To be fair, I've caught spotify giving me the same shuffle order several times. If i stop a playlist and start it later in the day it will sometimes give me 10 or so songs in the exact order I'd already heard them. It does the same if i search a song and let shuffle fill it in the rest, the next fews songs are usually predictable. My most used playlist has nearly 70hrs of music so i suspect this is some algorithm error or bug.

[–] papalonian@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It does this for me with every song I've played from the playlist so far. If I'm on a long drive, listening to the same playlist for an hour, and I like a song, add it to the playlist, or play a different song and go back to the playlist, the whole thing starts over at the beginning again and I have an hour of songs to skip through.

[–] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Yes I've had similar experiences. Even with smart shuffle on those new songs are the same. Another annoying feature is whenever i add a song from smart shuffle to the playlist it queues it up right away forcing a repeat listen.

[–] h0rnman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Spotify shuffle has been awful for a very long time. I've had the same experience more times than I can count (shuffling the Playlist gives you the same order for the first 10-20 songs). I've also noticed in my case that if I have a very long Playlist (like 300+ songs), I never hear anything but the same 70 or so. I have my theories but I can't prove anything

[–] fiddlesticks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

They use some special shuffle algorithm that (they claim) weighs the songs based on how recently they were played, but you can change it in settings somewhere for true random

[–] h0rnman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 hours ago

Yeah but even when you do that, the shuffle is still garbage. What i think is happening is that they're loading the first X entries in the Playlist and passing that to the (bad) shuffle algorithm instead of passing the whole Playlist first. Then when it gets towards the end of X, it does the same thing with the next chunk. I can't imagine that it saves that much money but it tracks with both what I see and the general trends of enshitification

[–] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

Part of my theory is my very specific tastes have strong armed the algorithm. I have a playlist with every genre i listen to in it and I abuse the shuffle button until something comes on that fits my current vibe.