Technology

Or "platform decay" if you need to talk to your grandma about it.

Not really the right use I think. It was coined specifically to describe platforms' lifecycle of changing who they benefit. What's above is just constant churn in the attempt of infinite growth or just hanging onto market share trying to decide what people want (or tell them what they should want).

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

A paid subscription service like O365 or spotify isn't too similar to the advertising "business partners" of a social media platform like tiktok. Of course language is descriptive rather than prescriptive but I feel like overusing this term loses the perceptive observation (and the message Doctorow wants to promote) of how these businesses work. Microsoft adding new features and spotify changing things to either make their app management easier (they claimed that's why they got rid of android widget for a while) or promote their own stuff doesn't seem to fit.

Normal part of monopolization.

When I first started with Premium, you could toggle shuffle mode on or off before hitting the play button. But then that went away and there was basically only a Shuffle button, so you had to do the sequence like here (from 2022)

https://www.drmare.com/spotify-music/play-spotify-album-in-order.html

but at first you didn't have to do this bit

Step 4. Open the "Now Playing" page and turn off the "Shuffle" button.

And I think at that time the forums were saying it was only the Android app where you had to do this (and I want to say that desktop/web app were indeed not putting me through these shenanigans at that time, was a probably 4-5 years ago, maybe more). And then when I further had to start doing that 4th step of disabling shuffle in the now playing screen I had just had enough and cancelled.

Other posts from 2023 seem to indicate this is now the standard UX on all platforms

https://www.audkit.com/spotify-music/spotify-play-album-in-order.html
https://integraudio.com/play-songs-order-without-premium/

edit:

Here's a community thread going back to 2015 ("modo aleatorio" means "random mode") with commenters chiming in through late 2022.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Android/Playing-albums-in-order/m-p/1262705

So I guess I may have my timelines a bit off, but I strongly remember the Play button originally having a little sub-button overlay you could tab to enable or disable shuffle before hitting the Play button proper.

Same here. Was surprised to read this comment, went to the Android app, played a few playlists. Shuffle is off by default, first song on a list starts playing. Switch it on, go to another playlist, it is still off by default. Is it some a/b testing by Spotify I am lucky not to be part of? Would certainly cancel my sub if that was the case.

I mean, there were quite a few elements of the ux I was mad about, like promoting stuff I'd never want to listen on the front page just because Spotify paid a gazillion to creators, but shuffle is not it.

I could not without a stupidly bad UX which was reportedly limited to Android while desktop/web/iOS were sane about it. I had been giving Spotify a try after Google squashed Play Music for YouTube Music and I canceled Premium and went to Google with YouTube Premium specifically over this issue.

Yes, it costs less and has higher quality audio

Napster is a paid legal site now