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Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

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Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#41

Post by domh »

javanissen wrote: post #12

They ruined it! Pre-acquisition Heardle played the song from the beginning immediately after you finished guessing. Post-acquisition, you had to open the song in Spotify which introduced a lag of several seconds. The immediate visceral reward of playing the game disappeared.

One thing they also broke was the ability to press the skip button whilst the song is playing, and have it carry on playing to the new skipped point without completely restarting. If I dont know it in the first 3 seconds, it's annoying having to listen to that whole chunk again before hearing the 4th second.

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#43

Post by domh »

mnd999 wrote: post #27
javanissen wrote: post #12

They ruined it! Pre-acquisition Heardle played the song from the beginning immediately after you finished guessing. Post-acquisition, you had to open the song in Spotify which introduced a lag of several seconds. The immediate visceral reward of playing the game disappeared.

Pre acquisition it was based on Soundclouds most popular 250, and most of them were well-known enough to be guessable. I've no idea what source they switched it to, but there's a lot of obscure songs which makes it a lot less fun.

Yeah I used to get it maybe 70% of the time in the first few seconds, and I just played it today and I have absolutely no idea what this song is. The main difference between Heardle and Wordle for me is that with Wordle you can sit there thinking on it for a bit and come back and you may have a new guess. With Heardle I either know it or I don't, I'm not gunna suddenly realise what song it is 5 hours later.

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#45

Post by basisword »

rektide wrote: post #25
encoderer wrote: post #23

Spotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.

I quit sometime after they ended extensions. It was so awesome having Spotify as a platform for dozens & dozens of extensions. I wish I'd taken a screenshot or done a video tour of my setup before it shut down. The Cluetrain Manifesto/Intertwingularity days were so full of open endless possibility & fun. Spotify did so so so well, had such an interesting capable Javascript extension system built in to the app... then…

Extensions were awesome. Took them about a decade to bring lyrics back after they killed extensions too.

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#46

Post by Bukhmanizer »

transcriptase wrote: post #28
encoderer wrote: post #23

Spotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.

Their UX is infuriating compared to a few years ago. Why does it take multiple clicks to get to search? Why are my playlists etc not front and centre? Pop-ups about new albums from artists that they know I’ve never listened to and never would? Every time I use it now, my inner voice is saying “get the fuck out of my way” to the UX itself. What are they optimizing for?

I think they’ve realized that as long as they don’t the licenses to the music itself, another company can always come along and eat it’s lunch (a la Disney+, Peacock, Hulu with Netflix. So they’re trying to raise the barriers to listening to “songs” rather than “whatever Spotify serves me”

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#47

Post by Sakos »

wincy wrote: post #6

Thank goodness. One of my Facebook friends spams my feed with his Heardle score every day and it drives me crazy.

You can unfollow friends to stop getting their posts on your feed. It's what I did to clean up my feed back when I still used FB. Made a huge difference in FB's usefulness.

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#48

Post by itsibitzi »

transcriptase wrote: post #28
encoderer wrote: post #23

Spotify, get your shit together. You’ve wasted a fortune in podcasting and now you’ve destroyed your app UX. Nobody wants this crap. Everybody just wants better music discovery and instant access to their favorites.

Their UX is infuriating compared to a few years ago. Why does it take multiple clicks to get to search? Why are my playlists etc not front and centre? Pop-ups about new albums from artists that they know I’ve never listened to and never would? Every time I use it now, my inner voice is saying “get the fuck out of my way” to the UX itself. What are they optimizing for?

You can jump straight to search using {Cmd,Ctrl}-L the same as a web browser, but for folks who're not used to key commands the decision to hide the search bar is absolutely deranged.

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#49

Post by ianferrel »

javanissen wrote: post #12

They ruined it! Pre-acquisition Heardle played the song from the beginning immediately after you finished guessing. Post-acquisition, you had to open the song in Spotify which introduced a lag of several seconds. The immediate visceral reward of playing the game disappeared.

They also weirdly broke something that made it reliably play. Pre-spotify it would reliably play the first X seconds. After Spotify sometimes it would play less than that, which made it harder and less reliable.

Re: Spotify abandons Heardle less than a year after buying it

#50

Post by musk_micropenis »

soneca wrote: post #15

Never heard of it. Thought it sounded fun. Went to play it. I had to skip without guessing to the end and then see today’s answer. I never heard that song in my life, nor ever heard of the artist. Connecting Heardle to my Spotify profile would make a more fun game.

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