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> Cornell researchers recently asked the question: Why do they still not let you vote down a song?

They do. "skip" does things other than skip the song.

They also had a dedicated dislike button and removed it years ago. Apparently what they are doing now works better.

> Specifically, they demonstrated that a listener is roughly 20 percent more likely to “like” a song if the algorithm is trained on 400,000 likes and dislikes, compared to an algorithm trained only on that amount of likes.

Building a naive recommendation engine and giving it more good data – paid for, and also not factoring in the difference in time spent acquiring it – will obviously yield better results in a direct comparison. Striking a comparison to what Spotify is doing is pretty naive.



When you remove a song from one of the auto-generated playlists (Discover Weekly / Release Radar) the app requires you to specify a reason, “I don’t like this song/artist”. Isn’t this effectively a dislike button? Or is this input not used in playlist generation?


> They do. "skip" does things other than skip the song.

This seems very unlikely as some people enjoy listening to just certain parts of a song.


Do you know if the algorithm takes that into account? I also became suspect of the behavior of the skip button, I sometimes skip songs of artists I really like and could observe that I did not get them recommended anymore until I explictly played a song of them. Of course this could be just random luck but it made me careful to skip my favorite songs and instead I open the playlist and select the next song.




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