3 ms·

Mathematical randomness is not exactly a skill required for survival. In fact, our ability to produce random numbers is so bad that our brains consider true ran

Mathematical randomness is not exactly a skill required for survival. In fact, our ability to produce random numbers is so bad that our brains consider true randomness to not be random, as this blog post from Spotify shows: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-songs/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/how-to-shuffle-son...

photonthug 3y ago
Doesn't Spotify basically need to pay nonrandom royalties on stuff inside any given playlist such that streaming some content costs them more than others, while the users payment is constant? If that is true it defies belief that they would avoid cost optimization on their side and give users a truly random shuffle. Especially if they can argue that users don't know randomness when they see it
- TonyTrapp 3y ago
  I'm not sure that has anything to with the algorithm described in the blog post. I posted it because it's a popular, often-referenced example for this type of problem. The problem exists outside of Spotify, in any music player. And I believe that back when this was written, Spotify was paying the same amount of money for all streams, as it was way before the whole problem with people streaming white noise to launder money arose that they currently try to combat by essentially not paying artists with little exposure at all.
Tainnor 3y ago
Spotify's shuffle is hilariously bad though (to the point that there exist outside tools to pre-shuffle your playlists). I see that article more as an "excuse" for their bad engineering. I'm sure there are people who will get angry if they get two songs in a row from the same artist on a "random" playlist, but I'll much rather have that than the pseudo-random Spotify nonsense that will only play similar tracks next to each other or just ignore 90% of the playlist.

3 ms·

Mathematical randomness is not exactly a skill required for survival. In fact, our ability to produce random numbers is so bad that our brains consider true ran

by TonyTrapp 3y ago

photonthug 3y ago
Doesn't Spotify basically need to pay nonrandom royalties on stuff inside any given playlist such that streaming some content costs them more than others, while the users payment is constant? If that is true it defies belief that they would avoid cost optimization on their side and give users a truly random shuffle. Especially if they can argue that users don't know randomness when they see it
- TonyTrapp 3y ago
  I'm not sure that has anything to with the algorithm described in the blog post. I posted it because it's a popular, often-referenced example for this type of problem. The problem exists outside of Spotify, in any music player. And I believe that back when this was written, Spotify was paying the same amount of money for all streams, as it was way before the whole problem with people streaming white noise to launder money arose that they currently try to combat by essentially not paying artists with little exposure at all.
Tainnor 3y ago
Spotify's shuffle is hilariously bad though (to the point that there exist outside tools to pre-shuffle your playlists). I see that article more as an "excuse" for their bad engineering. I'm sure there are people who will get angry if they get two songs in a row from the same artist on a "random" playlist, but I'll much rather have that than the pseudo-random Spotify nonsense that will only play similar tracks next to each other or just ignore 90% of the playlist.