[wanderr]

We built Grooveshark with an extremely small team and grew it to a massive scale. We re built Grooveshark multiple times (moving from flash-based to HTML5, several major design overhauls, adding collaborative listening, etc). It absolutely boggles my mind how big Spotify is and how stagnant the product is.

[wubrr]

Not just stagnant, but clearly getting worse.

- 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.

[jm4]

I don’t understand the appeal of Spotify. Back when it first came to the U.S. there were a few competing services and I thought Spotify was towards the bottom in terms of recommendations. Pandora was so much better, although all they had was a radio product. Even Rhapsody, from the detestable Real Networks, had a better product than Spotify in my opinion. These days, I would rather use Apple or YouTube.

[AOsborn]

That's an interesting point regarding suggestions. I wonder if they are having a massive drop in user engagement as the user base has matured.

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.

[texuf]

It's not that stagnant, they have time to make the product worse imo. Their recent UX changes broke my weekly workflow, they buried the discover playlists behind three clicks and scroll, and they seem to have changed the algo so that it recycles the same songs over and over again (though my listening patterns have changed a bit since a recent addition to the family). Playlists are harder to create. And heaven forbid the thing you want to listen to is listed at the top of the iphone app when you open it, because they're going to refresh the list in 3... 2... 1... oh it's gone.

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.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Same as Twitter before Musk.

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.

[cx201]

Do you have the impression the Twitter web application has been improving since Musk took over?

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.

[lightspot21]

> 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.

[JambalayaJim]

In my experience Steam is slow and crashes often. I don’t generally care about UI updates (which Steam does actually have)

[Freedom2]

Every popular webapp can be easily made with PHP and hosted in a bedroom, prove me wrong. We don't even need backend solutions like containers or kubernetes, companies have definitely wasted time investigating these technologies and putting money into them.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

We definitely don't need containers or kubernetes. Netflix wasted so much time and energy with the whole microservices nonsense while pornhub serves more video in more locations purely using PHP servers.

[lillecarl]

Kubernetes is supposed to make these things easier, and it very much can (and do for many). Containers are great, microservices on the other hand just seems like a way to decouple things so nothing can be verified AOT

[askonomm]

Grooveshark was amazing

[lillecarl]

I used to use Grooveshark back in the days, while it had it's own warts it was amazing for its time. I was sad to see it go when it went. I'm mainly using SoundCloud for my techno needs these days as Spotify can't seem to recommend me new music.