<story><title>How random is xkcd? (2015)</title><url>https://hardmath123.github.io/xkcd-random.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MountainMan1312</author><text>Anecdotally, Spotify shuffle is one of the worst shuffles I&amp;#x27;ve ever used. Or at least it used to be, not sure about now since they added Smart Shuffle. At least used to, maybe still, it would play a lot of songs over and over, but never play others. Like it had maybe 100 songs out of 2000 playing regularly, over and over.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t just me, but all my friends too. We&amp;#x27;re all the time finding old songs we saved that have never once been played with shuffle, while it&amp;#x27;s played this one song 3 times in the same day.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it doesn&amp;#x27;t work as well with large playlists? Me and my friends tend toward 1000+ songs in a playlist, but most other playlists I&amp;#x27;ve found are rarely over 250 songs.</text></item><item><author>avianlyric</author><text>There’s a really good article from Spotify Engineering that looks at exactly how Spotify bridged this gap between “random” and the “random” people actually expect.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;engineering.atspotify.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;how-to-shuffle-songs&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;engineering.atspotify.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;how-to-shuffle-son...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It a good read on understanding what people generally expect when they ask for a random stream of songs (or comics), and how you can meet that expectation by carefully engineering how you generate “random” lists.</text></item><item><author>mattnewton</author><text>Kind of an aside to the nerd sniping happening here, but I think the fact that people complain about the random button is a sign that the feature isn’t doing what those people really want, even if it is doing what is advertised. Those people _want_ a button biased to return novel ones they haven’t read either in that session or across all time somehow, likely because they are using it to discover new comics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>feoren</author><text>Just from reading the article you can see how bad it is, and it makes sense that it would be worse for larger playlists. They&amp;#x27;ve completely discounted the fact that when you play large playlists, you don&amp;#x27;t listen to the whole thing. The problem with the dithering comparison is that in dithering, you&amp;#x27;re looking at the whole image at the same time. But nobody listens to a long playlist all at once.&lt;p&gt;First of all, the core idea that Same Artist == Similar Song and Different Artist == Dissimilar Song is already flawed. There are just way, way more axes than that. Getting 4 slow songs in a row in a playlist of mixed slow &amp;amp; fast dance music is going to feel very bad for everyone.&lt;p&gt;They give each artist one single &amp;quot;random offset&amp;quot;. If this is uniform over [start, end], then it would absolutely &lt;i&gt;kill&lt;/i&gt; artists that show up a lot on your playlist, dramatically in favor of artists you have once or twice. If it&amp;#x27;s from [start, end&amp;#x2F;N] with N being the number of songs of that artist, it would be a little better, but it&amp;#x27;s still making the playlist behavior completely different at the start (where it&amp;#x27;s mostly completely random) from the middle&amp;#x2F;end (where it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;dithered&amp;quot;). If it&amp;#x27;s [start, end&amp;#x2F;M] with M being anything else, it&amp;#x27;s again dramatically favoring the artists with fewer songs on the playlist.&lt;p&gt;Instead, they could introduce a &amp;quot;ghost&amp;quot; song for each artist that gets shuffled in and then discarded (or possibly some small constant number of ghosts).</text></comment>
<story><title>How random is xkcd? (2015)</title><url>https://hardmath123.github.io/xkcd-random.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MountainMan1312</author><text>Anecdotally, Spotify shuffle is one of the worst shuffles I&amp;#x27;ve ever used. Or at least it used to be, not sure about now since they added Smart Shuffle. At least used to, maybe still, it would play a lot of songs over and over, but never play others. Like it had maybe 100 songs out of 2000 playing regularly, over and over.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t just me, but all my friends too. We&amp;#x27;re all the time finding old songs we saved that have never once been played with shuffle, while it&amp;#x27;s played this one song 3 times in the same day.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it doesn&amp;#x27;t work as well with large playlists? Me and my friends tend toward 1000+ songs in a playlist, but most other playlists I&amp;#x27;ve found are rarely over 250 songs.</text></item><item><author>avianlyric</author><text>There’s a really good article from Spotify Engineering that looks at exactly how Spotify bridged this gap between “random” and the “random” people actually expect.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;engineering.atspotify.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;how-to-shuffle-songs&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;engineering.atspotify.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;how-to-shuffle-son...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It a good read on understanding what people generally expect when they ask for a random stream of songs (or comics), and how you can meet that expectation by carefully engineering how you generate “random” lists.</text></item><item><author>mattnewton</author><text>Kind of an aside to the nerd sniping happening here, but I think the fact that people complain about the random button is a sign that the feature isn’t doing what those people really want, even if it is doing what is advertised. Those people _want_ a button biased to return novel ones they haven’t read either in that session or across all time somehow, likely because they are using it to discover new comics.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stronglikedan</author><text>Their shuffle is completely broken, but so are all modern streaming music players. It used to be that shuffle would do just that - shuffle the deck of cards (playlist), and then deal the cards in order, never repeating until all cards have been dealt. Now it just keeps the playlist in the same order it was in and jumps all over the place, repeating songs and never playing some. It&amp;#x27;s very frustrating and woefully broken. Old media players did it correctly.</text></comment>