Re:Ask HN: Why are modern music players so bad at playing mu...
by gervu on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @06:01PM
(#20349343)
Because users never wanted mathematical randomness. They wanted variety.
Not that saying "random" is wrong, but users mostly mean it in a colloquial sense, while programmers are apt to interpret it in a technical sense. But one leads to math.urandom() and the other to shuffle algorithms.
Lots of music players started out with true randomness and then dialed it back because people complained that it wasn’t very random.