hckrnws
by fusslo
My biggest disappointment with Dark Patterns and Unethical Design is Spotify.
I've been using spotify for over a decade, paying for premium almost the entire time. The last couple years have just been awful with ads, 'promotions', and 'suggestions' that are just more ads.
Popups for concerts every 5th time I open the ad. There's NO way of turning this 'feature' off. I turned off concert recommendations, but there is NO way of turning off concert recommendations IN THE APP. I spent about 3 weeks with their support until I got in contact with a developer who confirmed this. 100% 'nagging'
The suggestions and mixes, I am convinced, include artists that pay for promotion. Artists that I have 0 interest in, and are only tangentially related to a song in a playlist of mine. 'disguised ads'
Pushing podcasts EVERYWHERE. Why can't I remove the 'podcasts' playlist from my playlists? I didn't create it, why is it there? Also auto-playing podcast videos on the spotify home page, man that bugs me. And the spotify home used to be really useful, now it's 60% ads, and 40% useful. I think this is a form of 'nagging' too.
I've had 'recommended artists' that are from genres I don't listen to. 'disguised ads'
Spotify has gotten much more aggressive in the past couple years.
I remember it being a lot worse than it currently is, so I think they've realized a lot of that doesn't work or are doing some A/B testing on fixing things. My Spotify homepage is entirely relevant to me content outside of three sections for "popular" things. I'd say the audiobooks section is irrelevant since I don't care for them, but their recommendations are pretty much dead on. My mixes are all based around a different band I like. It used to shove a lot of "recommended" music I obviously wouldn't care for at me but hasn't for a while.
Release Radar is my only complaint, it frustrates me since it misses things from bands I listen to constantly and what it finds 90% of the time feels like they should just say "nothing new came out that you would like".
They seem to have backed up a little bit lately with that BS but their price creeping up and the sound quality (or lack thereof) is pushing me closer to Apple music every day.
Crafted by Rajat
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