Comment by ozzythecat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ozzythecat | Hacker News Reader

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> Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike button.

How do you know I dislike the song? Instead, maybe I just heard it (or a similar song) on your platform or elsewhere outside of your app and don’t want to listen to it again right now?

I guess you could try to build a more complex model that determines what songs or music I like at what times of the day or what day of the week, or based on what I just listened to.

IMO this is rampant in FAANG companies. We create complex solutions to problems that didn’t really exist and pat ourselves on the back when our experiment show positive results.

The experiment might show you some metric (total time in app, play time at whatever percentile, etc) increased. Great! Now we launch the model in production for all customers and pat ourselves on the back. Meanwhile, the actual experience became shittier. A few promotions come out of this, and we continue living in the bubble.

Alright, end of rant.

I know that these implicit signals affect how I use the app. I might force myself to listen to a song I like, but would rather listen to something else at the time because I don't want my choice to skip to impact my recommendations in opaque ways.

The paper is making an obvious claim. If I have data showing positive and negative affinity, that will perform better than a model which just has positive day. I don't find this very surprising but my point is in practice exposing dislike buttons to customers are a CX that is hardly ever used. So the point that a model will perform better with data that customer's rarely offer up to your platform makes their claim moot in my opinion.

I downvoted your comment to demonstrate that I disagree with you.

I've heard some good arguments against allowing users to show dislikes/downvotes as well as likes, but I've not heard your argument before and it doesn't strike me as accurate. Less used than the positive direction, sure, but still significantly used when available.

Netflix, Youtube and reddit aren't the same medium as short lived music streaming is. Streaming music is a show lived precision game of guessing what's relevant. There is a lot of it depends scenarios, are we showing recommendations on a landing page, are we sequencing songs in a station or are we ordering results on a search page. The CX context is a big part of how you can use signals to benefit the customer.

My argument isn't an argument so much as a from real world data in this industry at a major industry competitor that customer's don't use the dislike button enough to justify it taking over your CX. Using co-occurrences of playback across a customer segment and combining that with likes or other signals is good enough.

Form should follow function. CX used to mean customer experience, and when your customers are telling you they want this feature back then you should reinterperate your data, not tell them they're wrong.

It amazes me how tech savvy users think they know what the entire population of users want. I'm not telling anyone they are wrong, I'm simply sharing real world data that counters the idea that users actually want a downvote button for music streaming. The fact that most people in this thread have really strong opinions but don't work in music streaming baffles my brain.

Maybe the button’s utility doesn’t come from its use, but from its presence. The user may enjoy having the option to dislike a song, even if they never exercise that option. Taking away their choice robs them of that agency.

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