[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)