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Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it
- wincy 4y agoThank goodness. One of my Facebook friends spams my feed with his Heardle score every day and it drives me crazy.
- endisneigh 4y agoWhy not mute notifications of that type?
- TylerE 4y agoYou can’t, because they’re just normal text posts
- sam1r 4y agoWow. Almost forgot why I’m never on Facebook. Thank you.
- Mistletoe 4y agoWhat these people need is a Victorian diary. That's where you put stuff like your daily Heardle score. It's only interesting to you.
- endisneigh 4y agoInteresting - but even in the worst case the friend could be silenced entirely
- pie420 4y agoYou deserve that and much worse for still using Facebook in 2023.
- wincy 4y agoI’m such a rebel, I even press “allow” when Facebook asks nicely if it can track me on my iPhone.
- Sakos 4y agoYou can unfollow friends to stop getting their posts on your feed. It's what I did to clean up my feed back when I still used FB. Made a huge difference in FB's usefulness.
- brink 4y agoWhat was their original plan when they purchased it? Was it just an acquihire all along?
- akmarinov 4y agoOwn it in case it gets really popular
- sublinear 4y agoWhich is often a losing strategy because selling out changes the product. It's the reverse-Midas touch where everything turns to crap.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- klysm 4y agoI think investors get FOMO when they see other companies buying things and think "oh shit maybe I'm missing out on this great opportunity" and reactively buy something that fits the trend in their space.
- brookst 4y agoThis, though a sophisticated investor will call it “option value” rather than FOMO.
- onion2k 4y agoMaybe the intention was to shut it down..
- celdon25 4y agoI’m glad you posted this, that never would have crossed my mind.
- 4y ago
- rvba 4y agoI wonder what happened to the people who decided to buy it? Was it bought with intention to integrate it or to close it? I guess it is not worth to keep it on life suport with a skeleton crew just fixing bugs (if even needed)? But then why buy it in the first place? Embrace and extinguish?
- dralley 4y agoI remain pissed that Twitter killed Scroll within 6 months.
- vlunkr 4y agoHeardle was fun, but really needed more development. Why not use other parts of the song besides the intro? I think they also could broken it into genres or decades. I mostly lost interest because I'd go too many days with songs that I simply had no chance with. (I assume they are popular with the kids, but I'm out of touch)
- pipe2devnull 4y agoYou might want to try heardledecades.com. It’s pretty amazing, whoever runs it deserves an award, they keep adding new stuff.
- _steady 4y agohttps://heardledecades.com/ https://heardledecades.com/ you're welcome!
- vlunkr 4y agoNice, this is great!
- xii23 4y agoI wanted to try it but it was never made available in Germany.
- iamerroragent 4y agoSeems reasonable. It's a product that should, and perhaps could in a more bullish market, have grown their subscriber base while adding value to their core product. Clearly they didn't get the numbers they wanted/needed and if everyone else is cutting right now, this is something that seems reasonable to cut from their expenses. The concept of the game sounds cool though as a customer of the company itself however I didn't know about it. Also I wouldn't put it past them to push features of the game directly into the Spotify app in the future. (Maybe they already have, I don't know).
- javanissen 4y agoThey ruined it! Pre-acquisition Heardle played the song from the beginning immediately after you finished guessing. Post-acquisition, you had to open the song in Spotify which introduced a lag of several seconds. The immediate visceral reward of playing the game disappeared.
- mnd999 4y agoPre acquisition it was based on Soundclouds most popular 250, and most of them were well-known enough to be guessable. I've no idea what source they switched it to, but there's a lot of obscure songs which makes it a lot less fun.
- mnd999 4y agoLike today’s. No clue.
- domh 4y agoYeah I used to get it maybe 70% of the time in the first few seconds, and I just played it today and I have absolutely no idea what this song is. The main difference between Heardle and Wordle for me is that with Wordle you can sit there thinking on it for a bit and come back and you may have a new guess. With Heardle I either know it or I don't, I'm not gunna suddenly realise what song it is 5 hours later.
- domh 4y agoOne thing they also broke was the ability to press the skip button whilst the song is playing, and have it carry on playing to the new skipped point without completely restarting. If I dont know it in the first 3 seconds, it's annoying having to listen to that whole chunk again before hearing the 4th second.
- ianferrel 4y agoThey also weirdly broke something that made it reliably play. Pre-spotify it would reliably play the first X seconds. After Spotify sometimes it would play less than that, which made it harder and less reliable.
- JimiofEden 4y agoHeardle was one of the games that we really enjoyed quite a bit, but definitely needed some sort of variation to the game itself other than 'first x seconds' Usually we would get the answer in a single try, because it happened to be a song we knew by heart, or we wouldn't get it at all because we didn't know the artist/it was just not in a genre to which we regularly listen/the song was an obscure hit or one hit wonder before our time Perhaps it would have been better as 'guess the artist' and give you 5 second clips from decreasingly obscure songs
- DelightOne 4y agoWhy don't they just ask songs some of you once heard before using ur song history?
- maxique 4y agoBecause then it loses the shareability - you can't compete with your friends when you're all getting different songs to guess
- soneca 4y agoNever heard of it. Thought it sounded fun. Went to play it. I had to skip without guessing to the end and then see today’s answer. I never heard that song in my life, nor ever heard of the artist. Connecting Heardle to my Spotify profile would make a more fun game.
- musk_micropenis 4y ago[dead]
- soneca 4y agoThe song was Tattoo, by Jordin Sparks btw
- yubiox 4y agoAs long as heardle 80s stays up.
- rvz 4y agoOh dear. Less than a year. This is what happens when businesses follow and chase short-term hype cycles and end up wasting time and money in the end. The return on investment of this acquired startup is exactly $0. Facebook on the other hand with the Instagram acquisition gave returns into the tens of billions of dollars.
- yieldcrv 4y ago> The return on investment of this acquired startup is exactly $0. negative, far below zero.
- pwthornton 4y agoSay what you will about Facebook, but its acquisition strategy has generally been strong. Instagram has to be an all-time steal for what they paid for it. They also own What's App, a juggernaut in its own right. Facebook's acquisition of Oculus was reasonable. It does remain to be seen if they can truly harness it or not.
- encoderer 4y agoSpotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.
- rektide 4y agoI quit sometime after they ended extensions. It was so awesome having Spotify as a platform for dozens & dozens of extensions. I wish I'd taken a screenshot or done a video tour of my setup before it shut down. The Cluetrain Manifesto/Intertwingularity days were so full of open endless possibility & fun. Spotify did so so so well, had such an interesting capable Javascript extension system built in to the app... then we're one of the first people to pack up & leave the party. I was shocked.
- basisword 4y agoExtensions were awesome. Took them about a decade to bring lyrics back after they killed extensions too.
- transcriptase 4y agoTheir UX is infuriating compared to a few years ago. Why does it take multiple clicks to get to search? Why are my playlists etc not front and centre? Pop-ups about new albums from artists that they know I’ve never listened to and never would? Every time I use it now, my inner voice is saying “get the fuck out of my way” to the UX itself. What are they optimizing for?
- pie420 4y agothey get paid by Labels to promote certain songs and artists, similar to how labels pay radio to play only certain songs. Everything, from Amazon, to Spotify, to the Google Play Store wants you to click on promoted bullshit, not search for what you actually want. Welcome to the internet in 2023.
- 4y ago
- h4ch1 4y agoJust day before I saw Spotify had the same ADHD inducing reels/tiktok style music discovery thing on it. What is it with all these companies using the same UX patterns EVERYWHERE. As one commentor rightly said, Discover Weekly is the only thing keeping me on this platform, they even removed family mixes, my brothers and uncles are on my family plan, and even though we didn't keep in touch a lot that used to be a talking point whenever we met and was such a cool thing.
- yieldcrv 4y ago> What is it with all these companies using the same UX patterns EVERYWHERE. any guesses?
- h4ch1 4y agoplease illuminate me, my conspiracy theories will get me flagged to oblivion.
- rnjesus 4y agothe answer is really simple. monkey see, monkey do.
- lancesells 4y agoI'm going to guess it's part A/B engagement testing and part copying the whatever is hot (TikTok). The engagement tests only show what's currently "working" and doesn't correspond to long-term resentment, like what you're seeing in the comments here and everywhere else. In the end though, I don't think it matters. The majority of users will stay. Switching platforms means losing your friends, your familiarity, and your time.
- yieldcrv 4y agothe question was intended to spark introspection the simple answer is that people copy. there are too many infinite permutations to incentivize reinventing the wheel. a newer example being how ChatGPT simply showed people what product market fit is, various people and organizations had similar AI products and just didn't know that's what would hit. Google was sitting on one for years earlier its engineers were too busy getting finessed by it. Suddenly Google sees "oh, thats what we can do with it" and now Bard is out. Its the same with UX patterns.
- tinyhouse 4y agoSpotify has a document oriented culture. All they do all day is writing docs. No wonder they cannot execute on anything meaningful. It's unfortunate because it's a great employer.
- Mindwipe 4y agoDo the documents also have like four words on each page and you've to spend your entire time scrolling to navigate?
- green-salt 4y agoI enjoyed Heardle because I'd like to say I'm good at identifying a lot of the songs. Unfortunate buyout/dump story.
- oldstrangers 4y agoThis is the American dream in 2023. Get bought out and your product retired within the same year. Must be nice.
- kotaKat 4y agoDoes this mean the Heardle developers will be tasked elsewhere, like writing that AirPlay 2 integration they've had the ability to do for well over a year now, instead of a stupid widget for our iPhone lockscreens that doesn't even do what people want it to?
- scrollaway 4y agoWhat makes you think the Heardle developers know anything about AirPlay?
- deathanatos 4y agoWhat an incredible journey. (https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)