I agree, with one caveat: Spotify's algorithm seems less shitty than most. I've discovered a decent amount of fantastically good, fairly obscure music.

I used to say that too, but it's been years. Spotify used to be absurdly impressive in finding obscure stuff I was interested in, but it just doesn't do that any longer.

It may be that they changed the algorithm to work better for people who are not me. It may be that the algorithm choked on its own feedback (once listening patterns influenced by Discover Weekly started influencing Discover Weekly). Or maybe it just plain ran out of stuff to recommend me, having picked all the low hanging fruit (from its understanding of my taste).

It's also a bit conspicuous that DW was at its best when Sander Dielemann and Aäron van den Oord were interns working on it. Both went on to write some pretty great machine learning papers, and both were snapped up by Google/Deepmind.

I don't use Spotify, but on a similar note, my lone positive experience with any kind of recommendation algorithm has been with Apple Music/iTunes. Perhaps it's because I have used the platform for as long as it's been around, and have always been actively creating playlists, rating tracks/liking tracks within iTunes itself, thus ensuring their "genius" algorithm has sufficient information on me, but I have consistently managed to discover a lot of great bands/tracks/albums from it. Especially over the past year or two, it's pretty impressive.

Yeah their radio thing is my main way to find music these days. Find a song I like, hit radio on it, do some stuff till one stands out enough to like the song.

I do wish it'd stop trying to play Lostprophets on the odd occasion though. I don't think I've even listened to them even before the crimes but I don't want to enjoy a song and find out it financially supports a pedo.

I can't shake the feeling the experience just isn't optimised for what we want as users. For quite a while Google Play had fantastic organic discovery based on previous likes, but then it just got taken... elsewhere.

YouTube drives me crazy. It constantly recommends videos I have already watched.