Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wubrr 919 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.
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.