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Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

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Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#141

Post by Hokusai »

onion2k wrote: post #46
jorgesborges wrote: post #22

So basically they’re developing a product marketed to streaming platforms to identify what’s “more attractive” to consumers. The algorithms are still optimized for increasing sales and engagement, not improving recommendations (for the user). That’s exactly why I’m unhappy with Spotify lately. I feel I’m being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on what’s currently in vogue, and not just artistically but politically…

So basically they’re developing a product marketed to streaming platforms to identify what’s “more attractive” to consumers. The algorithms are still optimized for increasing sales and engagement, not improving recommendations (for the user). It's possible that the recommendations are both good for users and good for corporate interests. They might not work for you, but for millions of Spotify users they seem to work…

> They might not work for you, but for millions of Spotify users they seem to work.

That is the most reasonable explanation. HN users are not the average user of Spotify.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#142

Post by simion314 »

breakfastduck wrote: post #60
notyourwork wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without specifics I cannot guess as to your specific case but in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter that most customer's have no use for and won't use. In general, you had to be doing something to be getting recommendations so there is some action that when most customer's do demonstrates a high probability that you will like some genre and…

I absolutely love it when people working on a product tell their customers that they don't need a feature they're all asking for and that would clearly improve the experience, just because not everyone uses it all the time.

> absolutely love it when people working on a product tell their customers that they don't need a feature they're all asking for and that would clearly improve the experience, just because not everyone uses it all the time.

We need a name for this, personally I call it GNOME mentality but probably is bad name since most developers are not familiar with GNOME (though the file picker issue get on top HN a lot )

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#143

Post by yuliyp »

notyourwork wrote: post #2

I work in this industry and actually we’ve found from online experimentation customers generally don’t want to tell you they dislike something. The expectation is customers get what they like (relevant) and sometimes they want to express stronger affinity for specific things. The converse hasn’t shown to be true. Generally customers don’t have a clear picture of how their explicit signals impact recommendations. Thou…

It's honestly really stressful using systems which do this. I have to worry about the signals I'm sending to the system all the time. Did I hover over that clickbait too long? Did I alt-tab while a song I liked was playing? Did I accidentally click like on something? Did I misclick onto the wrong song?

Sure I might enjoy some clickbaity content every once in a while, but that doesn't mean I want the system to show me more of it, even if that will lead to me watching more things.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#144

Post by AtNightWeCode »

First, Spotify likes have been broken since forever, things you not liked end up as liked tracks. Second, it is obvious that the recommendations are mostly based on what you previously listen to. Hence, all parents are spammed with kids songs. I think they made a fix for that now though.

People does not act according to there believes and I have a hard time thinking that votes would beat history when it comes to mass consumption of music. Down votes are in general also known to cause problems.

For me, Spotify recommendations are by far the best recommendations on any entertaining platform I use. I use them all the time. Compare it with Youtube for instance were music recommendations are repetitive and mostly irrelevant.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#145

Post by oriolid »

klyrs wrote: post #78

An option to hide all podcasts would significantly improve spotify's recommendations. I don't listen to podcasts (though I have accidentally clicked on one, when a podcast interviewed a musician I like... blech). Why is my screen filled with podcasts multiple times per day? I like the music recommendations, "so and so artist radio," etc., but they make me hunt for them. Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I…

I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify and I still have them on my home screen, so I think that it's hardcoded, not a generated recommendation.

The probably autogenerated daily mixes have been surprisingly non-bad for me. Nothing like rap mix invaded by Bach, but the "classic rock" mix sometimes has Ghost that doesn't really sound that out of place.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#146

Post by saltedonion »

“ Piki selects music from a database of roughly 5 million songs and incentivizes users by giving them $1 for every 25 songs they rate. The Piki interface plays a song, and then gives the listener the ability to rate it after different amounts of time. Specifically, the user can “dislike” the song after 3 seconds, “like” the song after 6 seconds and “superlike” it after 12 seconds.”

These people are training on a completely different set of features than what Spotify is using. For example, listen time is likely to be a important feature where a short time or a skip will be a pretty good proxy for a dislike.

In other words, the authors conclusions are conditioned on only using the features outlined in the article, like, dislike, and super like. And I’m not sure it will generalize for Spotify.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#147

Post by notatoad »

aeyes wrote: post #99
psKama wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the exact reason I switched to YouTube Music. I remember even about 10 years ago, last.fm's algorithm on bringing songs I would enjoy basing on previously listened/liked songs was far more accurate than Spotify's today.

Does the algorithm of YouTube Music behave similar to standard YouTube? YouTube (not Music) basically always recommends the same tracks in the same order and within the same genre bubble. It is hard to discover anything new which makes me not want to try YouTube Music.

This was my experience with YouTube music - no matter what genre station I started off with, it eventually settled back onto the same small number of currently-trending songs. I get much more diverse recommendations from Spotify.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#149

Post by oriolid »

dfdz wrote: post #115

I have seen this article before. The author are so close to understanding why Spotify does NOT need a dislike button >To dislike a song is easy – to like one, you have to actually invest time in it. Likewise, to detect if a user dislikes a song is easy since the user will not invest time listening to it: the skip button is the dislike button. In contrast, detecting if a user likes a song is more difficult: there need…

Skip could also mean "I like this song, but I want to hear something different at the moment".

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#150

Post by verve_rat »

dfdz wrote: post #115

I have seen this article before. The author are so close to understanding why Spotify does NOT need a dislike button >To dislike a song is easy – to like one, you have to actually invest time in it. Likewise, to detect if a user dislikes a song is easy since the user will not invest time listening to it: the skip button is the dislike button. In contrast, detecting if a user likes a song is more difficult: there need…

But there is a difference between "I don't feel like this now" and "I hate this" that skipping a track doesn't capture.
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