200m on Rogan has caused more than few of my friends to drop spotify permanently because they couldn't get him off their home screen recommendation for months. If only one engineer added a dismiss button.
You could do this, but I think the profile pictures would look better with rounded edges.
Note: For all I know, they really could be making that error. Or perhaps someone inside Spotify feels the need to make the Rogan investment at least break even, consequences be damned.
I agree that a good product would do all these things and have a way to not show recommendations you don't want, but I get why these things might not exist.
When I worked in a <100 person startup we'd "just build it" and I'd probably spend a few hours on this, but we didn't have all these concerns. We didn't do user testing, we didn't care about scalability at this level. Now I work on Google Play, and if you want to add a button like this (that will need a database query) to a frontend it's a ton more work because the scale is so different.
Or they could invest in a generic "misc settings" column in their DB - to store random stuff like this in a blob. You could even query/index on them w/ something like Postgres's JSON support.
No it isn't. When you "dismiss", the service needs to have a point of view (or UX to clarify) whether you want to dismiss it permanently or temporarily (I'm not in the mood for it right now).
You also need to deal with the cases where someone accidentally hits the button.
You also need to think about people who use multiple devices.
Should the algo's now update to say you don't like podcasts? You don't like talk shows? You don't like podcasts with themes that Rogan covers - what themes would that be?
etc.
This is the kind of statement that leads to people saying "Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete." by making it sound like a big development team creates an unwieldy product then struggles to implement even the simplest of features.
The button is absolutely not missing because of any technical difficulty implementing it. Spotify is already storing per-user preferences - and doing all sorts of algorithmic stuff to make smart recommendations and suchlike, all with the ability to scale.
The button is missing for a business reason: They want their purchase of Rogan to be a success because they've spent a lot of money on it.
Big companies have big processes and that, at least at Google, would have prevented this from happening for at least 12-18 months. Then those things aren't pursued because of A) the literal cost of getting that arranged over 18 months B) the individual's decision not to invest in beating their head against a wall for 18 months for something that'd be done in a week if leadership cared. Leadership does not care, so QED, it will not be a positive for your career.
Things either get done because A) leadership cares and has skin in the game and everyone is afraid of getting in the way of whoever delivers B) leadership cares and will keep asking about it over and over again for a year or two or C) no one cares so no one will get in your way.
That's also the crux of why things at Google go sideways. A) is only true over a year long cycle (I.e. you need to get to launch) B) people are afraid to do because it's hectoring and C) if no one cares its probably not much of a game changer anyway, there's no incentive to do it, and especially in FAANG's Efficiency/Focus(tm) era[^1^], you can actually get pretty easily brow-beaten for it by middle management. Then what are you going to do? Appeal to a VP that your manager and managers manager are big ol meanies?
[^1^] I originally wrote error, which, lol
Well gee, if all these software developers are making them slower at software development, it sure sounds like they should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete.
I would say questions like scalability and data exporting fall squarely upon the software development arm of the business; and if they had chosen an architecture which made it hard for them to deliver value, that would reflect poorly on them.
I am also arguing they probably didn't choose a bad architecture, because I don't think a technical issue is making it difficult to dismiss Rogan ads.
It's far more likely this is the same as Youtube making it difficult to dismiss Shorts, and Amazon trying to trick you into a Prime subscription every time you check out: They've decided their strategy is to make a number go up, and your personal experience is less important to them than that strategy.
Precisely. If everybody was opted out by default, podcast growth would be anemic, and the product managers would find themselves on the list of people losing their jobs.
Ignoring the Joe Rogan of it all - it's frustrating to open spotify to listen to music and it the page is full of overly produced podcasts instead. I think that's a pretty normal reason to not like a product.
It was enough of an issue that I remember multiple support threads topics at the time.
Switched to plexamp for a while. Half a year later, I'm free riding off someones spare family plan slot.
Why should someone walk around afraid of being seen associating with Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson? They're certainly not promoting Jewish genocide, unlike others.
I'm ready for the downvotes.
If the image of the most popular podcast causes drama then it's those people who are on the fringe.
That's like saying people dropping Windows 11 for pushing Candy Crush and TikTok in the start menu si crazy. Is it really crazy? I don't think so.
If I'm a paying customer I want to be treated with respect. If you keep making my UX worse to push your own agenda I WILL drop you for the HDD of "definitely legit" MP3s ready to go.
That's not the right comparison.
You don't buy the OS for entertainment recommendations and listening/viewing/playing/reading.
I hate recommendation engines in software. One of the first things I always turn off when I install Spotify is the "When we finish your playlist we'll just keep playing similar music we think you'll like" option.
All I use Spotify for is to save myself the trouble of maintaining a media server and tracking down all the music I like to put on it
Huh? I definitely use my OS for entertainment but I don't want it to shove their own content in my face, same how I don't want that from Spotify. If I want to discover new content, I'll explicitly seek it out, otherwise GTF out of my way and play my songs.
It's kinda like how I judge most for-profit businesses based on the checkout experience. Usually (there are certainly valid exceptions), the process of me giving them money is what I expect to be the best experience I will ever have with that company.
Am I going to refuse to shop at a store simply because nobody cared about a payment process? No, not unless it's particularly painful or damaging to me in some way.
However, it's certainly a red flag and a warning that the rest of my interactions with them aren't likely to be better.
Same with the case here. If the landing page for a service product is so heavily pushing particular content in place of actually being useful for them, that's a pretty big red flag.
tl;dr by itself, it's a silly reason to drop it, but it can definitely reveal where business priorities currently lie.