<story><title>An odd discovery on Spotify</title><url>https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/visions/#spotify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rightbyte</author><text>Spotify&amp;#x27;s algorithm works really well until you let someone else use the account. I wish there was a &amp;quot;child mode&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;party mode&amp;quot; or whatever to disable updating recommendations.</text></item><item><author>merijnv</author><text>&amp;gt; Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing.&lt;p&gt;Spotify&amp;#x27;s recommendation system is &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; better than youtube&amp;#x27;s (at least for me). I frequently &amp;quot;joke&amp;quot; that it is one of the few applications of ML that actively make my life as a consumer better.&lt;p&gt;Having been following Spotify&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Discover Weekly&amp;quot; for several years now, I&amp;#x27;m actually really impressed how it manages to blend my long-term taste with recent moods. If I&amp;#x27;ve been listening to one type of music for 1 or 2 weeks, there will be a noticeable uptick of it in the recommendations, while still mixing in less recent tastes.</text></item><item><author>nosianu</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s really interesting - although when I read that story I thought the point was the broken recommendation system.&lt;p&gt;Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just &lt;i&gt;one thing&lt;/i&gt; - and now your recommendations are full of things like that &lt;i&gt;one thing&lt;/i&gt;. Or Facebook&amp;#x2F;Youtube, somehow: I watched a single video on Youtube about Viking sword fighting and suddenly my people recommendations on Facebook were at least 20% militaria fans, always visible from the profile picture already. It finally stopped but it took well over half a year.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why I thought this story was about recommendation systems recommending either only narrowly what you already know, and finding something new is not really well supported or not better than random, or that one outlier can skew your recommendations for a long time. Worst is there is no way to tell the system &amp;quot;stop recommending me this kind of stuff&amp;quot; at least for the second problem, no manual way to make adjustments for the user.</text></item><item><author>usednet</author><text>People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering&amp;#x2F;“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme.&lt;p&gt;People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them. At this point there are so many of these fake profiles and songs that the music, which is simple “mood music” normally (which happens to be easy to make), is appearing on real playlists and being recommended to real listeners.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duckmysick</author><text>Perhaps Private listening is what you&amp;#x27;re looking for, assuming it&amp;#x27;s working as advertised.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.spotify.com&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;private-listening&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;support.spotify.com&amp;#x2F;us&amp;#x2F;article&amp;#x2F;private-listening&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>An odd discovery on Spotify</title><url>https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/visions/#spotify</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rightbyte</author><text>Spotify&amp;#x27;s algorithm works really well until you let someone else use the account. I wish there was a &amp;quot;child mode&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;party mode&amp;quot; or whatever to disable updating recommendations.</text></item><item><author>merijnv</author><text>&amp;gt; Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing.&lt;p&gt;Spotify&amp;#x27;s recommendation system is &lt;i&gt;much&lt;/i&gt; better than youtube&amp;#x27;s (at least for me). I frequently &amp;quot;joke&amp;quot; that it is one of the few applications of ML that actively make my life as a consumer better.&lt;p&gt;Having been following Spotify&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Discover Weekly&amp;quot; for several years now, I&amp;#x27;m actually really impressed how it manages to blend my long-term taste with recent moods. If I&amp;#x27;ve been listening to one type of music for 1 or 2 weeks, there will be a noticeable uptick of it in the recommendations, while still mixing in less recent tastes.</text></item><item><author>nosianu</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s really interesting - although when I read that story I thought the point was the broken recommendation system.&lt;p&gt;Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just &lt;i&gt;one thing&lt;/i&gt; - and now your recommendations are full of things like that &lt;i&gt;one thing&lt;/i&gt;. Or Facebook&amp;#x2F;Youtube, somehow: I watched a single video on Youtube about Viking sword fighting and suddenly my people recommendations on Facebook were at least 20% militaria fans, always visible from the profile picture already. It finally stopped but it took well over half a year.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s why I thought this story was about recommendation systems recommending either only narrowly what you already know, and finding something new is not really well supported or not better than random, or that one outlier can skew your recommendations for a long time. Worst is there is no way to tell the system &amp;quot;stop recommending me this kind of stuff&amp;quot; at least for the second problem, no manual way to make adjustments for the user.</text></item><item><author>usednet</author><text>People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering&amp;#x2F;“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme.&lt;p&gt;People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them. At this point there are so many of these fake profiles and songs that the music, which is simple “mood music” normally (which happens to be easy to make), is appearing on real playlists and being recommended to real listeners.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dento</author><text>There is. Called &amp;quot;private session&amp;quot; in the settings.</text></comment>