead to your private iCloud | library. | | Edit: well, it's a bit nuanced of course, you can not | match and not sync or match and sync but you can't mix | and match that configuration. So it's either sync with | matching when possible or no syncing. | andrewzah wrote: | Check out Navidrome [0]. It's the closest one that I've | found. It supports the Subsonic API so there are plenty of | mobile apps and probably some desktop ones that work with | it. I use play:Sub on iOS. | | 0: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome | raffraffraff wrote: | Unless I'm mistaken, this doesn't fulfill the | requirement: | | > I want the ability to rate music across multiple user- | configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists | that interpolate between these. | | I'd actually pay for a 3rd party metadata service that | doesn't actually provide the music at all, but just let's | me tag and rate some across all music streaming services. | I've even thought about building that (simply for myself | to begin with). I want ratings, instrument tags, mood | tags etc. Let me search for songs with 'piano + synth + | dreamy + weird' instead of throwing some stupid | recommendation my way. And use those tags to find similar | tracks across genres and decades of time, instead of just | saying "Nirvana and Pearl Jam must be the same because | they're early 90s Seattle bands". | spurgu wrote: | This looks really nice, thanks for sharing! | Fnoord wrote: | What's the advantage compared to Airsonic? | | I use Airsonic right now, it is basically Jellyfin for a | music collection. I use both of these as reliable | alternative to Netflix/.../Spotify (where ... is a | plethora of other video services such as Disney+). | loudtieblahblah wrote: | I used to host my own Java based one for a while out of my | house. Worked OK on my phone. | | The software just wasn't as good of an experience of just | having my trusty 400gb sdcard. | f1refly wrote: | funkwhale has the web interface, the subsonic api (dunno | how well that works i dont use it), you can create your own | "radios" based on genre and artist | thaumasiotes wrote: | > I want a service where I can upload my own files and | easily access them from a player interface in the browser, | mobile, etc. | | Amazon used to provide this service, but they shut it down. | consumer451 wrote: | Google Drive with a custom media player UI? | | I looked for that when Play Music got shuttered but could | not find a satisfactory solution. I even paid for one iOS | app but it wanted access to my entire drive, and maybe some | other unnecessary permissions.. so hell no. I should be | able pick one folder and that's it. | | I guess I could have made a separate Google account just | for music. | raffraffraff wrote: | I bought a jelly pro (miniscule phone), rooted it, added | some automation to autoload a music player on boot and | activate airplane mode. I added a 256gb memory card with | a lot of tunes. It's now my mp3 player. When I deactivate | airplane mode it scrobbles my played tracks and 15 | minutes later it automatically reactivates airplane mode | unless the phone is charging, in which case it's | available for wireless music sync from MusicBee. It also | powers itself off after 30 minutes of being idle. Best | damn mp3 player I've ever had. | Waterluvian wrote: | It's fascinating to hear this feedback on Spotify because I've | never used it this way. I don't let it guide anything. I just | use it as a music repository and I pick the albums and make my | own playlists. | | Do others generally find that auto play (or whatever it's | called) works well? Or does it just feel like payola radio? | intricatedetail wrote: | It's only a matter of time comment like this will decrease your | social score... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-16 23:00 UTC)