Jesus, you are attributing something like this to malice, where it is simply:
It is a power user feature.... and most likely nobody bothered to prioritize it as it wont be changing any metrics at all.
Spotify (the desktop client), had all kinds of features (drag and drop, etc..), that were nice but were eventually dropped in the sub-sequential redesigns.
The realization was that less of 2% of the users were using any of those features, and many of those features had costs (extra code, more maintenance, etc)....
Of course, many employees are power users themselves, and some were not happy, but over and over it seems that dropping those features didn't hurt metrics, actually improved them (usually because the UI got more simplified, less cluttered).
That little feature is missing, (and annoying you so much) simply because Spotify is a large company now, and nobody (usually either a PM, or senior engineer) has thought that including it, because it doesn't have a large impact.
When the company was smaller, engineers could just jump in and implement little things that 'annoyed' them. Once the company is large, is gets harder to do that.
That just how it is in most tech companies when they reach a certain size.
I have to wholeheartedly agree with your parent here.
The whole purpose of playlists is to organise songs, and almost the entire usecase for removing a song from a playlist is to remove the currently playing song. I almost never want to remove a song under any other circumstances.
This shouldn’t be a power feature, but Spotify makes it unnecessarily difficult to do on the fly.
You're making a few big leaps here. First that self-built playlists are an important feature for users, that people are actively managing their playlists, and that people curate while listening.
Those might all be true for the majority of users, or it might be that you're an outlier. The only way to know is to actually sample real world users.
Malice? No. Prioritization? Sure. Monetization never affects prioritization discussion?
I understand not everything that can make it in and I understand not making features for power users, especially ones that clutter up the UI.
But this is a basic use case. Maybe people use Spotify differently than I do, but I would assume they add their favorite songs to a playlist, put it on shuffle, and that's basically it. Having this functionality be effectively append only doesn't make sense to me.
It is a power user feature.... and most likely nobody bothered to prioritize it as it wont be changing any metrics at all.
Spotify (the desktop client), had all kinds of features (drag and drop, etc..), that were nice but were eventually dropped in the sub-sequential redesigns. The realization was that less of 2% of the users were using any of those features, and many of those features had costs (extra code, more maintenance, etc)....
Of course, many employees are power users themselves, and some were not happy, but over and over it seems that dropping those features didn't hurt metrics, actually improved them (usually because the UI got more simplified, less cluttered).
That little feature is missing, (and annoying you so much) simply because Spotify is a large company now, and nobody (usually either a PM, or senior engineer) has thought that including it, because it doesn't have a large impact.
When the company was smaller, engineers could just jump in and implement little things that 'annoyed' them. Once the company is large, is gets harder to do that.
That just how it is in most tech companies when they reach a certain size.