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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

I had to keep deleting my Spotify account because my recommendations kept getting contaminated with music genres I didn't like that were impossible to get rid of. Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my recommendations. I would have very much liked a dislike button, or at least a "forget everything you think you know about me"-button.

Now it ended up with me getting rid of Spotify, because of this and other frustrations.

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I keep hearing from people how good is Spotify "Discovery" playlist. I've been a paid customer for 5+ years and their recommendations have a hit rate of 2%. I listen to a lot of different genres, artists, mostly dictated by my mood. Today it was some easy Dire Straits song, yesterday QOTSA, the other day some psytrance. So Spotify recommends all genres in the same playlist, creating an awful cacophony of songs that don't flow into one another.

Spotify recommendation system is very bad in cases like mine apparently. It's so bad I keep listening to the same old songs instead of discovering something new, which is why I'm no longer a customer until they improve their AI.

I listen to a LOT of different genres of music and their Discover reccomendations (not the playlists, the actual you like X artist you might like X) are absolutely brilliant. Got to be approx 50-60% hit rate.

It seems to differ wildly between people - I've heard plenty of people making the same case as you, but many that have the same as me. It never appears to be 'its ok', its either 'brilliant' or 'terrible'. I've been using Spotify for 10+ years at this point, so maybe that makes a difference?

Same here. I like Christopher Tin (e.g. Baba Yetu) and therefore for 6 years I've had no way to tell Spotify I don't like 8-bit video game music.

No amount of skipping or "I don't like this artist" seems to convince Spotify to stop offering me variations of 8-bit Tetris themes or MULTIPLE 8-bit Cowboy Bebop Tank! theme variations per every single Discover Weekly. I'd be thrilled to even get a 2% hit rate on music I like.

Seriously Spotify: two separate "Tank!" versions per Discover Weekly is too many.

Man, the spotify algo makes no sense. The other week I was in a really specific mood, starting with Sonic 1/2 OST and moving into 8bit/chiptune/keygen. I probably listened to every rendition of Chemical Zone out there.

Rest of the week, much the same. Nothing in Discover Weekly.

I think the relative "power" of a music genre is in relationship to its popularity compared to the popularity of what you usually listen to. Stands to reason that if you listen to rarer music (i.e. stuff the algorithm has less information about), then stuff that is more common (and the algorithm knows more about) will have a disproportionate effect on your recommendations.

This seems to be a problem with this general type of recommendation algorithms in general. YouTube suffers from it as well.

Yes that's very frustrating. I'm scared to even listen to new music on it because I'd try to use it for discovery but it would mistake what I listen to for what I like. Besides that it hardly recommends me any new music anyway. I now just use youtube for discovery.

They should add an incognito mode or something.

You could even do this maliciously. Send someone a Spotify link to a Steely Dan song and a Skrillex song, and now yacht rock and dubstep will follow them around until they delete their account (I'm assuming the intersection between those fan-bases is vanishingly small).

That already exists.

Profile > Private Session

Doesn't that just hide your activity from other people?

From their support docs:

Note: Anything you listen to in a Private Session may not influence your music recommendations, e.g. Discover Weekly.

High school me would have been very offended to be labeled “vanishingly small.”

But you’re not wrong.

By the way, I believe Spotify does have a private mode, which at least blocks your plays from showing up in the social pane and on your profile. But I’m not sure if it cuts them out of your recommendations.

Please, dear God, Spotify: just because I listened to the Hamilton soundtrack once does not mean that I want to hear it every week in Discover Weekly and multiple times per Duo playlist, because Lin-Manuel Miranda is apparently a genre of himself.

> Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my recommendations.

Similarly any app or website that pulls “top artists” from Spotify tends to include stuff I listens to a bit several years ago, but never stuff I’ve listened to nonstop for months.

Without specifics I cannot guess as to your specific case but in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter that most customer's have no use for and won't use.

In general, you had to be doing something to be getting recommendations so there is some action that when most customer's do demonstrates a high probability that you will like some genre and it just so happens you don't.

What industry just out of curiosity? I see dislikes used judiciously in youtube and reddit fwiw

Music but I don't work for Spotify currently.

> in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter that most customer's have no use for and won't use.

A feature does not need to be used often to be useful.

Take a fire extinguisher for example. Going by this logic, since most people will never even touch a fire extinguisher and most of them are never actually used, we should get rid of them because they're a cause of clutter.

I must say your dismissal of this is rather annoying. Multiple users are telling you they are facing a real -- and completely obvious and predictable -- problem due to the feature not being available. In a comment section regarding research showing it would be an improvement to recommendations.

Increased UI clutter due to a single extra icon is not a good nor sufficient argument for not including it.

My dismissal is based on a many-million digit customer base and online real world data. Sorry if a few hackernews users feel they want a dislike button, most users don't and if you give to them most users don't use it. I don't mind disagreement but dismissing real world data from this industry is sort of silly to counter with 'because I want it you're wrong'.

I'm not even saying you're wrong, I'm saying your argument for not including it for (at the very least) a sizeable minority is weak and somewhat silly.

What is a sizable minority aside from an oxymoron?

A sizeable minority is something that is still visible on a pie chart.

A minority is anything that is not a majority (this is the definition I'm using). So a < 50% group can hopefully still be viewed as non-negligible, even though it is not the majority.

I disagree that your reasoning is entirely sound. It's a bit of an elitist point of view I suppose; but fundamentally I don't think all customers are created equally in terms of importance. One could even in this day and age call some of the more important ones "influencer" or something similar.

While the general customer base might not be served by this feature, what if a subset of the customer base enjoys this feature to an extraordinary extent? Maybe it fixes a lot of problems they have with the service; and negates a lot of complaints they otherwise would have posted.

Would it still not be the correct choice to "clutter the UI" with this?

I don't think it's as easy of a choice like you're trying to make it.

But I could also be jaded by the fact that Spotify for years has trying to pull me into listening to all kinds of odd European folk music that I have no interest in what-so-ever.

For a long time we called this sort of user a "power user". People who are not necessarily technical but who love your application and use it extensively will appreciate power user functionality.

It's probably fine to not have anything to appeal to power users, but those power users probably will be the sorts to be influencers to talk up your application to everyone they know.

It’s interesting isn’t it, why did we stop talking about power users and catering to their needs?

Because the masses are now large enough that you don't need to have an actually useful application. You just need to make it kind-of work and for it to become popular.

I think for technically minded or abnormal users a dislike button would be valuable, but that's a minority of the population and I understand why a company would choose to focus on the larger market to the detriment of the enthusiasts. Props for taking the heat and trying to present this perspective.

I personally had these same complaints and acknowledged that I'm unusual and my needs are best served by my own hosted solution. I'd encourage people who are unhappy with major streaming services to roll their own if they truly feel strongly about it- I did and I'm happier for it.

How could people dismiss real world data that you didn't share? You only shared your interpretation of it and people pointed to lots of ways that this interpretation could be wrong. What data is this? Did you conduct a survey asking people if they “want” a dislike button? Or did you just measure usage frequency of the dislike button and decided that people didn't want it because it wasn't used as frequently as the like button? How could low usage frequency mean users don't “want” it?

This totally ignores effects from the long tail, black swans, power users, and criticality dynamics.

Downvotes are way more "potent" than upvotes. If I'm listening to music that I like, I'd say I probably log over 100x upvotes than downvotes. But when I downvote, I usually want to nuke the site from orbit.

What is the ratio? What ratio of users use downvote? What ratio is that compared to users that interact in any way? How are you controlling for sampling bias? Berkson's paradox? How much utility are the users that downvote obtaining, vs the disutility of being unable to?

I absolutely love it when people working on a product tell their customers that they don't need a feature they're all asking for and that would clearly improve the experience, just because not everyone uses it all the time.

> absolutely love it when people working on a product tell their customers that they don't need a feature they're all asking for and that would clearly improve the experience, just because not everyone uses it all the time.

We need a name for this, personally I call it GNOME mentality but probably is bad name since most developers are not familiar with GNOME (though the file picker issue get on top HN a lot )

> they're all asking for

All is the flaw in your comment. One person does not imply all and data speaks for itself.

The data does not speak at all. You are drawing inferences based on the data, inferences of a type that are pretty easy to poke holes in by looking at the pretty large class of things rarely used but situationaly useful (often life saving).

This type of bizarre logic makes me feel like I have to habitually use features even when they are not useful in order to protect them from UX designers in case I'm subject to some misguided A/B test.

UX designers not sufficiently held in check by strong product teams are lethal.

> The data does not speak at all.

What data are you referencing? I'm drawing conclusions based on data I have but I don't think you work for the same company as me so I'm not sure how you can speak to confidently about how wrong I am.

If x number of people are asking for something, all of those people are asking for it. I think it was pretty obvious I wasn't claiming all spotify users are asking for this.

I'm a PO so feel sufficiently qualified to state that user analytics data is completely redundant for looking at small use high value features & undervaluing direct user feedback from your 'power users' is generally a bad move.

Again, just because not everyone needs/wants a feature does not make it useless or not worth implementing.

Data doesn't tell you how useful a feature is, it tells you how frequently it's used & how many people use it. They are not the same things.

> Data doesn't tell you how useful a feature is, it tells you how frequently it's used & how many people use it. They are not the same things.

That entirely depends on the the data set. On one hand you are claiming to be an expert and on the other making generalizations about what data can be used for. In reality you know that data is contextual and depending on the data set is what determines what conclusions and how confident you can be in those conclusions.

It entirely depends on your perspective.

There's a difference between justifying your decisions with data, and letting data make your decisions for you.

What data would you use to justify not implementing a dislike feature that many users are asking for, for example?

Each of the comments that mirror yours illustrate a major problem we have in the tech sphere—assuming _we_ know better what the end user needs therefor we don’t listen to the actual user. In our defense, we’re very disconnected from the end users.

I’ve done some work with a couple disaster organizations in the past and we continually get massive praise and thanks from the victims of these disasters. The actual victims have the same praise over and over again: Unlike the red cross, salvation army, and FEMA we actually ask them what they (the victims) need. We don’t assume they need water and and a tarp, we assume they know whether or not they already have those things. Often the victims need diapers, help with flood mold remidiation, a chainsaw to cut limbs from their street so they can get their cars out so they can go help the neighbors a few streets over etc…. They know what is prohibiting them from getting out to help others much better than we.

When people are telling us what they need, we should listen to them and we should actively try to avoid our tendencies towards “I know better what you need.”

I have a couple friends who work on recommendation algorithms full time and in their defense, they’re fully aware how terrible the recommendations are—I still get my music recommendations from friends, from the local music store employees, and friends who work in music venues—their recommendations are infinitely better.

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