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No other company do I hate and love so much. I love their discovery algorithms and find new music through them so often. I look forward to my new Discover Weekl

No other company do I hate and love so much. I love their discovery algorithms and find new music through them so often. I look forward to my new Discover Weekly every Monday. But in every other way they drive me crazy. The UI is terrible and basic but I've learned to live with it. What I absolutely can't stand is inserting podcasts and audio books into the app with no option to opt-out. I get that they want to put these things in front of as many people as possible, but it's a shame that happens at the expense of those of us who don't want that cluttering up their libraries. Let me turn it off. Why can't I turn it off?

Gigachad 4y ago
The Spotify UI is bad but it’s not even close to as bad as Apple and YouTube music. I tried my best to like Yt music since it comes with YouTube premium but the service is simply unusable.
Jorchime 4y ago
I used to love the Discovery Weekly list as well. But since a couple of years, my account recommendations went into some strange niche solution and they recommend the same rubbish over and over again. I even get annoyed at certain genres that I used to mildly enjoy before. If you try to look for a solution, apparently the only way is to cancel the subscription, delete the account, resubscribe and start over ... I wish there was a way to reset the "intelligent" recommendations for an existing account. The only workaround I found: put a couple of similar and interesting songs into a playlist and let Spotify continue with recommendations.
- jackson1442 4y ago
  Agreed. I actually switched to Apple Music because the recommendations had gotten so consistently bad/weird. I wonder if it's related to money somehow, if some artists are accepting a lower cut in exchange for being placed on these playlists more frequently.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  Literally: they keep recommending variations of the same song over and over. And if I'm not mistaken, not even variations, but the same song over and over. Each time I mark it as "remove". I visit my Discover Weekly about once a month because there's almost never anything of value in there. I'd find more gems with a random list of 30 songs.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  I've heard that their algorithm now prioritizes lower licensing cost songs even if their algos rank them as a lower possible match for you. It also seems like their curated playlists prioritize lower quality songs now too, so I try to find better user generated ones. Why does everything go from good to the lowest mediocrity companies can get away with?
  - jterrys 4y ago
    This has always been the problem with Spotify for years but I guess it got worse and more blatant now. There has never been any incentive for the platform to be recommendations neutral and nowhere did they specify how they treat songs and labels from different artists. Whats particularly egregious with Spotify is that their recommended method of improving your recommendations is to just "listen more to things you like". It's so disingenuous.
fleddr 4y ago
The funny thing is that they have many teams each doing a tiny part of the app's UI, and proudly advertise this model as a best practice: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal... Baffling how you can have so many engineers working on a music player, and it ends up worse than Winamp or Mediaplayer from 25 years ago.
- mostlysimilar 4y ago
  Software interfaces in general have regressed severely since the mid-2000s. Media players are a perfect example. There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today. What is going on? Why are things getting dumber? Are we just optimizing too hard for the lowest common denominator and the average user wants things to be dead simple? I don't want to believe software has to be this basic. As software has become mainstream I think we've created a self-reinforcing myth that it has to be simplistic for people to want it. I think we can afford to ask users to think for a couple of seconds about the interface they're using.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    Same for Netflix. A basic UI like Popcorn time is all that most people need. Instead we get a situation where both the UI and content is randomized, constantly shuffled. The simplest of use cases are barely supported or completely missing. It's not just incompetence, they are intentional dark patterns. Netflix doesn't want you to structurally browse their catalog in easy ways as you might conclude that it falls short. So it throws random things at you, auto-playing videos, etc. Giving the inflated impression that there's always something interesting for you. Likewise, user reviews, an absolutely basic community feature, is simply not there. Because if it would be there, and assuming they are fair reviews, you could filter by rating. Which once again could reveal a lack of quality content. Best to mask that. It's sad to consider that the output of hundreds of engineers and some very high-tech data science leads to something a single engineer in mum's basement could do better.
  - eduction 4y ago
mtoner23 4y ago
the UI Is bad in comparison to what? its pretty easy to find whatever you want
amjnsx 4y ago
My biggest pet peeve with the Spotify iOS app is the offline mode - it’s total garbage. - Every time you open the app you get a “turn on wifi to enable downloads” alert. This may or may not be an iOS thing - I try to navigate to an artist or album I’ve downloaded and I just see loading spinners until it finally times out and shows me my offline content - Music I’ve previously downloaded just…not available - i.e. It needs to be redownloaded. Well thanks a lot Spotify - leaves me shit out of luck when I want to listen to something you’ve deemed as “expired”. My most recent one being Taylor Swift’s Midnights this evening, an album that came out and I downloaded on Friday.

Gigachad 4y ago

The Spotify UI is bad but it’s not even close to as bad as Apple and YouTube music. I tried my best to like Yt music since it comes with YouTube premium but the service is simply unusable.

Jorchime 4y ago

I used to love the Discovery Weekly list as well. But since a couple of years, my account recommendations went into some strange niche solution and they recommend the same rubbish over and over again. I even get annoyed at certain genres that I used to mildly enjoy before. If you try to look for a solution, apparently the only way is to cancel the subscription, delete the account, resubscribe and start over ... I wish there was a way to reset the "intelligent" recommendations for an existing account. The only workaround I found: put a couple of similar and interesting songs into a playlist and let Spotify continue with recommendations.

jackson1442 4y ago
Agreed. I actually switched to Apple Music because the recommendations had gotten so consistently bad/weird. I wonder if it's related to money somehow, if some artists are accepting a lower cut in exchange for being placed on these playlists more frequently.
unsupp0rted 4y ago
Literally: they keep recommending variations of the same song over and over. And if I'm not mistaken, not even variations, but the same song over and over. Each time I mark it as "remove". I visit my Discover Weekly about once a month because there's almost never anything of value in there. I'd find more gems with a random list of 30 songs.
ROTMetro 4y ago
I've heard that their algorithm now prioritizes lower licensing cost songs even if their algos rank them as a lower possible match for you. It also seems like their curated playlists prioritize lower quality songs now too, so I try to find better user generated ones. Why does everything go from good to the lowest mediocrity companies can get away with?
- jterrys 4y ago
  This has always been the problem with Spotify for years but I guess it got worse and more blatant now. There has never been any incentive for the platform to be recommendations neutral and nowhere did they specify how they treat songs and labels from different artists. Whats particularly egregious with Spotify is that their recommended method of improving your recommendations is to just "listen more to things you like". It's so disingenuous.

fleddr 4y ago

The funny thing is that they have many teams each doing a tiny part of the app's UI, and proudly advertise this model as a best practice: https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScal... Baffling how you can have so many engineers working on a music player, and it ends up worse than Winamp or Mediaplayer from 25 years ago.

mostlysimilar 4y ago
Software interfaces in general have regressed severely since the mid-2000s. Media players are a perfect example. There was 10x more functionality in Winamp or Windows Media Player than we get in Spotify or Apple Music today. What is going on? Why are things getting dumber? Are we just optimizing too hard for the lowest common denominator and the average user wants things to be dead simple? I don't want to believe software has to be this basic. As software has become mainstream I think we've created a self-reinforcing myth that it has to be simplistic for people to want it. I think we can afford to ask users to think for a couple of seconds about the interface they're using.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Same for Netflix. A basic UI like Popcorn time is all that most people need. Instead we get a situation where both the UI and content is randomized, constantly shuffled. The simplest of use cases are barely supported or completely missing. It's not just incompetence, they are intentional dark patterns. Netflix doesn't want you to structurally browse their catalog in easy ways as you might conclude that it falls short. So it throws random things at you, auto-playing videos, etc. Giving the inflated impression that there's always something interesting for you. Likewise, user reviews, an absolutely basic community feature, is simply not there. Because if it would be there, and assuming they are fair reviews, you could filter by rating. Which once again could reveal a lack of quality content. Best to mask that. It's sad to consider that the output of hundreds of engineers and some very high-tech data science leads to something a single engineer in mum's basement could do better.
- eduction 4y ago

mtoner23 4y ago

the UI Is bad in comparison to what? its pretty easy to find whatever you want

amjnsx 4y ago

My biggest pet peeve with the Spotify iOS app is the offline mode - it’s total garbage. - Every time you open the app you get a “turn on wifi to enable downloads” alert. This may or may not be an iOS thing - I try to navigate to an artist or album I’ve downloaded and I just see loading spinners until it finally times out and shows me my offline content - Music I’ve previously downloaded just…not available - i.e. It needs to be redownloaded. Well thanks a lot Spotify - leaves me shit out of luck when I want to listen to something you’ve deemed as “expired”. My most recent one being Taylor Swift’s Midnights this evening, an album that came out and I downloaded on Friday.