I wrote about things that have to change with SoundCloud a couple of months ago [1] I'm carefully optimistic that an improved interface will help improve how p

I wrote about things that have to change with SoundCloud a couple of months ago [1] I'm carefully optimistic that an improved interface will help improve how people end up using the site, but the biggest issues for me with SoundCloud are still signal-to-noise rate in community engagement and sound quality. I will pay close attention to how much behind-the-scenes improvement there is, but none is mentioned in the announcement (the only one that comes close to a point in my list is on search, which I personally never use). SoundCloud seems to still focus on being a cool site instead of addressing the very basic "data" problems like comment spam [2] (or follow spam) and, in the year 2012, they still stream music at 128kbps, which just does horrible things to your music unless you have professional mastering (even then it's a bit horrible). What irks me most is that there are very simple solutions to both of those - For comment spam, it seems like they still have no simple "if a user posts the exact same text a number of times, containing a link, that's spam" filters in place. I know that that can be a dirty arms race, but if it remains entirely unfought, the spammers will end up crushing any and all relevance. For the sound quality, even just bumping the bitrate to 192kbps would mean a huge improvement and at a very low cost to data transferred. In any case - I understand that they have to focus their message and that it's common to show off the more prestigious improvements. But if they have, for instance, an improvement on spam control, this is big enough of an issue for all SC users that they would really enjoy an announcement there. A community evangelist replied to my post on g+, saying that they would be rolling out improvements throughout the year and I will hold them to that. I must say, though, that I don't get how simple things like that aren't just rolled out in shameful "oh god, you're right, we will do that straight away" fashion, to be honest. [1] https://plus.google.com/111011776153281260419/posts/KgxmnsMGZPZ https://plus.google.com/111011776153281260419/posts/KgxmnsMG... [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/sr2s5/people_who_spam_on_soundcloud_are_the_scum_of_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/sr2s5/p...