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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Spotify researches the playlists that users make and will make similar ones. This is something I've noticed over the years; it's just serving a userbase, because some people won't bother to actually create themed playlists but will search for them. For example, I've made a playlist or two for (NFL) football season, and if I enter "football" it shows me a Spotify-created list called Hype Football Mix. There's a Vampiric Mix (which is actually garbage) because I've favorited some user's playlist to make fanvids for an Anne Rice series. Most of these are probably AI-driven.

because some people won't bother to actually create themed playlists

This isn't exactly helped by having no way to tell Spotify to never ever suggest this artist / album / song for this playlist.

In general Spotify is a classic example of a company where the majority of developers exist only to make themselves look useful. The Spotify client hasn't improved (and has actually declined) in a meaningful way in a decade and would realistically only need a small team of handful of people per platform to keep it up to date. Instead the company has more than doubled its employee count in five years while losing money throughout its entire history of operation.