The love/hate functions are really useful, both for users, and as high-value data points for recommendations etc.
This thread makes it clear to me that some users don’t use, or rarely use, the ‘hate’ function because of the strong connotations of that word.
Changing the wording it to something more mild (like ‘dislike’) seems like it could help with this, so I’ve made a ticket for it:
I think ‘love’ has some similarly strong connotations, so I do wonder if changing both functions to like / dislike (or something else?), perhaps with up and down arrow icons instead of hearts, would increase the use of both. I tend to click those more ‘casually’ than a love button (but I’ve never actually tracked this behaviour so I’m going by gut feeling).
Here is my regular user perspective(Ignoring any answers in this topic that might explain these things to me, as I haven’t come to the forums and seen this, I am just using LB )
For me Love mainly on the surface looks like a way to show people what songs you really like. And then you have hate, and I don’t really feel the need to show people songs I feel negatively towards.
But now thinking in the context of recommendations, love is obviously a good thing almost always I feel, as there is very little downside. But as I don’t understand exactly how these affect my recommendations, I am more wary of Hate/Dislike features so I don’t tend to use them.
At worst if I click love, the site may think I like an artist more than I do, but more stuff being in the pool of recommends isn’t the end of the world.
If I click hate on this song, am I suddenly going to make the site think I don’t like this particular artist? Or maybe this whole genre will take a bit of a dip in my recommendations? Or is it simply telling the site don’t recommend me this song anymore? I may be removing songs or even artists I potentially would enjoy from the pool of recommendations. So for me the unknown of how it will affect my recommendations keeps me from using it.
I think I(and maybe other users) would be much more likely to use hate(or even love) if LB had an explanation some place saying how they affected recommendations and anything else it would be used for.
Now, as someone who has read this
Even this, I don’t like hate(or dislike, etc) and probably won’t use it. To me, it feels to open to being used in more ways in the future I think? Maybe in the future it does more than remove it, and affects recommends more, which I wouldn’t want, personally. I would prefer a “Don’t recommend this song to me” option and that’s all it gets used for. Then I could even use it to prune songs from my recommends that don’t need to be there(Maybe I know them already, or they have been recommended before, etc and can use it to keep my recommends a bit more fresh)
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying there shouldn’t be a feature like hate/dislike that is used generally for recommends. I just personally wouldn’t use such a feature even knowing that is what it gets used for currently. But I would use one that I knew would only ever remove specific songs from my generated playlists.
Years ago Spotify had green checkmarks to highlight tracks. Yes - I used them much more ‘casually’ than I would have used the now provided green hearts. About the green checkmark I thought that to be a track to listen again to but suddenly Spotify changed the meaning to ‘love’. The result is, I have a lot of loved tracks on Spotify which I don’t ‘love’. Good luck you can remove this mark easily, if you really think it worth the hassle!
As a user of a service you never know which changes you will be confronted with by the provider. So currently I wouldn’t use any feature ‘casually’ but think twice before highlighting anything at all.
Over time the taste for music changes significantly. Tracks listened to a lot, suddenly are moved to the background or even forgotten. Adjusting the marks may not be worth the effort because it is possible you re-like a track after some time.
My personal statistics therefore is relying on number of plays only. If I listen to a track more often than to another one, it seems to be the one more appreciated.
As you already saw, we only use the hated tracks right now to prevent you from getting that track recommended again. Before too long I want to integrate the loved tracks as input to our collaborative filtering algorithm.
Longer term we’re likely going to have another level of user feedback: Do not recommend this recording/release/artist.
This should free up the love/hate to be used as you wish and for influencing recommendations use the new feedback settings.
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