[jennyholzer2]

At the start of 2025 I stopped buying Spotify and started buying Apple Music because I felt manipulated by the Spotify application's metrics-first design.

I felt that Spotify was trying to teach me to rely on its automated recommendations in place of any personal "musical taste", and also that those recommendations were of increasingly (eventually, shockingly), poor quality.

The implied justification for these poor recommendations is a high "Monthly Listener Count". Don't mind that Spotify can guarantee that any crap will have a high listener count by boosting it's place in their recommendation algorithm.

I think many people may have a similar experience on once-thriving social media platforms like facebook/instragram/X.

What I mean to say is that I think people associate the experience of being continually exposed to dubiously sourced and dubiously relevant metrics with the feeling of being manipulated by illusions of scale.