Spotify, Stop Trying to Become a Social Media App

Spotify’s determination to present remark sections nether podcasts should astonishment nary one. For years now, apps person been ripping disconnected each other’s astir fashionable features. Where erstwhile apps adhered to their respective “things,” contiguous they privation to bash it all: You tin station Stories connected YouTube, usage AI hunt tools connected Instagram, and shop for covering connected TikTok. And, arsenic of past week, you tin acquisition the thrill of seeing what random strangers deliberation astir your favourite podcasts connected Spotify.

In 2020, Spotify flirted with societal tools, specified arsenic a Stories-esque feature for artists and a collaborative playlist diagnostic for users. The pursuing year, Spotify began allowing creators to adhd interactive Q and As arsenic good arsenic polls to their podcasts, and began providing the enactment to prime definite answers for nationalist view.

Spotify’s caller remark conception diagnostic requires podcast publishers to reappraisal each remark submitted and prime those they privation to marque public. But Spotify yet plans to implement an enactment for comments to default to public (and isn’t ruling retired yet extending this diagnostic to music) truthful agelong arsenic they conscionable contented guidelines. (Spotify did not specify what its contented guidelines are.)

This suggests that Spotify wants to beryllium much similar YouTube, which, since the aughts, has allowed mostly unregulated remark sections to unrecorded beneath its videos.

YouTube comments, of course, are notorious for being dicey. For astir 2 decades, the level has scrambled to tame its users’ feedback, which, successful galore cases, amounts to anonymous bullying. (The comments beneath Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video are conscionable 1 illustration of out-of-control online harassment.) Too galore YouTube commenters person besides exhibited sinister, predatory behavior; successful 2019, for instance, YouTube temporarily disabled comments connected videos that diagnostic children successful an effort to mitigate the platform’s evident pedophilia problem.

Considering the information that American governmental commentary occupies a sizeable magnitude of abstraction connected Spotify’s planetary charts—Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Ezra Klein, Jon Stewart, and Tucker Carlson big immoderate of its astir listened-to shows—the platform’s remark sections could precise good go different outlet for rage.

Spotify is alert of specified risks. In 2020, Joe Rogan—whose podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, holds the fig 1 spot connected the platform’s charts—asked Spotify to alteration comments connected his episodes, but the institution declined, citing successful portion the imaginable for commenters to maltreatment the feature.

Creators who alteration comments volition besides carnivore the work of reviewing each one. A spokesperson for Spotify stressed to WIRED the “creator-controlled” quality of the update, saying that the institution has “consistently heard that creators emotion having the power successful their hands.”

However, this setup mightiness deter immoderate creators from opting in. A spokesperson for the Daily Wire, the blimpish media outlet that produces The Ben Shapiro Show (Spotify’s 10th astir fashionable podcast) tells WIRED it does not program to marque comments nationalist connected Spotify.

“We emotion robust statement successful the comments,” the Daily Wire spokesperson says. But, she adds, moderating the forecasted measurement of comments mightiness beryllium to beryllium astir impossible. Ben Shapiro’s YouTube transmission receives 3,700 comments daily, according to the spokesperson. “Assuming it would instrumentality astir 30 seconds to reappraisal each 1 [on Spotify], it would instrumentality 30 hours a day—more than 3 full-time positions—to moderate,” she says. “I can’t ideate who would instrumentality connected this costly burden.”