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Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

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Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes your just not in the mood for a specific song or genre. A skip doesn’t imply I’d never want to hear a song again.

A song you always want to listen to is better than one you only want to listen to sometimes.

It's far more complicated than that.

Some songs have extremely long shelf life and others are extremely short. For instance, an "adult contemporary" station could probably get away with playing Elton John's "Tiny Dancer", a 49-year old song, without anyone thinking anything is weird.

More popular songs of that year such as those by Roberta Flack or Gilbert O'Sullivan would not get the same non-reaction

Some songs have even longer shelf life that are associated with real world things like birthdays, holidays, seasons, etc. It's pretty common to hear a set of Christmas music that was literally recorded during WW2 with everyone's approval.

Some songs grow on people, others grow tired quickly. The classic example is novelty songs that specify a dance such as the cover of The Birdie Song by The Tweets or Black Lace's Agadoo, which reached impressive popularity and then were promptly forgotten forever. Ones that you may be familiar with such as Rick Martin's Macarena, probably gave you a headache just thinking about it.

But not all. Chubby Checker's "The Twist", a song in this category of instructional dance pop music, has escaped the ban hammer of time.

But overall the pattern of memory holing proscribed dance songs is robust, even for songs that developed a dance without actually calling it out, such as "Achy Beaky Heart".

Also there's no asymptotic drop after release date. Some songs that are popular now and symbolic of an era weren't as popular when they were new and some have second lives when featured in say a television show, video game, or covered by a more contemporary artist. Every few years a new version of Gershwin's "Summertime" seems to come out followed by renewed interest in previous versions by people like Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and Ella Fitzgerald. Should Ella Fitzgerald albums be recommended to people for the next 18 months now? Probably not the right way to interpret those results.

There's an exogenous contextual reason for such things and those have to be accommodated for

It's completely non-trivial and a simple model of skips and likes without sophistication behind it will dramatically fail to be anything other than an irritation

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#272
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…

Sometimes your just not in the mood for a specific song or genre. A skip doesn’t imply I’d never want to hear a song again.

I suspect that this same effect is close to the reason so many services removed the dislike button: humans are emotional and were, in some cases, disliking songs which they were not in the mood for, but would like at another time.

As a result, the signal coming from the dislike button was not very useful, and just added unnecessary complexity. Instead, the algorithm can present the user a fixed song in different settings to see if they continue to skip it. A nice result is that the user doesn’t have the negative reaction “hey I disliked this song why are you presenting it to me again”

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#273
post #83

I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account. I wanted to remove her music from my history so spotify would hopefully not recommend her music to me but there is no way to delete your history https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/2021-how-do-we... Account deleted. I know I'm not the norm but Spotify has never done a good job for me recomme…

It hardly matters now, but before you do anything with a guest, you can start a private session to make sure their history is ignored. Still a very weird feature to omit; I'd reckon that most people would use history deletion at some point

I use this a lot when playing music for my kid, but unfortunately the feature is clunky: weird path to find it, self-auto-disable much later but with the song still loaded. Hopefully this changes someday.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#274
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found out you can break your recommendations without losing control of your account. I listened to one podcast episode and it's been stuck on my home screen for two months. I've tried listening to it, ignoring it, unsubscribing, deleting (you can't!). It's just there forever now. And of course, that means it's always recommending related podcasts all the time so most of my homepage is now filled with this stuff and…

I’ve never listened to a podcast ever on Spotify. Refuse to, given their approach of trying to wall off podcasts in their own app. I’ve had an entire top-level list of podcasts recommended to me for over a YEAR now. I will never use it, but I have to constantly scroll past it and dodge podcast recommendations in new podcast + music playlists (that aren’t clearly marked) as well. I used to love Spotify. I got so many…

They paid a lot of money to make those podcasts Spotify exclusives. It follows that they'd advertise them as heavily as they can.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#275
post #186
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're probably trying to offset the guilt they feel from payola[0]. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-in...

If the product is free, you're the product. And if the product is paid, you're also the product.

If the product uses your data as AI inputs you are the prodict.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#276

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…

> Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana. What's inherently comical about this? One of my least favorite experiences is having a radio station based on a song and getting nothing but songs that sound just like it. Unless you have only played 90s grunge or 70s soft rock I'm not sure why this juxtaposition is not considered a feature.

That example might be OK, but my daily mixes include "Weird Al, Nerdcore Comedy, and also Radiohead" and "60s/70s/80s Rock and also Broadway Show Tunes". The transitions are very bizarre.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana. What's inherently comical about this? One of my least favorite experiences is having a radio station based on a song and getting nothing but songs that sound just like it. Unless you have only played 90s grunge or 70s soft rock I'm not sure why this juxtaposition is not considered a feature.

I agree. I love the wider scope of Spotify’s mixes. If I wanted a narrow scope then I’d just have created the playlist myself like the old days (or just thrown an album on). The reason I use Spotify mixes is for a variety within an approximate mood. And I’ve discovered so many good news tunes and artists through their mixes. That all said, I do wish I could turn off their podcast recommendations. I never listen to po…

Or even search for someone else's playlist!

Not happy about being forced ads though (on some podcasts)... I thought the idea of paying monthly was the value exchange for the content.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#278
post #256

But there is a dislike button in Spotify, specifically in the Discover Weekly playlist where most of the recommendations happen? https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Discover-...

The dislike button seems to come and go at random. Sometimes it's available in the desktop app, sometimes not. Sometimes I have the option to dislike songs in CarPlay, sometimes not.

It's as if they hired B. F. Skinner as an engineering consultant.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

People rarely know what they actually want

Bullshit. What people rarely know is what some rich tech company actually want them to want.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am speaking as if I have no idea about your work and what you do. I am speaking as if I am addressing the specific incredibly stupid thing you said, from a user point of view. You know who does not care about your music "industry" or your "work?" The users of spotify. They care about listening to music they want to listen to. My background is I listen to music using things that play it. Spotify is absolute crap bec…

Based on how you talk to people you sound like a terrible person to work with.

Based on assuming I talk at the office to my coworkers the way I talk to some stranger with a really bad opinion online, you have deduced that coworkers at my presales job in data storage are not treated well.

Based on how you talk here, you sound like you paint a fake little world around yourself full of straw men to make you feel better. Which goes well in line with your opinion you know better than the user of a product, what that user wants. Living in a fake little world where you da man, courtesy of your brain.

This is called deep seeded insecurity - where your brain makes subconscious coping mechanisms to avoid depression. Bullied a lot in high school?

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