Live data from Hacker News

Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

news.cornell.edu

431–440 of 660 posts

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#431

I'm apparently in the minority, but I long for a return of the 5-star ranking. I really miss that about itunes, being able to rank each song, and set up smart playlists based on genre and how much variety (how deep in the star rankings) I wanted. I'd have to think an intelligent recommendation engine could do a ton more with star rankings than a simple up/down too. 5=love, 4=like, 3=ok, 2=dislike, 1=hate. It could ev…

The more information the better, thing is platforms want to sell their content first and foremost. This removal of user input was pushed by the business so they could push content regardless of personal interest. Ever wonder why Netflix keeps on pushing bad content ?

What is Apple selling to have so little settings in MacOS? ;)

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#432

Things I want from Spotify: - Fix the damn album artwork in the browser. A big part of enjoying an album is viewing the cover and liner art. Let me do that full-screen with zoom. - Let me create genre-limited radio stations from my likes. Don't just play songs from my likes. If I'm in the mood for , say, 80s hip-hop, I want a radio station based off my liked 80s hip-hop songs which includes related artists. - Hide th…

While YouTube Music is still a clear regression from GPM, it's slowly catching up. Any year now it'll be good... But it seems it might already annoy you less than Spotify? Which is interesting, most people seem to believe Spotify is superior.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more information the better, thing is platforms want to sell their content first and foremost. This removal of user input was pushed by the business so they could push content regardless of personal interest. Ever wonder why Netflix keeps on pushing bad content ?

Do you have any evidence for that claim, or is that pure speculation on your part?

I don't have any written or direct evidence, however I worked for a public service broadcaster, who regularly dealt with Apple and Netflix, and the feedback from both was that star-rankings were driving a lot of royalty payments and user choice (people would ignore poorly ranked content). The impact of this was that low performing content providers made less money. By removing the collective scoring, the company would implement their own recommendations algorithms, which gave them the ability to both deliver 'better' recommendations based on what the user consumed and spread the royalty payments more broadly. If what you wanted was to see what everyone else was watching/listening to though, that's not in the interest of their business. Anecdotal and third hand but I believe the people that relayed this to me.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#436
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…

There are 3 artists that Spotify continually play to me and I preemptively will fast forward them even during the crossover play because I dislike them so much. I’ve submitted requests before to have a “don’t play me this artist” feature. I don’t know why this is so hard for them.

Shouldn't they have at least have a report as inapropriate content button? So my mom could then report Cradle of Filth.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#438
been using spotify for about 5 years and i swear the recommendations get worse and worse. i can't use the release radar or discover weekly playlist because they're so awful.

maybe thats a reflection of my usage, but would be nice to have a way to reset the recommendations or dislike.

there wasa period when i would keep static noise from spotify on the background for a few hours and now 80% of my recommendations are static noise. annoying

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#439

been using spotify for about 5 years and i swear the recommendations get worse and worse. i can't use the release radar or discover weekly playlist because they're so awful. maybe thats a reflection of my usage, but would be nice to have a way to reset the recommendations or dislike. there wasa period when i would keep static noise from spotify on the background for a few hours and now 80% of my recommendations are s…

Biggest issue for me with release radar is that Spotify still doesn't handle the case that multiple artists use the same name while not being close to the same style of music. (Exodus the trash metal band isn't remotely the same as exodus the gospel group)

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#440

I'm apparently in the minority, but I long for a return of the 5-star ranking. I really miss that about itunes, being able to rank each song, and set up smart playlists based on genre and how much variety (how deep in the star rankings) I wanted. I'd have to think an intelligent recommendation engine could do a ton more with star rankings than a simple up/down too. 5=love, 4=like, 3=ok, 2=dislike, 1=hate. It could ev…

The more information the better, thing is platforms want to sell their content first and foremost. This removal of user input was pushed by the business so they could push content regardless of personal interest. Ever wonder why Netflix keeps on pushing bad content ?

I'm pretty sure stars were discontinued because the best proxy for "what you will spend time watching, is what you spent time watching" and not your curated ratings. As in: the datapoint they funneled into their models was "time spent on video X" and not, "rating on video X".

Business of course wants to keep churn low, and they think time spent on the site is the best way to do that.

That (and "people mostly don't use ratings beside 1 and 5") is at least the reasoning I've read every time I've seen this topic mentioned in blogs/talks.

I do also feel Netflix is pushing it's in-house content way more these last few years, to the detriment of their recommendations though.

Post reply on HN