Apple Music is privileged when it comes to Siri. I currently have both a Spotify and Apple Music subscription, and one of the main reasons I prefer Apple Music, aside from shuffle not playing the same 20 songs in a 2000 song playlist, is the great hands free functionality. I can add songs to playlist, play a song next instead of adding it to the end of the queue (which is more of Spotify STILL not having deque support), and I know there are other things I've run into Spotify can't do on Siri, but I'm blanking at the moment.
I think your comment is also reinforced by the subjectiveness of the question, "What is toxicity?" While I can see a trend of decreasing respect for others, both online and in-person, the pendulum certainly swings in the other direction. Some individuals seek out any opportunities to play the victim and feel attacked, whether they do so consciously or not, and this seems to lead to those of this mentality calling any critique 'toxic'.
I recently left Spotify for Apple Music, in large part because of this new development path. I don't want podcasts, audiobooks, etc mixed in with my music. I prefer separate apps.
I think what bothered me more was the focus on branching into these new paths without any innovation in the music department--I'm sure there was innovation that wasn't visible to me. I'm tired of the same black and green color scheme. I don't like that I don't have a 'Library' and everything just goes in liked or a playlist.
I think their expansion into other media was a signal to me to look for someone doing a better job at specializing.
> I don't like that I don't have a 'Library' and everything just goes in liked or a playlist.
I left Spotify a while ago, but one thing I hate is that there's no way of differentiating when you add complete albums to your collection vs only one song.
This is precisely why I also switched to Apple Music, it was annoying to have Spotify constantly pushing podcast content to me as someone who had no interest in Podcasts and no way to enable a "music only" mode either.
I too recently left Spotify for Apple Music because it works better on my Home Pod and Apple TV. I don't know why Spotify doesn't fix this. I know they are in a feud with Apple and maybe they think this is a way to apply pressure to Apple, but the risk is they lose people like me.
There were other reasons for leaving. I don't like that I can't hide or disable audiobooks or podcasts. They take up a lot of important screen space and are useless to me. I also really dislike the notifications from Spotify. I have them all turned off, but ever once in a while they decide to show one anyway.
What I found thoroughly missing in all music streaming was emotional composition, aka the Algo being able to play music tailored to what situations I I'm experiencing and giving it an arc.
Example:im programming and the concentration music goes towards a victorious crescendo once it works.
Part of my dev process at work involves running a (rather) flaky test suite on my laptop. The test suite takes several minutes to run, and it doesn't fail fast. No good for my short attention span.
I wrote a script which runs the test suite in a loop. When the tests fail, it plays horns.aiff (from The Price is Right). When the tests pass it plays the epic Champions League theme music.
The best part is, I can do other stuff while waiting for the flaky tests to pass, without having to remember to check the terminal they're running in. Audio cues are really great.
That’s me too. I disliked having podcasts in otherwise perfectly OK music app, and also Spotify’s efforts to rebrand ‘podcasts’ as something else than “mp3s on RSS”. But I was a paying customer for 10+ years so they had a good run.
Counter-anecdote, I like that Spotify hasn't changed, and if it changed significantly tomorrow, it might prompt me to look at competitors and decide afresh which music service to use.
I left spotify after reading their privacy policy and some news stories about how they plan to use your listening data to infer things about you and sell the results
That (deque) is actually one of my favorite features, and something that had tempted me in the past. I have to relearn some behavior on queue creation though. I'm use to just clicking play, rather than adding to queue, so I end up with a bunch of songs in queue that I didn't intend (because I played a song from a longer playlist to start).
There’s definitely some annoyances… the paramount one for me is actually the opposite of what you describe: I click on an item to simply play it and it makes me deal with a pop up asking me how it should interact with my queue, even when I have no queue at all! Just play the damned song, stop asking me questions.
Ugh… things like this make me wish we had just one FOSS music player with a paid backend. I’d comment out all the modals and get on with life.
That's a good attempt, but I'd rather not run a server - if I'm paying for the service I'd like to have an API I can run/write a frontend against. And ideally I'd have the ability to listen to lossless music, not whatever encoding Spotify thinks I deserve.
As I understand it that is for listening to a library of personally owned material remotely? That's not really what I'm looking for. I appreciate the MAAS model, it's just the UI's that suck.
Looking to do this - how did you migrate your playlists? Also my family was using my main Apple Music account - so I have to "clear out the new place" as I setup a family account for them.
The new cover videos bands can post on songs are ill. The changing of the like button to not be just for liked songs is great (usually, tho sometimes I wish it was two
separate buttons). There’s constantly a bunch of new tools to find new music, some hitting better than others. The “listen with friends,” while still buggy asf, is a great feature.
5 years ago, Spotify updates were more like “we changed the colors and layout of the UI and that’s about it.”
It’s true though. They haven’t reinvented music completely.
I'm not sure what you're referring to with the Like/Love button. It seems to be the same as it ever was for me, except the UI is different based on whether you're in CarPlay, mobile app, or desktop app, so sometimes it's a heart and sometimes it's a plus sign.
One of my biggest complaints for Spotify is the removal of star ratings, but that's been probably a decade ago at this point. Apple Music has it for the desktop app, but it's missing from mobile.
Buying music, downloading it and putting it into your music folder also works great! Then you can organize it, display it, order it and listen to it however you want by using a player that suits your preferences, decoupling the source of your music from the application you use to play it.
I think a big part of the problem is the 'For You' feed, which has been trash since the day it was implemented (on practically every social media platform). I remember it being a big pain to get to the chronological feed years ago when they first implemented the curated feed as a default. It may not have been quite so full of ignorance and hate back then, but it was still full of things I had no interest in.
I still use X/Twitter weekly and I don't have any problem with the posts I see. My problem is with comments, which are usually where I will see hate and spam.
Yeah replies are a mixed bag. Some are funny, some are sad, some are just downright scary, but I like being treated like an adult and being able to choose which I spend time with, something that Americans haven't enjoyed from any other social media site in many years now.
I tested in Firefox (uBlock), LibreWolf (uBlock), Safari (AdGuard), and Chromium (no ad blocker), and the initial home page load takes a couple seconds, but I never witnessed a 5s delay. I would say it was actually fastest in Firefox for me, but that may have just been a result of some caching. I am a premium subscriber and have never seen a warning for using an ad blocker, so I'm not sure if premium subscribers get a pass.
While I tend to assume the vast majority of privacy is either imagined or a façade, I also have a deep enough distrust of authority that when I see such a claim made by a government, or government official, I'm inclined to believe it's a ploy to discredit someone that won't cooperate with them.
He was a hacker who leaked information about a single political party, justifying that with "Trump's already bad enough on his own, so no need to sling mud his way". Then said party, and the country's intelligence agencies, got mad. How is that surprising? Of course they're going to discredit and prosecute him; it's the healthy response to a foreign actor trying to target and influence politics to their agenda.
Its dangerous to think that committing crimes and violating rights is ok as long as the other side loses. A healthy response would have been internal reforms to the party and the abolishment of secret police. Punishing free speech just increases political cynicism in the general public, which can just as easily be taken advantage of by the other side.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of people--Americans at least--are capable of regular introspection. It is not a trait I have been able to identify in many others.
Interestingly, this posts headline offended me. I'm glad I read it in its entirety, but the entire way through I was struggling with dismissing the article because of a similar opinion to your own.
It's an opinion article, so I wasn't expecting much, but it seems a little disingenuous.
That said, an open-source platform more focused on decentralization would be a better solution, but nothing will be perfect while power and wealth are so centralized. I hope Damus is able to grow, but it's just not easy access enough as it is.
I generally dislike publicly traded companies and wish stock markets and speculation didn't exist, but there's no hope of that, so instead I'll cheer on any public corporation that goes private. I think using mass social media is largely bad for your mental health, but I hope the company succeeds in some capacity.
I wish everyone would go to platform-specific or interest-based forums. I think the Internet was a better place when you just banned the occasional crazy from your forums, whereas mass social media seems to promote their craziness and create an echo chamber of negative reinforcement for them.
