> Can Spotify actually become human- and artist-first?
No, it can't. Its founder Daniel Ek is a war profiteer. He is by definition anti-human.
Spotify itself is actively anti-artist. It has the lowest pay rates in the industry and is embracing AI replacing humans so they can pay humans even less.
Stop using it and vote with your wallet. Literally any alternative you choose is an improvement for artists over Spotify.
> Literally any alternative you choose is an improvement
Counterintuitive to me would be (1) not listening at all, or (2) torrenting.
I suppose choosing (1) means Spotify has less leverage over the artist, but to the detriment of the artist since they don’t get that fraction of a cent. Additionally, that also means one less pair of ears discovering the artist.
I suppose at least with torrenting the discovery aspect is preserved.
Big Bandcamp fan, I get almost all my music from there. But their AI removal (well, or piracy removal for that matter) is rather lacking. Any action takes over a week, sometimes more. Just like with clear piracy (pre release leaks have been up for months), and when they do, they just remove it, whoever bought it is out of luck.
They have been great for what I use them for, occasion niche discoveries, but I'm not sure they replace Spotify for the "hop in my car and my favorite mainstream hits begin playing without having to think too hard about it" use case.
It certainly was, but unfortunately FM radio has gotten pretty awful around me (which I find strange because we are in a fairly densely populated area).
The only thing I listen to on the radio regularly are baseball games.
It's trending in that direction. If you want genuine conversation with humans, it's best to start looking for small, private communities that have and enforce LLM policies that align with your desires. Public social media is universally trash, don't waste your time there. I think HN is still worth visiting for now, but it's getting harder to justify spending time here with the quantity of garbage-quality LLM articles and even many comments.
> HN is still worth visiting, but it's getting harder to justify spending time here
I feel the same. Quality of both submissions and discussions have considerable decreased. It is still the best general purpose “aggregator” I know of, but it is not what it was. It is becoming more and more FotM hype and boring group-think.
HN was great due to the breadth of unique, interesting, nerdy topics, most of which I would have never come across on my own; and the insightful thought-provoking commentary, often by insiders with unique insights and perspectives.
Now it is just the same LLM agentic coding harness hype cycle astroturfing 100x engineer 37k LoC/day BS I could get from Reddit or LinkedIn or Twitter or anywhere else.
The moderators are still doing a fantastic job though! I feel like that is the last big differentiator from just being orange Reddit.
I dunno, it's tough. I hesitate to say HN is "getting worse," even if I agree with that in my gut. I think that gives rose-tinted glasses and nostalgia-bait. Rather, I think the community is refocusing around something that I find uninteresting. If you find LLM output to be dull, as I do, it's less and less a place for you to be. I try to push the community in more interesting directions by upvoting articles with actual technical content, but yeah it's being drowned out by the ho-hum LLM output that I'm not interested in, and that means I want to be here less.
I could not agree more. I feel the exact same, its just a ton of content here that might not necessarily be "worse" I just find it (LLMs) dreadfully boring uninteresting. Lobste.rs seems to be nicer so I lurk there a lot now as I can't post.
I think it's a trend in the industry though. Engineering is known as a moneymaker and so a large part of the new generation is the kind of person that decades ago would have gone for finance as a profession.
Both the really old timey graybeard techies and the green haired alternative techie communities are reducing in numbers.
Since crypto and later LLM it got to its current state, everyone is trying to promote their stuff, sometimes in many covert ways, again, when money gets into anything it ruins it, same happened to YT and other sites.
I don't think it's exclusive to young people, no. I'm a couple years older than you. All of my friends also hate it and make fun of it. Like some of the people in the article, I'm also looking to get out of the tech industry and find something else to do other than be forced to talk to shitty robots. If they want to fire me for not using their crappy tech enough, fine. I don't care anymore.
> I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easily allows me to get right back into the context of a project, niche details and agreements had with a client, etc. No need to pollute the codebase or gather together a million emails or notetaking software just to get back up to speed.
Hmm that's interesting to hear. I'm starting up a very small business this year (one guy selling shit at a craft fair booth) and I'm using plaintext accounting files in a Git repo for it. I wonder if Fossil could keep me from re-inventing some note taking and record keeping approaches. I'll have to look into what it can do.
It has a wiki, forum and issues included. So it definitely can do that, what fossil allows by default is to not have a docs/ or bugs/todo file, because its all in the server part.
Computers are useful tools that do useful things for people. It is reasonable for people to want to use them to do things they find useful. They don't have to function like spy devices, but we've chosen to highly reward the people who have turned them into spy devices, so they do. We could choose to do something else with them instead. For example we could pass & enforce privacy regulations so they cannot function as spy devices. Or we could wheel out the guillotines so there are appropriate consequences for the creeps and sociopaths who choose to build and work at places like Facebook. Whichever, I'm flexible.
The Witness is one of my favorite games of all time, but yeah the first thing I say to anyone thinking of playing it is to skip all the audio logs. Those things are straight up embarrassing trash and I can understand anyone unfortunate enough to click on them dropping the game down into "don't recommend" territory. Also, given his extremely stinky personality, I probably won't be buying any future games by Blow.
I'm sure it's very common, yes. Permissions & popup fatigue is very real. Today, every application and website throws 6 dozen popups at you that you have to get through to get to the stuff you came there for. Most of it is marketing; some of it is from braindead lawyers; some of it is important; none of it gets read by users. At some point you give up and just click "yes, goddamnit, I have work to do" and all the security stuff is out the window.
Always remember: there is no such thing as computer security. If your data is on a networked computer, consider it to be semi-public. The first and only rule of computer security is don't store or do anything on a networked computer that would devastate you if it were leaked or compromised
And, make sure not to think about how much of our modern infrastructure is built on top of computers connected to the Internet.
I'm at a similar level, maybe a little behind that. I don't have any advice for you, but I'll relate the path I am planning to take. Would be happy to hear others' thoughts, too.
My feeling is this level is just too early to read "real" texts, so I am continuing to just use graded readers. I use the Du Chinese app for this, it contains a bunch of short stories at different comprehension levels, and has a spoken accompaniment to each story read by a real speaker (not AI/TTS). I also have some physical books from LingLing Mandarin, I like the challenge of not having a dictionary immediately to hand like I do in the app. My hope is by the time I finish with the Advanced stages of each of these sets of readers, I will be able to start reading "real" texts and fill in gaps with a dictionary app, at which point there is an infinite supply of material.
I do worry I'll end up at the "10% missing comprehension" described in the article, though, at which point I guess I'll try to find even higher level graded readers, if they exist. We'll see.
I do woodworking for a hobby and wanted to find a nice "intro to routers" article. After skimming past the obvious SEO crap on google I clicked the first likely-seeming link and was greeted by an AI slop image of two misshapen routers being operated by three disembodied hands with seventeen fingers each. I immediately threw my laptop out the window, watched it shatter into five hundred pieces, walked across the street to the library, and checked out a goddamn book.
I was already getting disillusioned with the Internet as a learning resource during the SEO spam era, but the AI era has completely destroyed it.
For questions like this you can ask an AI directly instead of getting herded through the clickbait.
Education and targeted summary searches are one of the best uses. I literally found the location of the criminal who embezzled thousands of euros from my condominium with an AI search. It took me around fifteen minutes. Other people had been looking for years. (True story...)
The thing with LLMs is that it is very, very easy to adjust the weights across the entire model to sway responses one way or another. Previously, in the hypothetical case one wanted to rewrite history, it would be a much more involved endeavour of curation; fabrication of original sources would be difficult to do at scale. But now it's trivial for a provider to inject a preamble to the prompt to not only hide results that do not fit the narrative of those legislating in the model providers' favour, but to distort the results.
Obviously none of that is happening in the current moment, and I grant that cake recipes would be low stakes, but I would rather take the tradeoff of trawling through a little bit of slop to get that same information than acclimate myself to a workflow that could be abused by providers in more high-stakes situations down the line.
But that's just me, and I realise this is not a particularly popular take, but it should nonetheless be illustrative for why "just ask the LLM" might not be the best of ideas long term.
No, it can't. Its founder Daniel Ek is a war profiteer. He is by definition anti-human.
Spotify itself is actively anti-artist. It has the lowest pay rates in the industry and is embracing AI replacing humans so they can pay humans even less.
Stop using it and vote with your wallet. Literally any alternative you choose is an improvement for artists over Spotify.
If you are strict about anti-AI, you might find Bandcamp appealing. https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
More info:
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/a-complete-guide-to-quit...
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/artists-le...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsing_(company)
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