I use spotify daily to listen to my playlists and find new music regularly. I have not noticed any dark patterns, apart from search on desktop being weird sometimes. What are they?
For one, all of the recommendations you receive are driven partly by sponsorship by major labels - release radar, the for you mix, and the radios you run from your playlists. This is not clearly documented online, but there is some coverage from when it was introduced in 2020. I'd be curious if anyone here has more up to date information.[0]
So one dark pattern would be the fact that the entire discovery system is partly driven by advertising incentives with no indication to the user about what recommendations are most genuine and what are being selected as the most-relevant sponsored option.
As an individual user, I think I've noticed this before. There was a span of time where every single playlist I made with hip hop on it would always bring up the same 2-3 JPEGMafia tracks in the radio mix, regardless of the playlists' individual content or the fact that I don't listen to that artist.
honestly, I don't know who to believe about anything anymore, but luckily this particular controversy is pretty low-stakes relative to a number of other current topics.
I only know of the upgrade splash screens where Dismiss is small and/or floating off of the brightly colored splash so it doesn't contrast and is harder to see. Exactly like Amazon Music.
