YHK - yet another hacker news clone

80 points IncandescentGas 6 hours ago 70 comments

Spotify forcing me to hear a bunch of ads on the desktop client today. I'm a paid subscriber.

Seems widespread, the spotify subreddit is actively removing discussion of the problem

noemit 6 hours ago | parent

I canceled my family subscription last month. We have Youtube Premium which I use to play music - Spotify was over 20/month and no longer made sense. We mostly used it to play music on our Google speakers for the kids. It's one of those products that used to make sense, but now just doesn't feel so critical. It's easy to replace and patch where I used it.

cobertos 6 hours ago | parent

I just migrated to Jellyfin and cancelled my Spotify subscription just last week (https://cobertos.com/blog/post/finally-cancelling-my-spotify). Paying off even more than I predicted. So sick of everything getting in the way of just listening to my music.

Festro 6 hours ago | parent

I gave up on Spotify as I started to listen to more podcasts which had their own ads inside them let alone Spotify's. Now I'm paying for Youtube (never thought I'd be doing that) and using the new(ish) jump ahead feature to skip in-video ad segments including in video podcasts. Problem largely solved?

raw_anon_1111 5 hours ago | parent

Just the thought of using YouTube as a PINO (podcast in name only) player makes me throw up a little.

If I can’t put an RSS feed in my podcast player of choice - it ain’t a podcast

lschueller 6 hours ago | parent

Yeah.. They seem to speed up their entshittification game. I recently wrote a short piece about how Spotify is forcefully updating the app, and how to prevent it. For example, if you plan tonuse spicetify or something similar: https://duckass.bearblog.dev/how-spotify-silently-updates-it...

Spotify is losing ground after their last subscription fees increase, as far as I see it.

sequin 5 hours ago | parent

I left Spotify years ago. Youtube is so much nicer in terms of content alone. But Youtube, with its insane backlog of video's not available elsewhere, is straight up a monopoly, so they too will start squeezing customers at some point. In anticipation of that I've been collecting flacs again. It's actually kind of a nice hobby.

kleene_op 4 hours ago | parent

Same here!

I found now was a good time to build that NAS I wanted to have a long time ago, and the first thing I installed on it was a Navidrome server so I could listen to my curated music everywhere.

Hopefully we're entering the era of people ditching megacorp craps and switching to personal cloud solutions.

YouTube will be very hard to replace though.

kreyenborgi 4 hours ago | parent

Same, except moved to Qobuz. They have both streaming and you can buy downloads.

embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent

I tried YouTube for music a year ago or so, as it was included when I tried out a paid YouTube plan to remove the ads. Apparently (at least at that point) not all videos are available in "YouTube Music", so you can't just play back any of the videos from YouTube while using YouTube Music via Carplay, instead you need to then use YouTube itself, which of course you can't use via Carplay.

After being disappointed again and again, I too moved back to collecting local files for my music instead, although bought rather than what.cd as I used in my early days. Tend to use Bandcamp mostly, they also waive their fee on purchases every first Friday of the month (https://isitbandcampfriday.com/), so collecting a bunch of things to buy and listen to each first friday of month has become a nice little ritual :)

al_borland 10 minutes ago | parent

YouTube’s commingling of playlists (and everything else) between music and videos made it completely unusable for me.

I am a YouTube Premium subscriber, but ended up subscribing to Apple Music to get a service that works the way I want, without screwing up other things I use.

YouTube has started screwing up as well. I was having a lot of issues with YouTube errors in Safari. Best I can tell it was due to uBlock Origin Lite. When I disabled content blockers on YouTube my error rate went down dramatically. If I’m paying for YouTube and shouldn’t see any ads, why does the site break itself when I have content blockers enabled? It seems the heavy handed measures to get free users to watch ads are also impacting Premium users. This feels wrong.

vpribish 5 hours ago | parent

IF this is happening it's gotta be a mistake. Ads on paid spotify will be the end of my subscription.

lich_king 4 hours ago | parent

We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads.

Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-school competitors". Now that the competitors are gone, Netflix is doing ads, Amazon is doing ads... why wouldn't Spotify?

I hate it, but the reality is that we groan on online forums but don't actually leave.

jbb67 4 hours ago | parent

It's very much easier to ignore ads in a newspaper. It's not so easy when you are forced to listen to them before the thing you paid for. It's not the same.

happytoexplain 4 hours ago | parent

"But you don't leave" is an excuse the human-hating producers tell themselves. But it's normal for consumers to be protected from the petty misery of natural market forces by legislation. We have enacted many such controls.

JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent

> We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads

To be fair, ad-free options for each of these later emerged. I pay up for them.

vpribish 4 hours ago | parent

maybe you did, but I did not. my attention is valuable to me and I do not pay people to waste it. i had tapes, CDs, mp3s, and paid spotify. this is a well-proven market.

drcongo 5 hours ago | parent

PSA: Stop using Spotify, they're predatory scum.

halapro 5 hours ago | parent

I really don't understand the hate for Spotify. Been a paid member for a decade and Apple Music still sucks for me (particularly when internet is bad)

vpribish 4 hours ago | parent

they funnelled money and attention to joe rogan. I hate them - not as much as i hate microsoft or oracle - maybe about as much as adobe. but i'm using them because i have not found an acceptable alternative ... yet.

petercooper 4 hours ago | parent

I don’t know how their behavior differs but I live in a country with patchy mobile coverage and Spotify and Apple Music are night and day with how they cope with this. Spotify is far more robust and I assume prefetches more aggressively.

mholm 4 hours ago | parent

Agree with this; I want to cancel my spotify subscription so badly. I already have Apple One, which includes Apple Music. But the recommendations and UX are so incredibly bad that I still pay for Spotify.

I was doing my yearly attempt at switching over to Apple Music and the 'similar music' radio had somehow saw fit to include Kendrick Lamar with my indie synth. Swapped back to spotify and immediately loved some of its similar suggestions.

pwython 3 hours ago | parent

My biggest gripe with Apple Music is shuffling. When I shuffle my entire library of thousands of songs, I'm hearing the same ~50 songs over and over UNTIL I add a new song to my library. Then suddenly I'm hearing songs I haven't heard in years. How does one screw up randomization that bad, and how has it not been fixed over the past several years?

thenthenthen 4 hours ago | parent

They started with a pirated set of music (sounds familiar?), they invest in the military industrial complex.

some_random 4 hours ago | parent

Spotify sucks for artists because music isn't actually worth much and they don't like hearing that. A certain group of people, including some politicians, have concluded that it must mean that spotify is taking advantage of musicians despite spotify only reaching profitability in 2024.

drcongo 1 hour ago | parent

Well, for one thing there's that whole pushing their own AI generated slop music into electronica playlists so that actual artists get fewer plays.

surgical_fire 4 hours ago | parent

All streaming services are predatory scum. Piracy is the way, even though it is sometimes less convenient. I pay for Spotify because it is cheap and I'm lazy

If you want to support musicians buy their merch, go to concerts. If they are smalltime, find their patreon, or join their YouTube thing, or buy their music on Bandcamp, etc.

piva00 40 minutes ago | parent

70% of their revenue goes straight into paying royalties, always, if the music labels don't pay their artists enough due to predatory contracts shouldn't some of the flak be focused there? Even more: they've always fleeced artists, even when physical media sales were the only market.

pythonaut_16 5 hours ago | parent

Seems like a bug. I had it happen (ads were playing and UI showed the premium upgrade nudges), then my Spotify refreshed and it went away again.

Annoying that it happened. Annoying that Reddit mods are aggressively removing the discussion. Annoying that HN comments here are immediately jumping to Spotify hate and the sky is falling.

Imagine if we all assumed every AWS outage meant that AWS was cancelled.

---

The responses in this thread are truly disappointing. Spotify can be bad and have vibecoding issues and we can still have a rational discussion rather than just jumping on the complaint bandwagon and panicking. I guess at least eventually real comments rose to the top.

conradfr 4 hours ago | parent

That can't be ... "Spotify engineers haven't coded since December"

mholm 4 hours ago | parent

Doesn't even feel like they've committed code since December 2023

sharkjacobs 4 hours ago | parent

Sometimes a bug is indistinguishable from AB testing

petersellers 4 hours ago | parent

This seems very likely to be a mistake or bug.

Spotify rolling this out without an announcement intentionally would be an incredible blunder. I'd cancel my membership immediately and I don't think I'd be alone in that decision.

chucksta 3 hours ago | parent

And you wouldn't cancel if they said you were gonna get ads upfront?

wao0uuno 4 hours ago | parent

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Basic-plans-... So it was a bug. Tags under the post are kinda funny though.

blakesterz 4 hours ago | parent

You're right, those tags are GREAT! Worth clicking through and having a look.

cuuupid 4 hours ago | parent

This is just the latest in a series of vibe-coding caused bugs, Spotify famously claimed their best devs were no longer writing any of their own code:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/12/spotify-says-its-best-deve...

I don't understand enterprises who take this stance, there is tons of room between "don't utilize AI for coding" and "exclusively utilize AI for coding."

shimman 4 hours ago | parent

Spotify has always been garbage software long before LLMs. PM/devs like to justify their constant a/b testing to gamify metrics to curry raises/promotions but for end users all we're dealt with is a constantly broken/changing UI.

My biggest peeve with Spotify UI is how hard it is to add something to your current playing queue, an action I would assume is quite common but you have to scroll down to hit several controls before you can do it.

lowenbjer 4 hours ago | parent

Three dots next to the song title, menu opens, "Add to Queue", done.

shimman 3 hours ago | parent

I click three dots, add to queue is at the bottom of the list, need to scroll, then click add to queue.

Why do I have to do so many actions when adding an item (say a podcast) to my current playlist? Why can't there be a single button that says "add to queue," why hide an common workflow behind nested menus and actions?

Wouldn't adding songs to your current queue be an extremely common action by users? Or at least power users?

I think I might become one of those people that makes their own frontend music player for Jellyfin. Adding and modifying playlists are something I do often (wrote like 100s of collages on what.cd back in the day), but with Spotify these actions are so fucking painful.

lowenbjer 1 hour ago | parent

Fair point, for me there is no scrolling required though, its like nr 3 in the list.

I wonder how long it will take for AI to learn how we work with software on an individual level and adapt the UI to fit our usage patterns.

fdghrtbrt 4 hours ago | parent

Keep doing. Hearing people complain about streaming software, when they could be playing their sounds locally with free software, makes my day every day.

shimman 3 hours ago | parent

I have been looking up DAP devices (digital audio players), anything you'd recommend that you know? Use to rock a Zune until the desktop software was unable to connect to it, loved that device.

Really tempted to buy this device:

https://store.hiby.com/pages/hiby-digital-miku

Because the color scheme and buttons look cool, not really aware of the waifu but she has good taste.

Do agree about local sounds, streaming audio sounds so compressed and awful. Very inefficient compared to the audio quality of locally hosted music.

samuelg123 4 hours ago | parent

Try using apple music

TYPE_FASTER 3 hours ago | parent

I bought another app to play Apple Music because that’s how much the Music app usability has decreased.

happymellon 4 hours ago | parent

Don't you just swipe right on a song to add it to the queue?

shimman 3 hours ago | parent

I wish! Just tried this on the iPhone app (sure it's all the same flavor of electron) but it doesn't work.

cuuupid 2 hours ago | parent

I mean Spotify sucks but Electron is a desktop framework, not what their iPhone app is built with, and you can queue by swiping right on their official app.

shimman 2 hours ago | parent

Wow, this only works for songs (and it's left) but not podcast episodes (my main use case). I had no idea you could do this! If I have to blame someone, I blame snapchat for making "unknown UX controls as something for users to discover" as the main pusher of the UI trend.

Rather than sending me marketing materials, I wish companies would send power users tips/tricks. Would definitely read those emails.

piva00 48 minutes ago | parent

It does work, I just did on my app, swiping right will show an icon to add to queue on the left side of the track, slide it until it's green.

The iPhone app is not Electron, it's a native app.

shimman 2 minutes ago | parent

This appears to only work for songs, this action does not work for podcasts or playlists. Wow! What bad engineering culture, likely only caring about what's in the ticket and not the feature overall. I guess this is what happens to a product after spending a decade only hiring people who can do leetcode.

OptionOfT 58 minutes ago | parent

Sounds like they have the same problem all software companies have as soon as the MBAs took over.

Metrics, not for the purpose of making the software better, but to justify someone's existence in the company.

Starman_Jones 23 minutes ago | parent

Not to mention that, if there is a queue, clicking Play on an album will play only the first track and add the rest of the tracks to the bottom of the queue. Did the PM honestly think listeners wanted that?

Gormo 4 hours ago | parent

> Spotify famously claimed their best devs were no longer writing any of their own code:

It seems almost criminal to hire Ludvig Strigeus and then not let him write code.

j1elo 4 hours ago | parent

It's fully caused by management mindset. There are companies that are investing hard on the AI trend, but the message is clear: all code pushed is your ultimate responsonsibility, and if it lacks quality or causes problems, you're on the hook for it; using AI hasn't changed that.

So if Spotify had a modicum of AI usage hygiene, plus accountability expectations for code quality, this would still mean a bad performance review for whoever introduced this issue (person or team; poor results and mistakes are never something that come from a single source)

SilverElfin 1 hour ago | parent

Spotify is a terribly run company. Zero innovation. Bugs. Frustrating interface design. It’s awful and they deserve to lose at this point. I’m surprised anyone ever praised their management techniques.

user3939382 4 hours ago | parent

I once decided to try spotify, paid the fee. Listened to a podcast and ads came on. “Oh no those ads are embedded by the podcast themselves, we don’t control that.” Ok I don’t care what your back end financial models are, either I’m paying to remove ads or I’m not. Immediately canceled.

lowenbjer 4 hours ago | parent

"the spotify subreddit is actively removing discussion of the problem"

This sounds like terribly bad form, won't buy them any goodwill down the line.

edoceo 4 hours ago | parent

More thing for Spotify is that their users are, more or less, locked in. That stickyness is what allows companies to try this dumb shit; management will hardly feel the impact of their bad choices - cause they are standing on many years of foundations.

It's like when Homer Simpson was carried up the mountain by Sherpas and thought he owned the achievement.

lowenbjer 4 hours ago | parent

I get that it looks bad to have vibe coding bugs creeping into your codebase for such a big company, but isn't it common sense that owning your misstakes taking accountability for them generates respect?

Esophagus4 4 hours ago | parent

I switched last year and discovered I wasn’t as locked in as I thought.

SongShift moves your library from one app to another super easily. In 20 minutes my whole collection, playlists and all, moved from Spotify to Apple. And it was free.

I encourage everyone who is dreading moving to a better app to try it… it’s pretty easy now.

I’m tempted to try Tidal myself because Apple Music’s recommendations aren’t that great.

surgical_fire 4 hours ago | parent

How so?

Spotify can be switched for YT Music, or Apple Music, or Deezer without any issues.

You can also just buy albums on Qobuz instead.

You can, ultimately, resort to one of the best things the internet offered since its inception - piracy.

If anything, Spotify is one of the easiest services to replace. And I say this as a paying customer.

lowenbjer 1 hour ago | parent

I tried tidal for the Lossless (dont care about the 24bit, i care about no EQ and compression added to music) but i went back to spotify for their recommendation model. Its a moat for me.

distances 51 minutes ago | parent

I don't think lossless gives you anything other than, well, lossless compression. EQ or dynamic range compression don't really have anything to do with it.

paxys 1 hour ago | parent

> This subreddit is mainly for sharing Spotify playlists. We're not a support community, and we encourage users to use official support channels for most issues.

Literally the first line of the sub description.

RogerL 24 minutes ago | parent

yes, the correct sub for this is r/truespotify, and there are a dozen discussions on the problem.

ladax72707 4 hours ago | parent

Haven't used spotify in years, but they used to have programmed and live ads in podcasts, even for paying subscribers. That's one of the reasons I've gave up on them. Just insulting for consumers.

Esophagus4 4 hours ago | parent

I canceled Spotify when they started putting “commercially promoted” songs (lol) in stations generated for me.

That’s an ad. I’m not paying for ads.

totallygeeky 1 hour ago | parent

For anyone looking for a spotify alternative, please join me in making a better, self-hosted spotify!

1.) Buy music when you can, and when you can't, pirate!

2.) Run Gonic(1)! (or whatever you want, I'm not in charge of what you do at the end of the day, but Gonic is a.) very light, and b.) a subsonic(2) server, so it's compatible with anything that supports that family of services)

2a.) How you run it is up to preference, I have a NAS that runs mine, you can also run it off something like Pikapods(3), a VPS (you know what a VPS is), or off your own desktop/laptop/raspberry pi, who cares.

3.) Download a subsonic compatible player, which is much more open to preferences, but I highly suggest Symfonium(4)

4.) Enjoy music streaming without ads, limits, or artists you don't like!

(1) https://github.com/sentriz/gonic

(2) https://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

(3) https://www.pikapods.com/

(4) https://symfonium.app/

to be clear, i have no relation to any of these products, outside of supporting the development of gonic and donating to symfonium. if anyone is interested I can do a more in depth write up of how I personally manage my stuff, but it's not much more complicated than this, just with a TB+ of music in a folder.

arealaccount 3 minutes ago | parent

Not a single mention of Pandora in this thread? Do people really not use it?

It’s so much better for just picking a song or musician or genre and having a never ending playlist