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Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

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Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#211

Post by chiefalchemist »

Oh happy days :) Spotify recommendations - at least for me - are generally useless. It feels like "here are some palatable suggestions. You might not actually like them but we're confident they're inoffensive (in a not at all interesting sort of way)." Mind you my range of musical styles is wide. But I went 2 or 3 weeks listening to Daily Mixes and heard nothing at all worthy of my attention.

I hope Google does similar with YouTube. Why does it keep suggesting things I've scrolled past 5 or 10 times?

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#212

Post by laserlight »

notyourwork wrote: post #85
feanaro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say your dismissal of this is rather annoying. Multiple users are telling you they are facing a real -- and completely obvious and predictable -- problem due to the feature not being available. In a comment section regarding research showing it would be an improvement to recommendations. Increased UI clutter due to a single extra icon is not a good nor sufficient argument for not including it.

My dismissal is based on a many-million digit customer base and online real world data. Sorry if a few hackernews users feel they want a dislike button, most users don't and if you give to them most users don't use it. I don't mind disagreement but dismissing real world data from this industry is sort of silly to counter with 'because I want it you're wrong'.

How could people dismiss real world data that you didn't share? You only shared your interpretation of it and people pointed to lots of ways that this interpretation could be wrong. What data is this? Did you conduct a survey asking people if they “want” a dislike button? Or did you just measure usage frequency of the dislike button and decided that people didn't want it because it wasn't used as frequently as the like button? How could low usage frequency mean users don't “want” it?

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#214

Post by n8ta »

oriolid wrote: post #151
gs17 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still stuck wondering if one artist I found recently had a very different style originally, or if it lumped two unrelated acts together.

They do lump unrelated acts together. It's somewhat obvious when one of them is a current young musician and other had their career in 60s.

You can email them and they'll fix it. I've done this twice. It takes about a month but they do get to it.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#215

Post by henriquez »

notyourwork wrote: post #167
soylentnewsorg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not suggest anything. I very clearly stated what I stated, in plain English that is very easy to understand. Your qualifications are irrelevant. Your point of view on the issue we are discussing is wrong for long-term product success, and destroys the hard work others have put into the idea, in order to feel personally superior to your users. I don't know how more plainly I can put it for you if you had trouble…

You’re speaking as if you work beside me and have a clue about anything in the music industry. There’s a reason Spotify doesn’t but uses to have dislike buttons more accessible. I’m not sure why you are disagreeing with me but there’s no need to speak down to someone because of different perspective. I have real world data and work in recommenders I’m not sure what your background is.

You have real world data but it’s not at all clear that you’ve been interpreting it correctly.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#216

Post by BLKNSLVR »

dagi3d wrote: post #40

I just wish they fixed the problem with the bands disambiguation. I just hate everytime I get a recommendation in the release radar for a band that happens to have the same name as the one I like but stylewise they have nothing to do with the music I usually listen.

Gaylord!

One is a progressive blend of funk, hard rock, jazz, psychedelic from New York, active in the mid 90s to 2010[0], and the other is an anti-fascist (anti)black-metal band from London formed in 2018[1].

Both are interesting, but I only like the music of the first one. Google Play Music used to mix them together.

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_(band)

[1]:https://genius.com/albums/Gaylord-band/The-black-metal-scene...

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#218

Post by chiefalchemist »

addandsubtract wrote: post #206
geoduck14 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a conference the other week and Spotify had a Keynote. They talked about the tradeoff between playing "diverse songs" and "consistent songs". It is a hard problem to solve. When you start your listening session they try and predict how long you are going going listen (based on your past history and time of day). If you are probably going to listen for a while, they are more risky and might play something "di…

They could just ask. I promise my answers will be more accurate than any AI guessing for me.

Exactly. There's no reason the "personlized" Daily Mixes can't be built/labeled to indicate "acaccuracy" rate. It annoys me when I'm in the mood for new or different - which is 60% of the time - and all the new Daily Mixes feel like the day / week before.

I'd love a personalized playlist titled "Curveballs" that contined things different and/or challenging.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#219

Post by omega3 »

I've deleted my Spotify account after noticing that the recommendations algorithm is useless.I don't understand how there can be regression in that regard from soulseek, what.cd network graphs, last.fm or even radio stations. Seriously, how hard is it for Spotify to hire some music heads to put together playlists for people.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#220

Post by rumblerock »

leppr wrote: post #177
rumblerock wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of that, if you listen to a wide range of genres the attempt to shoehorn your history into 6 Daily Mixes yields some comical results. Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana. Give me a home screen with 12 or more Daily Mixes that segment my listening behavior at a finer resolution, and I'd be a lot happier with the service. I understand why all the other playlists exist, but I generally have an idea of exactl…

Then you can simply find a song that matches what you're exactly wanting to listen to and start the "song radio" from there. For me the problem is exactly the contrary, I can't find enough diversity in the daily mixes, it's mostly all songs I've either explicitly "liked" or heard a couple times before.

Diversity in daily mixes is an issue for sure. I do use the song radio feature but find it's hit or miss - they usually start off strong, but seem to lose the thread at a certain point.

It's a fine balance between existing liked songs and expanding within sub-genres, but I have at least noticed the recommendations improving over the past few years.

I suspect it would help to port over my entire pre-Spotify music library into Spotify to provide a bit more data, my current library is all post-Spotify so it fails to capture the breadth of my music taste. I've just never gotten around to it.

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