Hacker News Reader

But there is a dislike button in Spotify, specifically in the Discover Weekly playlist where most of the recommendations happen?

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Discover-...

View on HN

The dislike button seems to come and go at random. Sometimes it's available in the desktop app, sometimes not. Sometimes I have the option to dislike songs in CarPlay, sometimes not.

It's as if they hired B. F. Skinner as an engineering consultant.

Not only that, sometimes the dislike button doesn’t seem to do anything

Exactly, hence the Skinner analogy (the power of intermittent rewards being a key observation in behaviorist psychology.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_rei...

The real hackers understand this sort of thing intuitively, and companies like Spotify pay big bucks for their insight. We nerds are just their tools.

No... unfortunately, that has been gone for probably close to a year now, replaced with a "Hide Song" button that doesn't seem to influence the algorithm in any way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com