6 ms·

There's at least one team devoted to screwing up the homepage, pushing content that I don't want like podcasts. Will not miss them.

maxglute 3y ago
200m on Rogan has caused more than few of my friends to drop spotify permanently because they couldn't get him off their home screen recommendation for months. If only one engineer added a dismiss button.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think this underestimates the complexity involved. It's not just a button, it's what the button does, it's respecting opt-outs like that in a scalable way for many millions of customers, it's having a way to un-do those for users and for support agents when customers inevitably accidentally hide a podcast they want to see, it's GDPR data export and deletion of those flags to hide things, it's UX testing around whether users even understand what the button does. I agree that a good product would do all these things and have a way to not show recommendations you don't want, but I get why these things might not exist. When I worked in a <100 person startup we'd "just build it" and I'd probably spend a few hours on this, but we didn't have all these concerns. We didn't do user testing, we didn't care about scalability at this level. Now I work on Google Play, and if you want to add a button like this (that will need a database query) to a frontend it's a ton more work because the scale is so different.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Yet somehow they managed to do the impossible and add a "hide from Discover Weekly" button.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    update users set "show_podcasts=0" where userid = 12345
    - danpalmer 3y ago
      If you think it through there is so much more to do here. This is the 3 person startup solution, but really doesn't get you much further than that.
  - pradn 3y ago
    For something as simple as a dismiss button for a particular promotion, it's reasonable to store the bit on device. This will work for mobile and desktop apps, which I assume are the vast majority of Spotify usage. Or they could invest in a generic "misc settings" column in their DB - to store random stuff like this in a blob. You could even query/index on them w/ something like Postgres's JSON support.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      > For something as simple as a dismiss button for a particular promotion, it's reasonable to store the bit on device. This will work for mobile and desktop apps, which I assume are the vast majority of Spotify usage. No it isn't. When you "dismiss", the service needs to have a point of view (or UX to clarify) whether you want to dismiss it permanently or temporarily (I'm not in the mood for it right now). You also need to deal with the cases where someone accidentally hits the button. You also need to think about people who use multiple devices. Should the algo's now update to say you don't like podcasts? You don't like talk shows? You don't like podcasts with themes that Rogan covers - what themes would that be? etc.
      - whoopsie 3y ago
        This is not outside the realm of one sprint.
      - pradn 3y ago
        Well, sure, there's infinite room for scope-creep. That doesn't take away from a minimal solution that works well from the user's point of view - "I don't want to see this, make it go away".
  - maxglute 3y ago
    I get you, but at the same time I'm more than little suspicious that they paid 200m for Rogan and just happens to plaster his face on my podcast tab like a permanent ad for months on end. IIRC it was right after also just acquired Bill Simmons also permanent thumbnail, basically fully visible unlike the third listing in the carousel that required scrolling. I find it hard to believe they couldn't rotate recommendations, or move it below the fold. This complaint was all over their forums, reddit, social media at the time. Their default answer on forum was, not yet, but features constantly coming. Avoided all the question of why can't they just remove the banner until feature implemented. I buy scaling features for 500m users is hard. I also buy using technical complexity is a cover for other motivations.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    > I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think this underestimates the complexity involved. It's not just a button, it's what the button does, This is the kind of statement that leads to people saying "Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete." by making it sound like a big development team creates an unwieldy product then struggles to implement even the simplest of features. The button is absolutely not missing because of any technical difficulty implementing it. Spotify is already storing per-user preferences - and doing all sorts of algorithmic stuff to make smart recommendations and suchlike, all with the ability to scale. The button is missing for a business reason: They want their purchase of Rogan to be a success because they've spent a lot of money on it.
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      No, they're right: your understanding of each other diverges when you write "it's not because of any technical difficulty" --- correct, we all agree there. However, it is still difficult. Big companies have big processes and that, at least at Google, would have prevented this from happening for at least 12-18 months. Then those things aren't pursued because of A) the literal cost of getting that arranged over 18 months B) the individual's decision not to invest in beating their head against a wall for 18 months for something that'd be done in a week if leadership cared. Leadership does not care, so QED, it will not be a positive for your career. Things either get done because A) leadership cares and has skin in the game and everyone is afraid of getting in the way of whoever delivers B) leadership cares and will keep asking about it over and over again for a year or two or C) no one cares so no one will get in your way. That's also the crux of why things at Google go sideways. A) is only true over a year long cycle (I.e. you need to get to launch) B) people are afraid to do because it's hectoring and C) if no one cares its probably not much of a game changer anyway, there's no incentive to do it, and especially in FAANG's Efficiency/Focus(tm) era[^1^], you can actually get pretty easily brow-beaten for it by middle management. Then what are you going to do? Appeal to a VP that your manager and managers manager are big ol meanies? [^1^] I originally wrote error, which, lol
      - michaelt 3y ago
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    Now take that thought and apply it to someone proposing to put a permanent Rogan-ad on the home screen. One of the first things that is going to come up is "but how can users remove it?" At the level of thought you're talking about here, someone somewhere already made the conscious decision to not make it removable.
  - FalconSensei 3y ago
    From a user perspective, they shouldn't have added podcasts without the opt-out option
- eddtries 3y ago
  That’s a crazy reason to drop using Spotify
  - constantly 3y ago
    People have different priorities. It didn’t cause me to drop music subscriptions, but did cause me to switch to Apple Music.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Not that Apple Music is God's gift to UI, but I prefer to keep my podcasts and my music separate and I don't want recommendations to be pushed on me.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    It's crazy to stop using a product because it's UI got worse by pushing content you don't want at the expense of what you do want? Ignoring the Joe Rogan of it all - it's frustrating to open spotify to listen to music and it the page is full of overly produced podcasts instead. I think that's a pretty normal reason to not like a product.
  - sdflhasjd 3y ago
    I didn't switch because of Joe Rogan, but Spotify kept changing the UI and at some point it got so annoying to browse music over the crappy podcasts being shoved in my face that I switched to Tidal.
    - metabagel 3y ago
      I felt like Tidal didn’t have as large a catalog as Spotify? What do you think?
      - sdflhasjd 3y ago
        I think the catalogue is just as good, but searching can be more difficult.
- rchaud 3y ago
  When you overpay massively for IP, you have no choice but to shove it down people's throats in the hope that even 1% decide to subscribe.
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    That sounds like a sunk-cost fallacy to me. Note: For all I know, they really could be making that error. Or perhaps someone inside Spotify feels the need to make the Rogan investment at least break even, consequences be damned.
- butlike 3y ago
  Yeah but the dismiss button has to be directly tethered to the machine learning analytics that is also tied to the retention team, so if too many people trigger it, the retention team is alerted to a potential user-retention risk. You need to write the API to hook into those two services, then make sure you have benchmarks before your pull-request will get approved. You could do this, but I think the profile pictures would look better with rounded edges.
s3p 3y ago
They’re not leaving. 17% of the staff doesn’t include the entirety of the curation team.

maxglute 3y ago

200m on Rogan has caused more than few of my friends to drop spotify permanently because they couldn't get him off their home screen recommendation for months. If only one engineer added a dismiss button.

danpalmer 3y ago
I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think this underestimates the complexity involved. It's not just a button, it's what the button does, it's respecting opt-outs like that in a scalable way for many millions of customers, it's having a way to un-do those for users and for support agents when customers inevitably accidentally hide a podcast they want to see, it's GDPR data export and deletion of those flags to hide things, it's UX testing around whether users even understand what the button does. I agree that a good product would do all these things and have a way to not show recommendations you don't want, but I get why these things might not exist. When I worked in a <100 person startup we'd "just build it" and I'd probably spend a few hours on this, but we didn't have all these concerns. We didn't do user testing, we didn't care about scalability at this level. Now I work on Google Play, and if you want to add a button like this (that will need a database query) to a frontend it's a ton more work because the scale is so different.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Yet somehow they managed to do the impossible and add a "hide from Discover Weekly" button.
- ta1243 3y ago
  update users set "show_podcasts=0" where userid = 12345
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    If you think it through there is so much more to do here. This is the 3 person startup solution, but really doesn't get you much further than that.
- pradn 3y ago
  For something as simple as a dismiss button for a particular promotion, it's reasonable to store the bit on device. This will work for mobile and desktop apps, which I assume are the vast majority of Spotify usage. Or they could invest in a generic "misc settings" column in their DB - to store random stuff like this in a blob. You could even query/index on them w/ something like Postgres's JSON support.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > For something as simple as a dismiss button for a particular promotion, it's reasonable to store the bit on device. This will work for mobile and desktop apps, which I assume are the vast majority of Spotify usage. No it isn't. When you "dismiss", the service needs to have a point of view (or UX to clarify) whether you want to dismiss it permanently or temporarily (I'm not in the mood for it right now). You also need to deal with the cases where someone accidentally hits the button. You also need to think about people who use multiple devices. Should the algo's now update to say you don't like podcasts? You don't like talk shows? You don't like podcasts with themes that Rogan covers - what themes would that be? etc.
    - whoopsie 3y ago
      This is not outside the realm of one sprint.
    - pradn 3y ago
      Well, sure, there's infinite room for scope-creep. That doesn't take away from a minimal solution that works well from the user's point of view - "I don't want to see this, make it go away".
- maxglute 3y ago
  I get you, but at the same time I'm more than little suspicious that they paid 200m for Rogan and just happens to plaster his face on my podcast tab like a permanent ad for months on end. IIRC it was right after also just acquired Bill Simmons also permanent thumbnail, basically fully visible unlike the third listing in the carousel that required scrolling. I find it hard to believe they couldn't rotate recommendations, or move it below the fold. This complaint was all over their forums, reddit, social media at the time. Their default answer on forum was, not yet, but features constantly coming. Avoided all the question of why can't they just remove the banner until feature implemented. I buy scaling features for 500m users is hard. I also buy using technical complexity is a cover for other motivations.
- michaelt 3y ago
  > I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think this underestimates the complexity involved. It's not just a button, it's what the button does, This is the kind of statement that leads to people saying "Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete." by making it sound like a big development team creates an unwieldy product then struggles to implement even the simplest of features. The button is absolutely not missing because of any technical difficulty implementing it. Spotify is already storing per-user preferences - and doing all sorts of algorithmic stuff to make smart recommendations and suchlike, all with the ability to scale. The button is missing for a business reason: They want their purchase of Rogan to be a success because they've spent a lot of money on it.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    No, they're right: your understanding of each other diverges when you write "it's not because of any technical difficulty" --- correct, we all agree there. However, it is still difficult. Big companies have big processes and that, at least at Google, would have prevented this from happening for at least 12-18 months. Then those things aren't pursued because of A) the literal cost of getting that arranged over 18 months B) the individual's decision not to invest in beating their head against a wall for 18 months for something that'd be done in a week if leadership cared. Leadership does not care, so QED, it will not be a positive for your career. Things either get done because A) leadership cares and has skin in the game and everyone is afraid of getting in the way of whoever delivers B) leadership cares and will keep asking about it over and over again for a year or two or C) no one cares so no one will get in your way. That's also the crux of why things at Google go sideways. A) is only true over a year long cycle (I.e. you need to get to launch) B) people are afraid to do because it's hectoring and C) if no one cares its probably not much of a game changer anyway, there's no incentive to do it, and especially in FAANG's Efficiency/Focus(tm) era[^1^], you can actually get pretty easily brow-beaten for it by middle management. Then what are you going to do? Appeal to a VP that your manager and managers manager are big ol meanies? [^1^] I originally wrote error, which, lol
    - michaelt 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  Now take that thought and apply it to someone proposing to put a permanent Rogan-ad on the home screen. One of the first things that is going to come up is "but how can users remove it?" At the level of thought you're talking about here, someone somewhere already made the conscious decision to not make it removable.
- FalconSensei 3y ago
  From a user perspective, they shouldn't have added podcasts without the opt-out option
eddtries 3y ago
That’s a crazy reason to drop using Spotify
- constantly 3y ago
  People have different priorities. It didn’t cause me to drop music subscriptions, but did cause me to switch to Apple Music.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Not that Apple Music is God's gift to UI, but I prefer to keep my podcasts and my music separate and I don't want recommendations to be pushed on me.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  It's crazy to stop using a product because it's UI got worse by pushing content you don't want at the expense of what you do want? Ignoring the Joe Rogan of it all - it's frustrating to open spotify to listen to music and it the page is full of overly produced podcasts instead. I think that's a pretty normal reason to not like a product.
- sdflhasjd 3y ago
  I didn't switch because of Joe Rogan, but Spotify kept changing the UI and at some point it got so annoying to browse music over the crappy podcasts being shoved in my face that I switched to Tidal.
  - metabagel 3y ago
    I felt like Tidal didn’t have as large a catalog as Spotify? What do you think?
    - sdflhasjd 3y ago
      I think the catalogue is just as good, but searching can be more difficult.
rchaud 3y ago
When you overpay massively for IP, you have no choice but to shove it down people's throats in the hope that even 1% decide to subscribe.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  That sounds like a sunk-cost fallacy to me. Note: For all I know, they really could be making that error. Or perhaps someone inside Spotify feels the need to make the Rogan investment at least break even, consequences be damned.
butlike 3y ago
Yeah but the dismiss button has to be directly tethered to the machine learning analytics that is also tied to the retention team, so if too many people trigger it, the retention team is alerted to a potential user-retention risk. You need to write the API to hook into those two services, then make sure you have benchmarks before your pull-request will get approved. You could do this, but I think the profile pictures would look better with rounded edges.

s3p 3y ago

They’re not leaving. 17% of the staff doesn’t include the entirety of the curation team.