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Spotify was down

spotify.com

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Re: Spotify was down

#101
post #93
post #55

AWS is having problems, the two are probably related https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/ EDIT: someone below mentioned Spotify is on GCP but Google appears to be having issues as well https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud/

Is downdetector reliable at all? I feel every time something is down, a lot of unrelated sites also are reported as having problems. E.g. at the moment it reports AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare and Facebook among others having issues.

downdetector just uses search trends from google and twitter and other social apps, its definitely not checking if the site is 'down' on its own.

Re: Spotify was down

#102
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am under the impression that Spotify doesn't care a lot about UX in general. Inconsistencies in gesture handling, sessions still buggy after years, being logged out as soon as the API is unreachable, directly playing a song when opening a link, etc

I cancelled my subscription last week precisely because of the poor UX. It really pisses me off that they charge what feels like a disproportionate amount (certainly more than I've ever spent on music elsewhere), offer a very simple service only passably well, then waste their revenue on SV dev salaries (with no obvious benefit to the users in features or stability) - and of course their illustrious podcast hosts.

> then waste their revenue on SV dev salaries

wouldnt really call that a waste if those devs are producing meaningful features and/or fixing bugs.

devs work on the features they are told to, they don't direct what features get put in place or even how those features should behave in UX, most of the time.

seems more a design and/or project management failure, to me.

Re: Spotify was down

#103
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am under the impression that Spotify doesn't care a lot about UX in general. Inconsistencies in gesture handling, sessions still buggy after years, being logged out as soon as the API is unreachable, directly playing a song when opening a link, etc

Agree. They don't care about UX at all. Trivial example: the Home button that doesn't reliably take you home. It's some sort of home/back hybrid where you're never quite sure what it's going to do (this is on iOS). Instead have two buttons: one for Home and one for Back. Then we'd all know what to expect when we pressed one of them. Not difficult, is it? More substantive example: poor integration, to the point of bei…

Yeah, he's gonna come back to life and go work for those bozos :/

Re: Spotify was down

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've all come to accept random outages for so many of services we use. I wish we didn't have to because for some of these services I really don't have a backup. Given how infrequent they happen it's not worth my time to invest in having a ready backup for music streaming, when I'm not at home with my NAS. Other forms of distribution didn't have "outages" like CDs but these days when a cloud service outage happens it…

I'm not sure I accept that. A whole lot of CDs I owned at one point got scratched to the point that at least some part of a song couldn't be listened to any more. In some cases, the entire CD stopped being readable. Sometimes, they went beyond scratching to breaking. They could get lost. The players broke. Did loss of listenability due to physical degradation of media happen more or less than Spotify goes out? I have…

I have plenty of CDs that are nearly three decades old and still play great. The point is that the onus is on me to maintain my collection and my listening equipment. Well-kept media and well-maintained gear shouldn't break, and if it does then at least the fix is dependent on me.

I don't want to rely on a corporation's uptime and solvency to listen to music.

Re: Spotify was down

#105
post #8

And this is why I refuse to give up on owning media and relying on streaming. Discord seems to be gone, as well.

This is why? Because once every year or two it'll be unavailable for a couple of hours?

Because my access to it shouldn't depend on a third party's uptime. The fact that it's "a couple of hours once a year" doesn't make it any better.

We've been conditioned to just accepting that random outages and corporate decisions can take things away from us, but it is a ridiculous proposition that only benefits the bottom line of the service providers. I understand that the "convenience" angle might be attractive to some, but personally I don't think it's worth the trade-offs.

And this is not just about music, or movies. It applies to all forms of data that we have collectively agreed can just live in the cloud, because the cloud will always be there and we don't have to think about it. Until one morning you find that the cloud is unavailable, and so is all your data.

Physical media is inconvenient in a lot of ways, but to me is still an infinitely better proposition than trusting a bunch of random companies to provide me with access to digital media.

Re: Spotify was down

#106
post #8

And this is why I refuse to give up on owning media and relying on streaming. Discord seems to be gone, as well.

This is why? Because once every year or two it'll be unavailable for a couple of hours?

Or perhaps if you are a Russian person that was cancelled by them. They might like to do it afterwards with you, western citizen.

Re: Spotify was down

#108
post #16
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why? Because once every year or two it'll be unavailable for a couple of hours?

To be more generous, there are also many cases where more obscure music will start evaporating from your playlists. Some of us have serious problems with this kind of UX.

This is something else I forgot to mention, but it drives me absolutely mental. Music vanishing from my playlists, old TV shows I'm watching are suddenly not available. Paying for that kind of experience strikes me as a horrid proposition.

Re: Spotify was down

#109

And this is why I refuse to give up on owning media and relying on streaming. Discord seems to be gone, as well.

Tell me about it.

I live in an area impacted by Hurricane Ida. For a long while, we had electricity, but no internet. Having physical media meant I could still watch/listen to things.

Re: Spotify was down

#110

The painful bit was that I got automatically logged out with all of those "offline" songs. Is it a feature or a bug? IMO if there was no logout then many clients would just keep playing the cached songs, and people would not notice a disruption that much.

I tried to login to Spotify today, after many weeks. And it was down at that time. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed definitely.
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