- 95% of my auto-suggested/generated playlists I get for the last ~year are now the same ~200-400 or so tracks rearranged in different orders.
- Half of these tracks are not artists I ever intentionally picked myself, and in fact they are tracks and artists I don't like. So I have to essentially skip half the tracks which are suggested - Spotify doesn't seem to take into account that I keep skipping certain tracks/artists - it suggest and keeps recommending them over and over again. I've gotten to the point where I have to block entire artists in settings just to have reasonable playlist suggestions (which still suck).
- The mobile (android) and webos apps seem to be getting more and more buggy every update. From pause/play breaking and skipping to the next song, to the webos app bugging out when attempting to control using phone, to the apps randomly crashing like once a week, etc.
All of these problems didn't exist or were far less common just a few years ago.
As in, anecdotally, all my friends and I just talk about using the radio from a track or another playlist, as opposed to curating playlists ourselves.
The golden egg that Spotify was sitting on (user-driven curation and favourites across a huge userbase) may be slowly evaporating.
Sorry for the rant. I love Spotify. Nearly all of recorded music for one low low price. I wish they would realize that their apps are utilities, not social, and stop optimizing for engagement.
All I want to do is change the bluetooth settings back to my phone and all I see is "start a remote group session!" No thank you, get your sharing features out of my face.
Basically the meme of Javascript / React devs making everything complicated is amplified at really large scale in a lot of these companies and there is a lot of truth to this. "Frontend engineering" is basically a bullshit jobs program masquerading as real engineering work and costing company billions in time and money.
Like Spotify had this whole team dedicated to just the back and forward buttons. Whole team for 2 buttons.
I wish more companies tried to be like Valve who are more efficient than FAANG or any other tech company.
Also, the Steam client has to be one of the most stagnant applications I ever had the pleasure of using, not sure that makes Valve super efficient.
If said software is fit for purpose already, why the need to induce frivolous change for the sake of changes themselves? If permanent stagnancy is bad, perpetual change is equally bad IMHO.