[Nathan2055]

It’s bizarre, because I understand why YouTube recommends heavily disliked videos or just things that you personally are likely to dislike. Anger leads to massively increased engagement, as Zuckerberg famously discovered.

But music? Most people don’t listen or engage with music they dislike, and just skip to the next track. They can’t even serve additional ads that way, at least as far as I know. Unless they’re trying to inflate some made-up “total streams started” metric or something, it doesn’t make any sense to avoid filtering out disliked tracks. It’s purely a net negative for them.

[itairall]

I don't get it either. What is is even worse is that the algorithm has pulled a some incredible music recommendations for me but they are so few and far between.

My fav is Countdown at Kusini by Manu Dibango. The soundtrack to a 1976 Nigerian action film that I absolutely love. Totally from left field.

Most recommendations though are just absolutely terrible. Either stuff I would never listen to or David Bowie "Let's Dance" because I am a Bowie fan. The most trivial,useless, brain dead recommendation possible.

At this point I just assume Google is far less competent than what it it seems like they should be.

[soylentcola]

> The most trivial,useless, brain dead recommendation possible.

This is what I notice as well. Before the end of Play Music, I'd uploaded around 30k tracks to my library. I stream music fairly often. So it knows enough about artists I enjoy and can suggest others I don't know.

But when it picks something from an era/genre that should be at least adjacent (let's say early 90's alt rock) it skews so heavily toward the same overplayed tracks I grew sick of hearing on the radio decades ago.

Nirvana? Teen Spirit/Come as You Are

Jane's Addiction? Jane Says

Soundgarden? Black Hole Sun

Then as often as it throws out something modern or classic that I'd never really heard and enjoy discovering, it goes into weird tangents with stuff I dislike and always thumbs-down. If I always downvote an artist, the algo should be able to infer that I don't like the artist. From there, it should pick up the pattern. It never does, and I still get Kid Rock, Dave Matthews, Nickelback, and Linkin Park in there constantly.