14 ms·

I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on d

I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. The service itself is fine, I quite like some of the music it finds for me on discover, but the UI is on a slow death march towards complete uselessness, and some features have always been hopelessly broken (queuing). From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Music player UI is a solved problem. At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again, but that would mean people admitting they don't really serve much purpose. About as pure an example of a "bullshit job" as is possible.

wodenokoto 5y ago
> Music player UI is a solved problem. No it isn’t. Not even close.
- upcode 5y ago
  Thanks for such an insightful comment
  - orhmeh09 5y ago
    It’s infinitely more insightful than the claim that it’s a solved problem, which rates as a zero on that scale.
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      OK, let's try to move the conversation in a more productive direction. What aspects of the music-player problem weren't already solved by 2010 or so?
- akho 5y ago
  Last music player UI I liked was Muine circa 2007. I don’t think we are improving our solutions.
- manigandham 5y ago
  What is unsolved? What's the revolutionary change since Winamp or Itunes in 2003?
  - ChrisArchitect 5y ago
    I love and still use WinAmp and do not use any streaming -- but what changed is how people listen, thanks to iTunes and iPods etc and then Spotify. Everything is based on playlists and artist selection leaning away from albums/releases. It changed how people load up music, introduced a huge rise in 'random' playing that was way different than previous era of CDs where you'd pick an album and play it, or listen to radio and DJs are selecting things (perhaps the 'DJ' selecting has just been replaced/attempted to be duplicated locally by software I guess). The way people listen changed. Not a fan of it at all, but that's where the 'unsolved'ness comes from. IMO the way people listen became even more passive and lazy and the huge portion of the market that just streams whatever puts little to no effort into their music (read: people who 'like all kinds of music') and that's what's just fine by Spotify.
    - manigandham 5y ago
      The UI is still the same though. A big grid of Song - Artist - Album. Everything is fundamentally based on that, whether that's your entire library, a playlist, or filtered by something else. Everything else is an addition, but somehow modern apps have managed to make the basic grid worse too at the same time.
grishka 5y ago
My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.
- topkai22 5y ago
  “A bank doesn’t need a full time development team for example” Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. I might be misunderstanding your point, but a bank doing digital banking needs a huge IT staff, including software devs. Even if no new products are being developed (unlikely), they support changes to common industry systems, redevelop systems for retiring hardware/operating systems, support integrations with changing business partners, changes to regulatory requirements, etc. I’m sure some devs pulled late nights trying to support the PPP program for example.
  - grishka 5y ago
    > Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. Right now, with all the churn that only serves to update various financial numbers in databases and is generally useless for the society at large. As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. It already works for me as it is right now. A rather popular bank in Russia is now trying its damnest to become a super-app. It's developing a voice assistant. Its mobile app has stories. A bank. Is developing a voice assistant and becoming an operating system. Where did we make the wrong turn? And maybe, just maybe, regulatory change doesn't need to happen in the first place?
    - blibble 5y ago
      > As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. I personally like features such as savings accounts (which require a treasury department), a brokerage, lending, mortgages, wire transfers, detection of fraud, and so-on a bank does far more than provide a safe place for your cash to sit
rl3 5y ago
>I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. My favorite regression is probably how the Windows client finally had type-to-search functionality for adding new songs to an existing playlist, and now it doesn't again. The Linux client still has it though! This is to say nothing of their radio algorithm regression.
davmar 5y ago
We can only blame ourselves for Spotify's bad UI! (jk) Spotify uses an internal experimentation platform that guides which features they determine are successful, based upon how our usage moves their metrics: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/10/29/spotifys-new-experimentation-platform-part-1/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/10/29/spotifys-new-ex... So, basically, the bad UI is improving their metrics. Or something. Maybe this is a case of experimentation gone wrong.
- ec109685 5y ago
  Sometimes it's hard to spot long term degradation of quality via short term experiments. Each little thing shows uplift, but overall it gets crapperier.
- xmprt 5y ago
  I can only assume one of their metrics is the classic "time on app" or "user engagement" which is a bullshit metric for a music player. If I'm spending more time on the app then that clearly means I'm not finding what I'm looking for.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    I generally agree with engagement being a BS metric, I'm not sure I agree in this case, unless we separate out time I'm actively interacting with the app and time I'm listening to music and only call the former BS. When I first switched to Spotify from Google Play, I listened to a lot more music because the recommendation algorithm pointed me at a ton of music I ended up looking a lot. Now its recommendations have gotten to samey and my engagement declined. I'd love for them to improve recommendations and drive my engagement up that way. Now, similar example is Netflix. I've at times reached a point where I think I had watched everything on the platform I'd enjoy. Their UI keeps showing old stuff as new tough, different pictures for the same show, etc. This led to wasted time and frustrating engagement. (Aside: the best Netflix UI ever was a script I wrote myself when they still had a public API that just listed all movies ordered by how much they predicted I'd like it. That paired with IMDB ratings and filtered by what I've already have seen would be the holy Grail but it would be obvious when it's time to unsubscribe for a while)
city41 5y ago
I canceled my Spotify subscription because it was so dang buggy. Getting it to play music for longer than an hour was simply impossible for a myriad of reasons. I switched to Amazon Music and at the time the webapp looked pretty much just like mainstream Amazon: drab, white/orange/blue, simple. But dang, it was rock solid. I couldn't get it to error if I wanted to. I could leave the tab open for weeks and it'd play music on command without missing a beat. They have since redone the site to make it look more trendy and more Spotify-ish. This new skin brought bugs with it and it's not the reliable workhorse it used to be. It's still way better than Spotify though. I am very sensitive to buggy software. And in my opinion, most software available today is just riddled with bugs. I completely switched away from Apple because of this for example. To me, this is the real tragedy of modern software. The bad UX, the dark patterns, the slowness, etc... None of this stuff bothers me all that much when it comes down to it. But bugs, bugs get me every time.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  Subplot: I doubt they care. Since spotify is designed to lose money it has little reason to care if customers cancel, it's only going to be concerned if investors lose interest.
  - city41 5y ago
    Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I think bugginess just doesn't affect bottom lines of most companies these days, hence the state we're in. Also, anecdotally, I find people are very tolerant of bugs and just suffer in silence a lot of the time.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      " I find people are very tolerant of bugs and just suffer in silence a lot of the time." Most people probably blame themself of not getting it. Or throw hands in the air of what to do about it. And most don't know that you can make software that fits to the user needs and not the other way around. OpenSource could have potential here, but most free software developers are not really into UX design either and seem to expect the same tech level of their audience as they have.
godelski 5y ago
I hope there's some UI/UX designers that can explain this to me. It often appears that design changes are changed just to change. Doing things like changing the clock from right to left (Android). Moving a bar that's existed to another location (Spotify). Removing color hints (Signal). And so many other things. Things that basically your users have been trained to look at and then need to be retrained. Removing hintings that people have been relied on. So, the big question is: why? Good design is hard and often underappreciated. I don't want to convey that idea. But why do things like this happen so often? Changes that don't actually provide any more utility. Changes that remove utility. It is just so common that there has to be some reason for it. Often backend people say that it is just done to justify their existence but I don't buy this because there are plenty of good design features that can be constantly worked on and improved. Is there some psychological effect this has on users because it is once again novel? So often we don't see good design improvements but things that just come off as "change because change." Why? Help me understand.
- mikelward 5y ago
  I think the clock moved to balance out icons on either side of the big center notch. Then next year they moved to a left-side holepunch notch, but didn't move it back. Or even offer the option. :(
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  Fashion. Also, in my industry, if you're software is not visibly changing, people assume its dead and no longer supported, not going anywhere. People want to feel like they are part of something that is going somewhere. Software is not a tool, its a journey into the future!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 5y ago
strictfp 5y ago
I'm familiar with how they operate and my opinion is that they screwed it up by hiring too many devs and setting up the teams based on software components. Very hard to get anything meaningful done.
- hkt 5y ago
  Conway's law in action.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
* At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more"* They could have made the service compatible with all of the existing media players, and never hired a UI team to begin with.
ozzythecat 5y ago
> At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again I work at a tech company, and I’ll offer my take on why this didn’t happen. Some growth oriented organizations incentivize product people to keep iterating and “improving” a product. Then, product people are on the hook to show some kind of measurable improvement in some metric. Otherwise, they miss out on promotions, or worst case, they get pushed out. What I’ve seen happen is some elegant, simple UX that no one ever complained about suddenly morphs into a convoluted, busy mess of its former self. But hey, as long as some A/B test shows an increase in click through rate or total engagement time - great! Mission accomplished! The root cause is these teams and product people don’t really obsess with the product or the customer experience. They’re incentivized towards optimizing some metric - which at face value appears like optimizing it would provide a better product. But it turns out that’s not the case. These people all get promoted, pat themselves on the back, and move on. Slowly, the engineering teams realize that these business requirements and stringent launch dates led to a convoluted architecture. We can no longer move quickly or truly innovate. It honestly turns into death by a thousand cuts, where the second and third order effects of the incentive structure ultimately results in a not so great experience. It actually becomes increasingly expensive to fix the past mistakes… the reason could be compatibility or versioning issues, a mess of dependencies and services that no one really understands, or even just a general fear of breaking things and not having clarity on how to get back on track. It might be that team A has the right senior leadership, but they rely on team or org B to fix issues or update some code. But that other team or org has their own product people, with their own priorities. They couldn’t care less. What’s worse is that no one is really willing to call out these issues, at least not on the record. Sometimes it’s disengagement and other times it’s fear of coming off as a negative person. Because the immense complexity is too difficult to solve by one person alone, and they honestly don’t have a solution that people would really get behind. Slowly the engineers burn out or feel disengaged. The great engineering talent ends up leaving. You end up with the career people or the disengaged people who are coasting by. At the end of the day, the customer suffers. We stopped obsessing with the customer experience. It’s turned overwhelmingly into cross team or cross org politics, salesmanship, and often times people focusing on the wrong problems (inventing solutions to problems that don’t even exist) while the obvious thing is right in front of them. Okay I’ll stop my rant now.
lucb1e 5y ago
This. There is no better alternative music service, but just yesterday I reinstalled Antennapod for podcasts. Spotify did a great job getting me hooked on some podcast shows, but the UI changed (need more taps and travel from the lowest to the highest button on my phone screen every time I want to use it) and features broke (e.g. it needs internet to list downloaded podcasts such that I can press play on one of them). After half a year of waiting for them to patch this worst of bugs I've given up and moved away. But yeah not everyone is going to remember using a different and open source podcast app years ago and can easily move back, most people will just stick with it. GDPR's automatic data transfer clause could really be put to better use. For music I can't simply install an open source alternative. That I make a backup of the apk before hitting update says enough I think.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  There are quite a few alternative music services. Not sure what you mean by that.
- vanilla_nut 5y ago
  Glad to hear you switched away from listening to podcasts on Spotify. Their attempt to buy up a huge number of podcasts in the last couple of years, which resulted in exclusification of some of those podcasts, is an awful development in the previously free and open podcasting community. I love podcasts and I'd prefer to be able to keep listening to all of my favorite podcasts on whatever app I want.
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    Yes, that is one of the reasons I moved away. But also before moving away, I was subscribed to one of the ones they made exclusive, Gimlet Media's something-science I think it was called. Enjoyable and fairly informative much of the time, but if they are going to create a gated community I'm just not going to be part of making that a success, so I immediately stopped listening & recommending it and unsubscribed.
thethethethe 5y ago
> It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Music player UI is a solved problem. At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again, but that would mean people admitting they don't really serve much purpose This makes sense in the short term but what happens when UI design passes you by and all your competitors look sleek and modern while your UI looks clunky in comparison? Would you use Spotify if it's UI looked straight out of the 2002? Maybe you would, but most people will not.
- svnpenn 5y ago
  This is the dumbest comment I have read in a long time.
  - dang 5y ago
    No personal attacks please, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. We ban accounts that post like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28116532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28116532. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
hanniabu 5y ago
> I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. Similarly with the Google Play to Youtube Music transition. Play was so clean, snappy, and intuitive. Youtube Music is similar to what you describe of Spotify where everything is buried, busy layout, and nothing is intuitive.
- mark-r 5y ago
  Google Play was perfect for playing the .mp3 files on my Android phone. No need for an internet connection. Then suddenly it was ripped away, and YouTube is not remotely a replacement. I still haven't found an adequate replacement because I don't know how to search for the features that are important to me.
  - oscardssmith 5y ago
    Vlc is quite good
  - exlurker 5y ago
    Foobar 2000 has served me really well for any local audio file.
tshaddox 5y ago
> From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Presumably Spotify makes more money if you listen to artist A instead of artist B, and these changes are all part of the gradual change from an interface designed to let you browse and discover music you like to an interface designed to make you do whatever makes Spotify the most money that day.

wodenokoto 5y ago

> Music player UI is a solved problem. No it isn’t. Not even close.

upcode 5y ago
Thanks for such an insightful comment
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  It’s infinitely more insightful than the claim that it’s a solved problem, which rates as a zero on that scale.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    OK, let's try to move the conversation in a more productive direction. What aspects of the music-player problem weren't already solved by 2010 or so?
akho 5y ago
Last music player UI I liked was Muine circa 2007. I don’t think we are improving our solutions.
manigandham 5y ago
What is unsolved? What's the revolutionary change since Winamp or Itunes in 2003?
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago
  I love and still use WinAmp and do not use any streaming -- but what changed is how people listen, thanks to iTunes and iPods etc and then Spotify. Everything is based on playlists and artist selection leaning away from albums/releases. It changed how people load up music, introduced a huge rise in 'random' playing that was way different than previous era of CDs where you'd pick an album and play it, or listen to radio and DJs are selecting things (perhaps the 'DJ' selecting has just been replaced/attempted to be duplicated locally by software I guess). The way people listen changed. Not a fan of it at all, but that's where the 'unsolved'ness comes from. IMO the way people listen became even more passive and lazy and the huge portion of the market that just streams whatever puts little to no effort into their music (read: people who 'like all kinds of music') and that's what's just fine by Spotify.
  - manigandham 5y ago
    The UI is still the same though. A big grid of Song - Artist - Album. Everything is fundamentally based on that, whether that's your entire library, a playlist, or filtered by something else. Everything else is an addition, but somehow modern apps have managed to make the basic grid worse too at the same time.

grishka 5y ago

My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.

topkai22 5y ago
“A bank doesn’t need a full time development team for example” Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. I might be misunderstanding your point, but a bank doing digital banking needs a huge IT staff, including software devs. Even if no new products are being developed (unlikely), they support changes to common industry systems, redevelop systems for retiring hardware/operating systems, support integrations with changing business partners, changes to regulatory requirements, etc. I’m sure some devs pulled late nights trying to support the PPP program for example.
- grishka 5y ago
  > Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. Right now, with all the churn that only serves to update various financial numbers in databases and is generally useless for the society at large. As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. It already works for me as it is right now. A rather popular bank in Russia is now trying its damnest to become a super-app. It's developing a voice assistant. Its mobile app has stories. A bank. Is developing a voice assistant and becoming an operating system. Where did we make the wrong turn? And maybe, just maybe, regulatory change doesn't need to happen in the first place?
  - blibble 5y ago
    > As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. I personally like features such as savings accounts (which require a treasury department), a brokerage, lending, mortgages, wire transfers, detection of fraud, and so-on a bank does far more than provide a safe place for your cash to sit

rl3 5y ago

>I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. My favorite regression is probably how the Windows client finally had type-to-search functionality for adding new songs to an existing playlist, and now it doesn't again. The Linux client still has it though! This is to say nothing of their radio algorithm regression.

davmar 5y ago

We can only blame ourselves for Spotify's bad UI! (jk) Spotify uses an internal experimentation platform that guides which features they determine are successful, based upon how our usage moves their metrics: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/10/29/spotifys-new-experimentation-platform-part-1/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/10/29/spotifys-new-ex... So, basically, the bad UI is improving their metrics. Or something. Maybe this is a case of experimentation gone wrong.

ec109685 5y ago
Sometimes it's hard to spot long term degradation of quality via short term experiments. Each little thing shows uplift, but overall it gets crapperier.
xmprt 5y ago
I can only assume one of their metrics is the classic "time on app" or "user engagement" which is a bullshit metric for a music player. If I'm spending more time on the app then that clearly means I'm not finding what I'm looking for.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  I generally agree with engagement being a BS metric, I'm not sure I agree in this case, unless we separate out time I'm actively interacting with the app and time I'm listening to music and only call the former BS. When I first switched to Spotify from Google Play, I listened to a lot more music because the recommendation algorithm pointed me at a ton of music I ended up looking a lot. Now its recommendations have gotten to samey and my engagement declined. I'd love for them to improve recommendations and drive my engagement up that way. Now, similar example is Netflix. I've at times reached a point where I think I had watched everything on the platform I'd enjoy. Their UI keeps showing old stuff as new tough, different pictures for the same show, etc. This led to wasted time and frustrating engagement. (Aside: the best Netflix UI ever was a script I wrote myself when they still had a public API that just listed all movies ordered by how much they predicted I'd like it. That paired with IMDB ratings and filtered by what I've already have seen would be the holy Grail but it would be obvious when it's time to unsubscribe for a while)

city41 5y ago

I canceled my Spotify subscription because it was so dang buggy. Getting it to play music for longer than an hour was simply impossible for a myriad of reasons. I switched to Amazon Music and at the time the webapp looked pretty much just like mainstream Amazon: drab, white/orange/blue, simple. But dang, it was rock solid. I couldn't get it to error if I wanted to. I could leave the tab open for weeks and it'd play music on command without missing a beat. They have since redone the site to make it look more trendy and more Spotify-ish. This new skin brought bugs with it and it's not the reliable workhorse it used to be. It's still way better than Spotify though. I am very sensitive to buggy software. And in my opinion, most software available today is just riddled with bugs. I completely switched away from Apple because of this for example. To me, this is the real tragedy of modern software. The bad UX, the dark patterns, the slowness, etc... None of this stuff bothers me all that much when it comes down to it. But bugs, bugs get me every time.

RNCTX 5y ago
Subplot: I doubt they care. Since spotify is designed to lose money it has little reason to care if customers cancel, it's only going to be concerned if investors lose interest.
- city41 5y ago
  Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I think bugginess just doesn't affect bottom lines of most companies these days, hence the state we're in. Also, anecdotally, I find people are very tolerant of bugs and just suffer in silence a lot of the time.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    " I find people are very tolerant of bugs and just suffer in silence a lot of the time." Most people probably blame themself of not getting it. Or throw hands in the air of what to do about it. And most don't know that you can make software that fits to the user needs and not the other way around. OpenSource could have potential here, but most free software developers are not really into UX design either and seem to expect the same tech level of their audience as they have.

godelski 5y ago

I hope there's some UI/UX designers that can explain this to me. It often appears that design changes are changed just to change. Doing things like changing the clock from right to left (Android). Moving a bar that's existed to another location (Spotify). Removing color hints (Signal). And so many other things. Things that basically your users have been trained to look at and then need to be retrained. Removing hintings that people have been relied on. So, the big question is: why? Good design is hard and often underappreciated. I don't want to convey that idea. But why do things like this happen so often? Changes that don't actually provide any more utility. Changes that remove utility. It is just so common that there has to be some reason for it. Often backend people say that it is just done to justify their existence but I don't buy this because there are plenty of good design features that can be constantly worked on and improved. Is there some psychological effect this has on users because it is once again novel? So often we don't see good design improvements but things that just come off as "change because change." Why? Help me understand.

mikelward 5y ago
I think the clock moved to balance out icons on either side of the big center notch. Then next year they moved to a left-side holepunch notch, but didn't move it back. Or even offer the option. :(
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jay_kyburz 5y ago
Fashion. Also, in my industry, if you're software is not visibly changing, people assume its dead and no longer supported, not going anywhere. People want to feel like they are part of something that is going somewhere. Software is not a tool, its a journey into the future!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 5y ago

strictfp 5y ago

I'm familiar with how they operate and my opinion is that they screwed it up by hiring too many devs and setting up the teams based on software components. Very hard to get anything meaningful done.

hkt 5y ago
Conway's law in action.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

* At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more"* They could have made the service compatible with all of the existing media players, and never hired a UI team to begin with.

ozzythecat 5y ago

> At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again I work at a tech company, and I’ll offer my take on why this didn’t happen. Some growth oriented organizations incentivize product people to keep iterating and “improving” a product. Then, product people are on the hook to show some kind of measurable improvement in some metric. Otherwise, they miss out on promotions, or worst case, they get pushed out. What I’ve seen happen is some elegant, simple UX that no one ever complained about suddenly morphs into a convoluted, busy mess of its former self. But hey, as long as some A/B test shows an increase in click through rate or total engagement time - great! Mission accomplished! The root cause is these teams and product people don’t really obsess with the product or the customer experience. They’re incentivized towards optimizing some metric - which at face value appears like optimizing it would provide a better product. But it turns out that’s not the case. These people all get promoted, pat themselves on the back, and move on. Slowly, the engineering teams realize that these business requirements and stringent launch dates led to a convoluted architecture. We can no longer move quickly or truly innovate. It honestly turns into death by a thousand cuts, where the second and third order effects of the incentive structure ultimately results in a not so great experience. It actually becomes increasingly expensive to fix the past mistakes… the reason could be compatibility or versioning issues, a mess of dependencies and services that no one really understands, or even just a general fear of breaking things and not having clarity on how to get back on track. It might be that team A has the right senior leadership, but they rely on team or org B to fix issues or update some code. But that other team or org has their own product people, with their own priorities. They couldn’t care less. What’s worse is that no one is really willing to call out these issues, at least not on the record. Sometimes it’s disengagement and other times it’s fear of coming off as a negative person. Because the immense complexity is too difficult to solve by one person alone, and they honestly don’t have a solution that people would really get behind. Slowly the engineers burn out or feel disengaged. The great engineering talent ends up leaving. You end up with the career people or the disengaged people who are coasting by. At the end of the day, the customer suffers. We stopped obsessing with the customer experience. It’s turned overwhelmingly into cross team or cross org politics, salesmanship, and often times people focusing on the wrong problems (inventing solutions to problems that don’t even exist) while the obvious thing is right in front of them. Okay I’ll stop my rant now.

lucb1e 5y ago

This. There is no better alternative music service, but just yesterday I reinstalled Antennapod for podcasts. Spotify did a great job getting me hooked on some podcast shows, but the UI changed (need more taps and travel from the lowest to the highest button on my phone screen every time I want to use it) and features broke (e.g. it needs internet to list downloaded podcasts such that I can press play on one of them). After half a year of waiting for them to patch this worst of bugs I've given up and moved away. But yeah not everyone is going to remember using a different and open source podcast app years ago and can easily move back, most people will just stick with it. GDPR's automatic data transfer clause could really be put to better use. For music I can't simply install an open source alternative. That I make a backup of the apk before hitting update says enough I think.

emodendroket 5y ago
There are quite a few alternative music services. Not sure what you mean by that.
vanilla_nut 5y ago
Glad to hear you switched away from listening to podcasts on Spotify. Their attempt to buy up a huge number of podcasts in the last couple of years, which resulted in exclusification of some of those podcasts, is an awful development in the previously free and open podcasting community. I love podcasts and I'd prefer to be able to keep listening to all of my favorite podcasts on whatever app I want.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  Yes, that is one of the reasons I moved away. But also before moving away, I was subscribed to one of the ones they made exclusive, Gimlet Media's something-science I think it was called. Enjoyable and fairly informative much of the time, but if they are going to create a gated community I'm just not going to be part of making that a success, so I immediately stopped listening & recommending it and unsubscribed.

thethethethe 5y ago

> It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Music player UI is a solved problem. At some point they should've just said "welp, don't need a UI team any more" and just never touched it again, but that would mean people admitting they don't really serve much purpose This makes sense in the short term but what happens when UI design passes you by and all your competitors look sleek and modern while your UI looks clunky in comparison? Would you use Spotify if it's UI looked straight out of the 2002? Maybe you would, but most people will not.

svnpenn 5y ago
This is the dumbest comment I have read in a long time.
- dang 5y ago
  No personal attacks please, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. We ban accounts that post like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28116532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28116532. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

hanniabu 5y ago

> I hope people will use Spotify as a case study in how to fuck up a UI over time. Similarly with the Google Play to Youtube Music transition. Play was so clean, snappy, and intuitive. Youtube Music is similar to what you describe of Spotify where everything is buried, busy layout, and nothing is intuitive.

mark-r 5y ago
Google Play was perfect for playing the .mp3 files on my Android phone. No need for an internet connection. Then suddenly it was ripped away, and YouTube is not remotely a replacement. I still haven't found an adequate replacement because I don't know how to search for the features that are important to me.
- oscardssmith 5y ago
  Vlc is quite good
- exlurker 5y ago
  Foobar 2000 has served me really well for any local audio file.

tshaddox 5y ago

> From a business standpoint I find it fascinating. It's about as perfect as an example it gets of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Presumably Spotify makes more money if you listen to artist A instead of artist B, and these changes are all part of the gradual change from an interface designed to let you browse and discover music you like to an interface designed to make you do whatever makes Spotify the most money that day.