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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,

by dfdz 5y ago

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.)

jdsully 5y ago
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.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  A song you always want to listen to is better than one you only want to listen to sometimes.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    It's far more complicated than that. Some songs have extremely long shelf life and others are extremely short. For instance, an "adult contemporary" station could probably get away with playing Elton John's "Tiny Dancer", a 49-year old song, without anyone thinking anything is weird. More popular songs of that year such as those by Roberta Flack or Gilbert O'Sullivan would not get the same non-reaction Some songs have even longer shelf life that are associated with real world things like birthdays, holidays, seasons, etc. It's pretty common to hear a set of Christmas music that was literally recorded during WW2 with everyone's approval. Some songs grow on people, others grow tired quickly. The classic example is novelty songs that specify a dance such as the cover of The Birdie Song by The Tweets or Black Lace's Agadoo, which reached impressive popularity and then were promptly forgotten forever. Ones that you may be familiar with such as Rick Martin's Macarena, probably gave you a headache just thinking about it. But not all. Chubby Checker's "The Twist", a song in this category of instructional dance pop music, has escaped the ban hammer of time. But overall the pattern of memory holing proscribed dance songs is robust, even for songs that developed a dance without actually calling it out, such as "Achy Beaky Heart". Also there's no asymptotic drop after release date. Some songs that are popular now and symbolic of an era weren't as popular when they were new and some have second lives when featured in say a television show, video game, or covered by a more contemporary artist. Every few years a new version of Gershwin's "Summertime" seems to come out followed by renewed interest in previous versions by people like Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and Ella Fitzgerald. Should Ella Fitzgerald albums be recommended to people for the next 18 months now? Probably not the right way to interpret those results. There's an exogenous contextual reason for such things and those have to be accommodated for It's completely non-trivial and a simple model of skips and likes without sophistication behind it will dramatically fail to be anything other than an irritation
    - asveikau 5y ago
      > Ones that you may be familiar with such as Rick Martin's Macarena It was done by a group from Seville. Los del río. Very southern Spanish accent which is quite different from Ricky Martin.
      - kristopolous 5y ago
        Gosh you are correct on that. My apologies. I don't know why I associated the two, I try to be pretty good on this stuff. I'll need to review 90s Latin pop again. Sorry about that.
        petre 5y ago
        You should see the video: two elderly men and some underage looking dancers. Nothing like Ricky Martin.
- dfdz 5y ago
  I suspect that this same effect is close to the reason so many services removed the dislike button: humans are emotional and were, in some cases, disliking songs which they were not in the mood for, but would like at another time. As a result, the signal coming from the dislike button was not very useful, and just added unnecessary complexity. Instead, the algorithm can present the user a fixed song in different settings to see if they continue to skip it. A nice result is that the user doesn’t have the negative reaction “hey I disliked this song why are you presenting it to me again”
  - xerox13ster 5y ago
    I frequently will find one of their auto-mixes I like, and listen to it for a while throughout the day skipping songs I don't like or I'm not in the mood for. Then when I go back the next day, even if I didn't restart the mix, it has updated, and what plays isn't the stuff I liked and repeated. It was the stuff they have financial incentive to get plays on that I skipped the day before and "might be in the mood for now". This alone drove me back to my local music library. I would rather dislike a song and have it recommended in a "How about now" playlist to determine if I actually hate it or if it was a mood in the moment.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      I used to track “skip counts” in iTunes and would review the most skipped songs every month or so and determine if they needed to be reduced in star count.
- crucialfelix 5y ago
  It can also just mean that I've heard it too many times. Give me something fresh, a hit of dopamine please
  - ascorbic 5y ago
    I'm sure they can take that into account.
- Socketier 5y ago
  It would be nice if when you skipped a song it would do a soft pop up or something to ask why you skipped it. You could ignore it most of the time but if you felt strongly about the recommendation then you could at least vent your frustration on the "I don't like this song" button. I think the main issue here is, is that users feel a bit powerless to influence the algorithm with thier dislikes as much as thier likes. Even though a song skip may be functionally similar to the dislike button, the user has no "haptic feedback", for lack of better term, when they really feel the need to have their negative opinion on the song heard by the algorithm. I think most people's gripes with the nature of these recommendation algorithms deciding things, centre around the feeling that the algorithm doesn't listen to them and their opinion as much as it obeys other overriding trends. Giving them tangible and tactile options to deliver their opinions in hard and fast way gives them some more peace of mind that the algorithm is working for them, and not for some other entity.
verve_rat 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
  - smrq 5y ago
    They can't possibly have sufficient context. I recently got super into the band Squid. But I hated them the first time I heard them. It was because I was depressed and looking for more music like Black Midi-- Black Country New Road came up and was perfect. Squid came up and made me want to punch my speakers. If they have enough data to predict my mood to that extent then I would like to hire them as my therapist.
    - nimonian 5y ago
      Same! Started with Squid and Spotify took me to Black Midi, Yard Act, Dry Cleaning, all of whom I'd skipped in the past because I just didn't get it, now I'm obsessed. Some music just defies understanding on a first lesson.
    - bagacrap 5y ago
      it's not perfect, but ytm does what gp says. "You often listen to X in the morning" can be helpful even if it doesn't know about personal events in your life
oriolid 5y ago
Skip could also mean "I like this song, but I want to hear something different at the moment".
- Talanes 5y ago
  Sometimes it even means "I love this song, but I'm trying to listen to something new."
didibus 5y ago
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.
- dfdz 5y ago
  > I often have fear of skipping because I think it might teach the algos I don't like it So basically Spotify is performing reinforcement learning on you— beautiful!
  - VortexDream 5y ago
    Beautiful? No, fucking awful. How can you consider this a good thing when there's no way to teach the service what you want to listen to and when?
cplusplusfellow 5y ago
There are 3 artists that Spotify continually play to me and I preemptively will fast forward them even during the crossover play because I dislike them so much. I’ve submitted requests before to have a “don’t play me this artist” feature. I don’t know why this is so hard for them.
- prepend 5y ago
  Probably because Spotify takes payment from artists to play their songs. Promoting before a new album, etc. If they let you block artists then this is less money for them.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  Youtube for me, fixates on a couple of videos-- as in it recommends them every single time I use it-- one is a Marques Brown retrospective on the Gameboy, and one is the TYT (news outlet), story about a woman who had her face bitten off by an ape and is at least 8 years old. I don't know why these show up in my recommendations every single day. I will never watch them.
  - graftak 5y ago
    With YouTube you can mark them as ‘not interested’ and poof, they’re gone.
    - oceanghost 5y ago
      I mostly use the YouTube app on my google TV which is notoriously... behind the times. I will look for that thank you!
      - tomjen3 5y ago
        Even if it isn't, if you login to youtube briefly on a computer, you can set it there, then it should be reflected on your tv.
- petre 5y ago
sethgecko 5y ago
> there needs to be a way to distinguish between a user enjoying a song and the user not paying attention There is a way to do this, the signal is adding the song to your favourites or a playlist
homami 5y ago
Deezer has added a "don't recommend this song again" button. I used a couple of times only but I feel that my recommendations have been indeed improved. Before, I had to skip the songs that I did not like, and Deezer was keep putting them back in my 'Flow' a few days later. That was pretty annoying.

by dfdz 5y ago

jdsully 5y ago

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.

charcircuit 5y ago
A song you always want to listen to is better than one you only want to listen to sometimes.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  It's far more complicated than that. Some songs have extremely long shelf life and others are extremely short. For instance, an "adult contemporary" station could probably get away with playing Elton John's "Tiny Dancer", a 49-year old song, without anyone thinking anything is weird. More popular songs of that year such as those by Roberta Flack or Gilbert O'Sullivan would not get the same non-reaction Some songs have even longer shelf life that are associated with real world things like birthdays, holidays, seasons, etc. It's pretty common to hear a set of Christmas music that was literally recorded during WW2 with everyone's approval. Some songs grow on people, others grow tired quickly. The classic example is novelty songs that specify a dance such as the cover of The Birdie Song by The Tweets or Black Lace's Agadoo, which reached impressive popularity and then were promptly forgotten forever. Ones that you may be familiar with such as Rick Martin's Macarena, probably gave you a headache just thinking about it. But not all. Chubby Checker's "The Twist", a song in this category of instructional dance pop music, has escaped the ban hammer of time. But overall the pattern of memory holing proscribed dance songs is robust, even for songs that developed a dance without actually calling it out, such as "Achy Beaky Heart". Also there's no asymptotic drop after release date. Some songs that are popular now and symbolic of an era weren't as popular when they were new and some have second lives when featured in say a television show, video game, or covered by a more contemporary artist. Every few years a new version of Gershwin's "Summertime" seems to come out followed by renewed interest in previous versions by people like Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and Ella Fitzgerald. Should Ella Fitzgerald albums be recommended to people for the next 18 months now? Probably not the right way to interpret those results. There's an exogenous contextual reason for such things and those have to be accommodated for It's completely non-trivial and a simple model of skips and likes without sophistication behind it will dramatically fail to be anything other than an irritation
  - asveikau 5y ago
    > Ones that you may be familiar with such as Rick Martin's Macarena It was done by a group from Seville. Los del río. Very southern Spanish accent which is quite different from Ricky Martin.
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      Gosh you are correct on that. My apologies. I don't know why I associated the two, I try to be pretty good on this stuff. I'll need to review 90s Latin pop again. Sorry about that.
      - petre 5y ago
        You should see the video: two elderly men and some underage looking dancers. Nothing like Ricky Martin.
dfdz 5y ago
I suspect that this same effect is close to the reason so many services removed the dislike button: humans are emotional and were, in some cases, disliking songs which they were not in the mood for, but would like at another time. As a result, the signal coming from the dislike button was not very useful, and just added unnecessary complexity. Instead, the algorithm can present the user a fixed song in different settings to see if they continue to skip it. A nice result is that the user doesn’t have the negative reaction “hey I disliked this song why are you presenting it to me again”
- xerox13ster 5y ago
  I frequently will find one of their auto-mixes I like, and listen to it for a while throughout the day skipping songs I don't like or I'm not in the mood for. Then when I go back the next day, even if I didn't restart the mix, it has updated, and what plays isn't the stuff I liked and repeated. It was the stuff they have financial incentive to get plays on that I skipped the day before and "might be in the mood for now". This alone drove me back to my local music library. I would rather dislike a song and have it recommended in a "How about now" playlist to determine if I actually hate it or if it was a mood in the moment.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    I used to track “skip counts” in iTunes and would review the most skipped songs every month or so and determine if they needed to be reduced in star count.
crucialfelix 5y ago
It can also just mean that I've heard it too many times. Give me something fresh, a hit of dopamine please
- ascorbic 5y ago
  I'm sure they can take that into account.
Socketier 5y ago
It would be nice if when you skipped a song it would do a soft pop up or something to ask why you skipped it. You could ignore it most of the time but if you felt strongly about the recommendation then you could at least vent your frustration on the "I don't like this song" button. I think the main issue here is, is that users feel a bit powerless to influence the algorithm with thier dislikes as much as thier likes. Even though a song skip may be functionally similar to the dislike button, the user has no "haptic feedback", for lack of better term, when they really feel the need to have their negative opinion on the song heard by the algorithm. I think most people's gripes with the nature of these recommendation algorithms deciding things, centre around the feeling that the algorithm doesn't listen to them and their opinion as much as it obeys other overriding trends. Giving them tangible and tactile options to deliver their opinions in hard and fast way gives them some more peace of mind that the algorithm is working for them, and not for some other entity.

verve_rat 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
- smrq 5y ago
  They can't possibly have sufficient context. I recently got super into the band Squid. But I hated them the first time I heard them. It was because I was depressed and looking for more music like Black Midi-- Black Country New Road came up and was perfect. Squid came up and made me want to punch my speakers. If they have enough data to predict my mood to that extent then I would like to hire them as my therapist.
  - nimonian 5y ago
    Same! Started with Squid and Spotify took me to Black Midi, Yard Act, Dry Cleaning, all of whom I'd skipped in the past because I just didn't get it, now I'm obsessed. Some music just defies understanding on a first lesson.
  - bagacrap 5y ago
    it's not perfect, but ytm does what gp says. "You often listen to X in the morning" can be helpful even if it doesn't know about personal events in your life

oriolid 5y ago

Skip could also mean "I like this song, but I want to hear something different at the moment".

Talanes 5y ago
Sometimes it even means "I love this song, but I'm trying to listen to something new."

didibus 5y ago

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.

dfdz 5y ago
> I often have fear of skipping because I think it might teach the algos I don't like it So basically Spotify is performing reinforcement learning on you— beautiful!
- VortexDream 5y ago
  Beautiful? No, fucking awful. How can you consider this a good thing when there's no way to teach the service what you want to listen to and when?

cplusplusfellow 5y ago

There are 3 artists that Spotify continually play to me and I preemptively will fast forward them even during the crossover play because I dislike them so much. I’ve submitted requests before to have a “don’t play me this artist” feature. I don’t know why this is so hard for them.

prepend 5y ago
Probably because Spotify takes payment from artists to play their songs. Promoting before a new album, etc. If they let you block artists then this is less money for them.
oceanghost 5y ago
Youtube for me, fixates on a couple of videos-- as in it recommends them every single time I use it-- one is a Marques Brown retrospective on the Gameboy, and one is the TYT (news outlet), story about a woman who had her face bitten off by an ape and is at least 8 years old. I don't know why these show up in my recommendations every single day. I will never watch them.
- graftak 5y ago
  With YouTube you can mark them as ‘not interested’ and poof, they’re gone.
  - oceanghost 5y ago
    I mostly use the YouTube app on my google TV which is notoriously... behind the times. I will look for that thank you!
    - tomjen3 5y ago
      Even if it isn't, if you login to youtube briefly on a computer, you can set it there, then it should be reflected on your tv.
petre 5y ago

sethgecko 5y ago

> there needs to be a way to distinguish between a user enjoying a song and the user not paying attention There is a way to do this, the signal is adding the song to your favourites or a playlist

homami 5y ago

Deezer has added a "don't recommend this song again" button. I used a couple of times only but I feel that my recommendations have been indeed improved. Before, I had to skip the songs that I did not like, and Deezer was keep putting them back in my 'Flow' a few days later. That was pretty annoying.