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Comment by njovin | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunately a common problem and the only way to beat the algorithm is to turn it against itself.

Create few playlists and add songs you like to them and also be diligent about liking and unliking songs. These will heavily influence your recommendations and you should be able to get back on track.

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Spotify needs to enable dislike on any song playing, not just in discovery playlists.

I wish we could just "ban" a song from ever playing, that way I won't have to make a new playlist from an existing one just because i don't want to listen to these one or two songs I find super annoying.

I have playlists that work as filters for me, if I'm mass copying a playlist I first put it into the filter playlist, then I press "skip duplicates" now all the songs that are not on my shit list (fiilter list) will end up at the bottom labeled "now" on "date added" then I copy those to the playlist I want to and erase them from the filter.

oooooh I thought Spotify just had a schizophrenic A/B test started every other quarter, I didn't realize the UI changes are contingent on what kind of song list you were listening to.

They do have schizophrenic A/B testing though.

Just recently they started playing the exact same ads but sometimes they have a few syllables messed up. I think I now have first-hand experience in being gaslit, it really makes you doubt your sanity if you heard the "same" ad but "wrong".

That could be advertisers doing schizophrenic A/B testing rather than Spotify.

They're "Spotify premium" ads though.

yes please. i'll never understand why this isn't default behavior.

My impression is that Spotify only pays royalties to songs that get streamed for over 30 seconds. Presumably if you skip a song early this is a feature used in its recommendation algorithms. Not as strong as an explicit dislike but I would guess if you keep skipping songs you don't like they'll get penalized.

Tidal has this! Plus a lot better audio quality, at 1440kbps. It is $10 more though.

It allows you to block either 1. the artist or 2. the song track.

There are a lot of things I like about tidal but I had constant network issues even with lossy playback. Tracks were skipping and pausing and taking forever to start on the same network that works flawlessly with other services.

Were you in a city with decent 5g coverage? More recently, I’ve been impressed with the smooth streaming of master quality audio.

This was all on fast wifi, not cellular.

I'd jump to Tidal in a heart beat if my Model 3 supported it natively.

See I was doing that, and I guess I didn't do it long enough because it didn't do anything for me. I think that algo is so heavily trained at this point. I think Spotify should really release something that is obvious and UI friendly that isn't some weird hack/workaround to fix this issue.

Maybe being able to mark something as a guilty pleasure which would exclude it from algorithmic use - and ideally from showing it to your friends on facebook if they still do that!

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