this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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Is this why my wife is constantly complaining that her playlists constantly keep playing the same songs over and over?
Fuck yeah, it is.
My favourite example of Spotify being shit is:
I want to play an album, so I go to it and press play. Then a bit later I want to queue a second album after the first one is done. How do I do that? As far as I can tell the answer is to go fuck myself. I have start a new queue or playlist with both albums in it.
That's apart from all the basic software quality stuff like randomly restarting the queue.
Edit: so now I use finamp with jellyfin, which I can actually fix when it does something I hate.
The point of these apps is to leech as much money as possible.
An opposing goal would be to make the app better for users.
Spotifys UX has always been terrible. We all got used to having crappy software. It’s too convenient that’s AI also makes crappy vibecode without supervision. No one will notice anything.
Podcast. Filter out episodes I've already listened to. Turn around. Filter out episodes I've already listened to. Put the app in the background. Filter out episodes that I've already listened to. Finish an episode. Filter out episodes I've already listened to. The year is 2026. Filter out episodes that I've already listened to.
Tell me, why is that not persistent?
There was a time back in maybe... 2009(?) when the UI was great. It made sense, you could do everything you could possibly want very easily. Then they broke everything I think around 2012 and completely revamped the UI, and it's never been good ever since.
Glad I left it years ago.
2009 would be back when it was a native application, rather than just a web browser
I too remember when there were actual markets with actual products who actually competed with one another
Have you fixed anything when it's done something you've hated? I sometimes think, "I can fix this" and the I let my workarounds last for years. Like a leaky faucet where I fix it by rotating the handle not to 180° but to like 185.
Yeah, I try to make a point of using free software and contributing where I can. It does have to rise to a certain threshold of annoyance though.
function GetRandomNumber(): return 42;It's a random number, what more do you want 🤷♂️ /s
No, that’s just random being random. In order for something truly random to feel less random to the average person, you have to reduce the repetition.
Idk why the donwvotes. This is how these players implement shuffle, because people don't actually want a random shuffle most times.
Maybe people disliked my fun fact, maybe I came off the wrong way, maybe people took offense at my typo. It doesn’t matter much. I comment for me! (This comment included)
This is the difference between randomly choosing songs and randomly choosing songs without repetition.
Both are random but the later is much better for humans.
https://www.statisticshowto.com/sampling-with-replacement-without/
Of course there are other possible methods of choosing. It seems like Spotify is doing some kind of weighting from the other comment posted in this chain.
and that is what spotify actually does: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2025/11/shuffle-making-random-feel-more-human
... And here I am, expecting "shuffle" to be a random ordering without repetition at all, like a silly person apparently.
This, the Shuffle function should play every song exactly once, just in a random order. This is what cd players have been supporting since the late '80s.
It is a very simple algorithm but Spotify turned it into something complex that barely works. By default, in large playlists, it will heavily prioritize some songs while others are almost never heard. People have complained about this for years and there is an option in the settings for it now, although I am not yet sure if that setting really disables all of the "smart" algorithms Spotify has associated with shuffle.
You mean "shuffle" like when you shuffle a deck of cards and have exactly the same cards still but in a different order with no single card repeating because you started out with a deck of cards and why would there suddenly be an extra card or 5 of the same face value in the deck because that's just crazy talk? That kind of shuffle?
Yeah sorry, Spotify doesn't do that.
My problem with Spotify shuffle was that it always ended up throwing a similar order of songs. The same group of songs would end up in the same general position on the playlist every time. It's not random, and it stands to reason that people doesn't actually want real random order. But it was super obvious, noticeable and quite annoying to hit the same songs at the same time on your walk every single time. They even admitted publicly that their shuffle function sucks.
that is exactly what it does
the fewer repeats is for when you listen to the same playlist multiple times, not for the sequence itself