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Comment by jere | Hacker News Reader

One infuriating thing about economic incentives and Spotify:

Very often, when a song comes up, I will want to delete it from my current playlist because it no longer interests me. In many years it has been practically impossible in the UI. The only way to do it is to hunt through thousands of songs, then click on a context menu to delete it, despite this being something that would be incredibly easy to add to the current song interface and accomplish in one second (Adding the same song to a playlist is an option there).

So why is this the case?

I recently realized that preventing me from cleaning up my playlist means MORE SKIPS for Spotify. They can shove more ads in my face by forcing me to listen to more stuff I don't care about over time. It sounds silly but I would bet money that this is the reason considering how technically simple this feature is and how large the value would be.

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Jesus, you are attributing something like this to malice, where it is simply:

It is a power user feature.... and most likely nobody bothered to prioritize it as it wont be changing any metrics at all.

Spotify (the desktop client), had all kinds of features (drag and drop, etc..), that were nice but were eventually dropped in the sub-sequential redesigns. The realization was that less of 2% of the users were using any of those features, and many of those features had costs (extra code, more maintenance, etc)....

Of course, many employees are power users themselves, and some were not happy, but over and over it seems that dropping those features didn't hurt metrics, actually improved them (usually because the UI got more simplified, less cluttered).

That little feature is missing, (and annoying you so much) simply because Spotify is a large company now, and nobody (usually either a PM, or senior engineer) has thought that including it, because it doesn't have a large impact.

When the company was smaller, engineers could just jump in and implement little things that 'annoyed' them. Once the company is large, is gets harder to do that.

That just how it is in most tech companies when they reach a certain size.

I have to wholeheartedly agree with your parent here.

The whole purpose of playlists is to organise songs, and almost the entire usecase for removing a song from a playlist is to remove the currently playing song. I almost never want to remove a song under any other circumstances.

This shouldn’t be a power feature, but Spotify makes it unnecessarily difficult to do on the fly.

You're making a few big leaps here. First that self-built playlists are an important feature for users, that people are actively managing their playlists, and that people curate while listening.

Those might all be true for the majority of users, or it might be that you're an outlier. The only way to know is to actually sample real world users.

Malice? No. Prioritization? Sure. Monetization never affects prioritization discussion?

I understand not everything that can make it in and I understand not making features for power users, especially ones that clutter up the UI.

But this is a basic use case. Maybe people use Spotify differently than I do, but I would assume they add their favorite songs to a playlist, put it on shuffle, and that's basically it. Having this functionality be effectively append only doesn't make sense to me.

https://i.imgur.com/a4PWICd.png

I don't see adding one extra option, which would logically fit next to "Add to Playlist", to this context menu with 8 options to be crazy.

Another user stepped in to let me know that playlists can be filtered with Ctrl-F. Now that's a feature for power users if I ever heard of one.

>I recently realized that preventing me from cleaning up my playlist means MORE SKIPS for Spotify. They can shove more ads in my face by forcing me to listen to more stuff I don't care about over time.

I have a paid account and have the same difficulty removing tracks from a playlist via a mobile device. There are no ads on my account, yet the UX is the same, so I'm not sure that that would be their reasoning. Your idea sounds silly because it is, IMO.

I didn't say the UI would be different for paid accounts. That's a bizarre idea. The difference is with a paid account you can skip as many songs you don't like and face no problems. When I do the same, I quickly run into 3+ consecutive ads, without having barely heard any actual music. You don't have to deal with obnoxious ads. Of course you think it's silly.

While playing a song in a playlist, clicking on the album art next to the song name will bring you to the song in the playlist, if you're using the desktop client. Doesn't work on mobile. Clicking the song name will send you to the song in the album.

It's similar (well opposite) to Github commits view, where clicking a user avatar will send you to his profile, while clicking his nickname will show you all his commits in the current repo.

It's not a very good affordance.

OK, fair enough. I could have sworn I tried this many, many times and never got it to work. Possibly because you have to click on the image and not on the expand button and not on the song name or album name for this to work...

And it's still too many click IMO.

I never get ads, at all. I stopped using the desktop app and just connect via the browser and u-block origin does the rest. Continuous music all the time. Is it lower bitrate? Maybe, I can't tell.

I'm not sure about the mobile app, but command-f to search for songs inside a playlist works on the desktop app. It's really not hard to delete songs.

Thanks for the tip! I usually guess this command to be available in a text based UI and represent a search, but it's presence in a menu list UI like Spotify and it's function as a filter is a complete surprise.

On mobile, searching inside playlists recently turned into an option in the three-dot menu on the display page. I miss the old interface where you just drag down to expose a search field, focus it and start typing. :(

I still have that on iOS? Never noticed it going away and it’s still there for me. That feature really did take way too long for me to realize although.

I really should have said Android. I guess I just assumed they used a cross-platform framework on mobile, with no justification at all. Oops.

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