That’s a very elaborate way to spell “leeches”.

The problem is all the other people voting the wrong way with their bigger wallets.

From reading the article, it sounds like Spotify itself doesn’t get directly affected. Instead, the record companies and advertisers are upset. The record companies, because the shared pool of royalties that gets paid out is now getting split with white noise creators, leaving them a smaller share of the pie. The advertisers, because most people listening to white noise are using it to fall asleep or just keeping it on in the background, and therefore nobody will be listening/paying attention when the ads come on.

Tough titties for them, you may say, but if they don’t like it, they may take their respective balls and go home. That would seriously impact Spotify, since without the music, most users will quickly lose interest, and the advertisers are a large part of their revenue stream. If they don’t do something, they could end being a streaming service predominantly for white noise, which would be far less profitable.

It should also be taken into account that a lot of the white noise hits were not organic, but the result of a problem with how Spotify set up their algorithm.

Having read it, this is basically correct. The last hurdle was that the sewer system was designed to use the river to dump overflow in the case of heavy rains. Now they’re finishing up a large reservoir to use instead.

He didn’t want to buy the company. So, he’s turning it into a pet project.

That’s a good point, and one that had not occurred to me. For all we know, he’s already mentally written off the $44 billion as a loss and is just having fun with it, with no expectation of success.

That would explain a lot.

It wasn’t up the whole time. I went looking for it a few years ago after a new OS install, and found that, at the time, the site was in limbo with some message about coming back eventually, but no official way to download it. Glad it’s back, hope they didn’t turn it into enshittified bloatware.

It might also help with the potential problem of entire communities being eradicated by rogue actions from an instance admin, or instance issues in general. If the community is spread out across multiple instances, it can weather problems on its “main” instance without being as easily dispersed.

That’s what they want you to think. (not sure if I’m being sarcastic or not)

Even if that’s true, once they become a part of the ecosystem, they will start looking for ways to dominate it. That’s just the nature of for-profit corporations.

Makes me wonder if that’s what Digg was doing…