This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I don’t get the anger or outrage or even mild concern here? Spotify lets people upload their podcasts and music. People abuse that.
Spotify didn’t do anything wrong, the people uploading this crap disguised as podcasts did. Spotify removed them when they found them.
Where’s the issue?
It's because we've seen this so many times and are really tired of this: Everybody knows that you have to moderate user generated content. If you provide a upload function for user generated content and don't have a clear moderation policy in place and a moderation team, you will allow scammers, child porn, drug dealers and crypto scammers onto your platform. That has happened hundreds or thousands of times. And then some newspaper will do a report and they will remove some of the mentioned content without doing anything.
Spotify has smart employees. Some of them even worked at other companies who ran into the same issues. But they still decided to launch the feature like that, mostly because upper management really doesn't want to pay the costs of functional moderation. That is how Facebook went on to be used in the genocide in Myanmar. That is how thousands of minors got abused. Moderate your shit. There is no way around and AI won't help you
I'd imagine that you could even take podcasts and run them through a speech recognition app much like visual voicemail does. This could then parse the text and flag a podcast for manual review by a human to ban an account, could even auto suspend the account until its challenged or reviewed. You don't even need someone to listen to everything since Podcasts and usually spoke word.
Hell I bet I could build a pipeline to run on a local server in under a week that does this. Download the audio. Parse it into text. Then parse the text for any trigger words or phrases.
I dislike that you can't block NSFW stuff. My son found NSFW stuff on Spotify.. and I had to take it off our Living Room Tv and ban him from using it for now. I think you can block accounts, but there were so many.. Go ahead, search tits on Spotify.. fucking wild to me it's not moderated.
Huh, I had never thought to search for tits on Spotify, but now I see I was wrong for not doing so.
You’re saying that Spotify don’t have employee moderators for uploaded podcasts, which they do. In this era of every person thinking they’re an influencer and everyone needs to hear what they say, the issue is that likely no matter how many they have, the number of episodes that get uploaded will always dwarf them, so they rely on their auto-moderators to find the most egregious rule breakers. They can’t catch everything there though. If a customer finds a rule breaker and reports it, they’ll take action - that’s good!
The alternative is that every single episode of every single podcast has to be manually reviewed and approved before it goes live, which is not feasible.
Please take a look into the articles. That really was something that a good moderation team should find and they really didn't need to listen to every podcast:
The intention of many of these pages is obvious from their names. Podcasts with titles, such as “My Adderall Store” — which has a link in the episode description to a site that purportedly sells Adderall, as well as potentially addictive pain medications like Oxycodone and Vicodin, among other drugs — were listed within the first 50 suggested results, a CNN review this week found. CNN identified dozens of these fake podcasts across Spotify, advertising sales of medications ranging from Methadone to Ambien, in some cases claiming that the drugs can be purchased without a prescription, which is illegal in the United States.
And we're not concerned that they fund and heavily promote on their services extremist content and disinformation by the truckload?
Concern? You obviously haven't considered all the money they're making!
At least in the US, I'm absolutely destroyed that people just don't care. They talk like they care, but they just fucking don't. I don't get it at all. They will gripe about how evil and bad something is, then just keep using it. "If everyone else is, so will I" maybe. Group Inertia.
I think it's more that most people just aren't aware of any equivalent alternatives, or in some cases like where there literally aren't any alternatives. Look at phones, both Apple and Google suck and their mobile OSes are terrible but what's the alternative? Sure there's a few Linux phones out there and that's almost an alternative but it's not there yet. You could go with a "dumb" phone, but for most people that's not going to work. So you pick your lesser evil and bitch about it whenever the latest round of enshitification hits.
If you asked most people what alternatives exist for Spotify they'd probably say Pandora, and maybe Apple Music or Youtube Music and then struggle to come up with anything else. The better alternatives are suffering from a massive discovery problem.
What’s an example of an alternative with a really great recommendation algorithm?
Things like recommendation algorithms are difficult for small companies/individuals to provide. Let alone the library of music.
No algorithm but buying physical media again is one path.
A few months ago I got a couple CDs and I'm hoping to rebuild my collection and get off Spotify. It supports artists better, and YouTube is still there to help discover new music.
Buy a CD a month instead of your service. A roll back for technology of course, but worth trying imo
Our musicians are getting fucked with streaming services and I like directly supporting them.
Since you asked, in the US at least I would say Tidal's is quite good. Not a small company, but an alternative.
People don't wish to help fight the war on drugs. Why should they? Are you destroyed by people's indifference to drug advertising or are you making a general statement not necessarily about this story? Are you okay with legal prescription drugs being advertised? Or is it the illegality that's a moral issue with you??
Legal drugs should not be advertised either. Drugs or other treatments should be prescribed by a doctor based on a review of the actual symptoms and side effects to the patient. A drug advertisement will generally tell you the key words to tell the doctor and may be missing other factors.
I have symptoms C, L and Q. What treatment plan will be best. Vs. I want drug X because I have symptoms X Y and Z.
That said, I read the OC as a protest to Spotify and their predatory practices in general.
I'm just trying to find out what about this is upsetting for the person I replied to.
Why would people here care that much about this? This kind of material exists on any site that allows user submitted content, and the only solution is aggressive automated moderation, which winds up hurting everyday users. Would you prefer that anyone who uploads a song or podcast that names a drug be automatically removed and have to be manually approved?
These are low-effort scams to steal credit card numbers, it doesn't seem like any of these had an actual avenue to purchase drugs. They should be removed for sure, but this is hardly some wild breach of responsibility.
So they realised Spotify hosts Joe Rogan?
🌈 Enshittification 🌈 in all its facets. This one's pretty bad though.
Enshittification is not when Spotify doesn’t immediately notice and purge new uploads with scam content.
Enshittification is when Spotify takes away the free-tier, or makes the ad-free tier have limited ads while raising the price.
or does something by making features worst than before.
