I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less.
Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows.
The "shuffle" alone on Spotify was enough to send me running. Have a playlist with 200 songs from 80 different artists? Well, we'll just play this one artist - the same album even! - back to back to back until you're annoyed enough to manually select the next song!
I understood people flocking to Spotify back when it was the only game in town that allowed you to play specific songs, make playlists, and "download" songs for offline (airplane) playback. But now Pandora does all this too - and has for the past several years. The two services are even priced about the same...
So, if Spotify is so bad, as would seem evidenced by all these HN threads that pop up from time-to-time, why do people continue to use it?