At least in the US, I’m absolutely destroyed that people just don’t care. They talk like they care, but they just fucking don’t. I don’t get it at all. They will gripe about how evil and bad something is, then just keep using it. “If everyone else is, so will I” maybe. Group Inertia.
I think it’s more that most people just aren’t aware of any equivalent alternatives, or in some cases like where there literally aren’t any alternatives. Look at phones, both Apple and Google suck and their mobile OSes are terrible but what’s the alternative? Sure there’s a few Linux phones out there and that’s almost an alternative but it’s not there yet. You could go with a “dumb” phone, but for most people that’s not going to work. So you pick your lesser evil and bitch about it whenever the latest round of enshitification hits.
If you asked most people what alternatives exist for Spotify they’d probably say Pandora, and maybe Apple Music or Youtube Music and then struggle to come up with anything else. The better alternatives are suffering from a massive discovery problem.
What’s an example of an alternative with a really great recommendation algorithm?
Things like recommendation algorithms are difficult for small companies/individuals to provide. Let alone the library of music.
Since you asked, in the US at least I would say Tidal’s is quite good. Not a small company, but an alternative.
Plexamp does a pretty good job with the radio features, granted you will have to torrent stuff you’re not necessarily familiar with first. If you have a few friends who also share their music libraries with you it can really help by including their tracks in your radios.
Wait, PlexAmp allows for multiple libraries?
Settings > playback > radio > include external media
“Consider tracks from shared servers and TiDAL”
Also if you just mean multiple libraries like switching between them, click at the top. I’ve got 4 of my own and 1 from a friend here.
Also, there’s an app called Prologue that adds audiobook support to Plex’s libraries. Or rather, it parses the metadata that Plex refuses to parse.
Basically, Plex doesn’t read audiobook metadata. It just refuses to. It can still play audiobooks, but it treats them like 250 hour long albums. Which is… Well… Not great. Especially when a single chapter can be 10-20 minutes long. But Prologue does parse metadata.
You log into Prologue with Plex, then it uses Plex’s remote access to actually read the audiobook files. Then it does its own metadata parsing directly on your phone. So the Plex server isn’t doing any extra work to serve the file, and no config changes are required on Plex’s end. But on your phone, you get nice pretty chapters, bookmarks, speed controls, etc…
I tried to get Audiobookshelf to work for a day or two. It just refused to read or write anything to my NAS. Everything was configured properly on the surface, and it appeared to work… But then it would lose my added audiobooks every time it restarted. After throwing myself at it for about two days, I gave up and found Prologue.
Thank you, friend. I do have two different personal libraries, but was unaware of the “external” libraries option.
I would welcome sharing libraries with you, if you were into such things.
No algorithm but buying physical media again is one path.
A few months ago I got a couple CDs and I’m hoping to rebuild my collection and get off Spotify. It supports artists better, and YouTube is still there to help discover new music.
Buy a CD a month instead of your service. A roll back for technology of course, but worth trying imo
Our musicians are getting fucked with streaming services and I like directly supporting them.
That dossn’t seem like “one path” if it’s almost the exact opposite of what they were saying.
Fine, yes. I was just throwing an idea out there. I don’t know how to pirate shit anymore, and am to an age where I can afford to support artists directly, so if one can, one should.
Where did the music to pirate come from back in the day? Was it not uploaded from a CD and then file shared?
I did learn in this thread there are numerous other streaming services I was completely unaware of, so thats cool
People don’t wish to help fight the war on drugs. Why should they? Are you destroyed by people’s indifference to drug advertising or are you making a general statement not necessarily about this story? Are you okay with legal prescription drugs being advertised? Or is it the illegality that’s a moral issue with you??
Legal drugs should not be advertised either. Drugs or other treatments should be prescribed by a doctor based on a review of the actual symptoms and side effects to the patient. A drug advertisement will generally tell you the key words to tell the doctor and may be missing other factors.
I have symptoms C, L and Q. What treatment plan will be best. Vs. I want drug X because I have symptoms X Y and Z.
That said, I read the OC as a protest to Spotify and their predatory practices in general.
I’m just trying to find out what about this is upsetting for the person I replied to.
I mean I think there’s nothing wrong with advertising OTC meds, which is also legal here. Might sometimes let you know about a product you didn’t know existed at all, common ones being gas relief drugs and joint pain creams.
Advertising prescription meds is just weird, feels very wrong, and I don’t understand how some countries don’t ban it.
So they realised Spotify hosts Joe Rogan?
I don’t get the anger or outrage or even mild concern here? Spotify lets people upload their podcasts and music. People abuse that.
Spotify didn’t do anything wrong, the people uploading this crap disguised as podcasts did. Spotify removed them when they found them.
Where’s the issue?
It’s because we’ve seen this so many times and are really tired of this: Everybody knows that you have to moderate user generated content. If you provide a upload function for user generated content and don’t have a clear moderation policy in place and a moderation team, you will allow scammers, child porn, drug dealers and crypto scammers onto your platform. That has happened hundreds or thousands of times. And then some newspaper will do a report and they will remove some of the mentioned content without doing anything.
Spotify has smart employees. Some of them even worked at other companies who ran into the same issues. But they still decided to launch the feature like that, mostly because upper management really doesn’t want to pay the costs of functional moderation. That is how Facebook went on to be used in the genocide in Myanmar. That is how thousands of minors got abused. Moderate your shit. There is no way around and AI won’t help you
I dislike that you can’t block NSFW stuff. My son found NSFW stuff on Spotify… and I had to take it off our Living Room Tv and ban him from using it for now. I think you can block accounts, but there were so many… Go ahead, search tits on Spotify… fucking wild to me it’s not moderated.
Huh, I had never thought to search for tits on Spotify, but now I see I was wrong for not doing so.
Jesus that’s just straight up porn
We gave the kids access to Spotify Kids, I think it’s ok so far.
Yeah it was okay here too, until he hit middle school and a classmate mate told him about it …sigh…
They don’t stay little for long, I know but I was not prepared!
I’m not sure anyone can be prepared.
I’d imagine that you could even take podcasts and run them through a speech recognition app much like visual voicemail does. This could then parse the text and flag a podcast for manual review by a human to ban an account, could even auto suspend the account until its challenged or reviewed. You don’t even need someone to listen to everything since Podcasts and usually spoke word.
Hell I bet I could build a pipeline to run on a local server in under a week that does this. Download the audio. Parse it into text. Then parse the text for any trigger words or phrases.
You’re saying that Spotify don’t have employee moderators for uploaded podcasts, which they do. In this era of every person thinking they’re an influencer and everyone needs to hear what they say, the issue is that likely no matter how many they have, the number of episodes that get uploaded will always dwarf them, so they rely on their auto-moderators to find the most egregious rule breakers. They can’t catch everything there though. If a customer finds a rule breaker and reports it, they’ll take action - that’s good!
The alternative is that every single episode of every single podcast has to be manually reviewed and approved before it goes live, which is not feasible.
Please take a look into the articles. That really was something that a good moderation team should find and they really didn’t need to listen to every podcast:
The intention of many of these pages is obvious from their names. Podcasts with titles, such as “My Adderall Store” — which has a link in the episode description to a site that purportedly sells Adderall, as well as potentially addictive pain medications like Oxycodone and Vicodin, among other drugs — were listed within the first 50 suggested results, a CNN review this week found. CNN identified dozens of these fake podcasts across Spotify, advertising sales of medications ranging from Methadone to Ambien, in some cases claiming that the drugs can be purchased without a prescription, which is illegal in the United States.
Spotify furious that they aren’t getting their cut.
And we’re not concerned that they fund and heavily promote on their services extremist content and disinformation by the truckload?
Concern? You obviously haven’t considered all the money they’re making!
🌈 Enshittification 🌈 in all its facets. This one’s pretty bad though.
Enshittification is not when Spotify doesn’t immediately notice and purge new uploads with scam content.
Enshittification is when Spotify takes away the free-tier, or makes the ad-free tier have limited ads while raising the price.
or does something by making features worst than before.
