The abysmal state of this forum and Spotify's bug management.

[mlidbo]

Here's how you know that you have a well functioning support & feedback forum: The customer usually arrives frustrated and annoyed. The customer usually leaves feeling better, usually with their problem solved or with assurances that their problem will be solved.  

This forum is the opposite. Users usually leave more frustrated, often infuriated to the point of rudeness.

Why? Here's a short partial list of reasons: 

1.  The application is shock full of real bugs that don't get fixed.
2. Working features that people depend on keep being removed without any notice.
3. Spotify does not motivate it's decisions. They just declare them even when they know many will be negatively effected.
4. Reported problems are rarely solved. I rarely read a post that actually solved the users problem. If there is an accepted "Solution" is usually a variation on the "We have no intention of fixing this." theme.  It's gotten to the point where I sneer at a topic being marked as "Solved" before I even read the "Solution".
5. Customers virtually never get sincere assurances that their problems are being taken seriously and will be fixed. Instead they get polite meaningless platitudes promising nothing.
6. You try very hard to deny that something is a bug. Making the reporter jump through countless hoops and/or pointing at different bugs and saying "oh you're seeing this".
   
   It's a process to make people give up and go away rather than discovering and fixing bugs.
7. You don't fix bugs. Once you do admit that one exists you are likely to mark it "Not right now" without any explanation.
   
   Here's a hint Spotify. Serious companies don't consider fixing bugs optional. They don't leave bugs in their software on purpose. If fixing something is so hard that they can't do it immediately they explain this and they explain why and they give some sort of timetable for when it will be fixed. They don't say "Not right now."
8. When you do fix something you may well fix it for one platform only and customers using another platform have to start all over again trying to be heard.

Edits about additional serious problem:

1. Spotify Jedi mind trick:Data corruption IS a bug
2. Edits causes posts/comments to be rejected as spam
3. Spotify enrolls users in their Alpha testing program without consent and without any way to opt out
4. The moderators mark their own "solutions" as solutions whether or not the poster wants them to. This is why so many posts here are "Solved" even though the "Solution" solves nothing. 
5. Spotify is covertly (without notifying the user that their post/comment was removed) deleting things that users post. But it seems there are rules. They cannot remove anything and everything. Instructions to google something Spotify dislike remains. Links directly to something Spotify dislikes are removed. Disliked things are things like instructions on how to roll back the New Desktop Experience so that you can have a working version of spotify again.
6. If you try to help people here you quickly run into this error: "Post flooding detected (user tried to post more than 2 messages within 300 seconds)".

This is just a rough draft of a few of the ways that Spotify and this forum continually fails to deliver solutions to customers, instead usually delivering nothing but polite platitudes and meaningless assurances that Spotify actually does care.

The real message of this forum seems to be: "We don't intend to make a sincere effort to fix all our bugs and usability issues. We're here so we can spin the PR that we do care, not to actually implement caring."

Yes this post is also useless. You won't take it seriously. You will sigh and reply with some polite meaningless assurances that promise nothing[Edit: Nope, Thundering silence is the weapon of choice here.]. Why am I still posting it? I don't really know. Some sort of compulsion due to the rage that Spotify's treatment of me and other customers inspires in me I suppose.

[mlidbo]

Update:

There was a long thread here with me describing a bug and being put off again and again and again. Made to jump through countless hoops and told that the bug I was describing was another bug. 

Then I find out, in the New Desktop Experience,  that the feature that is now buggy will be completely removed in that new version.  That Spotify employees were knowingly wasting my time talking about a feature they knew was being removed.

Obviously I was furious about this treatment and made that heard loud and clear in the thread where Spotify employees were knowingly deceiving me and wasting my time. 

The response? The removal, not of the angry post, but of the whole thread. Because we don't want customers knowing that this is how we treat them do we Spotify? That we intentionally mislead them and waste their time? Because that would make them furious wouldn't it? 

[CL415]

Could not have said it better. They'll delete this too, don't worry.

[mlidbo]

Two posts describing more serious problems with this forum.

1. Spotify Jedi mind trick:Data corruption IS a bug
2. Edits causes posts/comments to be rejected as spam

[mlidbo]

Let's add Thundering Silence to the list: 

Thundering Silence: Whenever Spotify does not want to acknowledge a problem, a bit of feedback, a request for information, or a bug, their default strategy is to simply refuse to engage. They give the post or comment the complete silent treatment.

If any answer at all is forthcoming it will deal with peripheral issues while utterly refusing to even acknowledge that the real feedback has even occurred.

Examples of Thundering Silence

• The dozens of comments begging Spotify for a way to opt out of the New Desktop Experience 
• The dozens of comments asking Spotify to "Please talk to us", to explain their reasoning regarding the New Desktop Experience.
• All the comments about covert censorship on this forum. Posts and comments being removed without their authors being notified.
• This post and every post I linked to.

This is appalling treatment of paying customers.

[sylves]

These forums always manage to make my blood pressure shoot through the roof with how horribly they're managed. Not to mention Spotify's consistently awful development and release of "new" "features." I don't even know why I stick with Spotify at this point.

[intellix]

Dozens of negative posts? You mean 85 pages of angry customers with no acknowledgment at all.

It's time to revert the desktop update and apologise.

PS: I've already cancelled my decade long subscription and found that the desktop user experience actually reverts in guest mode... So there's a workaround if you're after one: stop paying them

[illya]

here so i know i'm not crazy and in fact there is a whole (Angry At) Spotify Community

[emma013]

Very well said, Spotify’s customer service is practically nonexistent. These forums are basically useless as they will either ignore your complaint/bug report entirely or they will post a “solution” that doesn’t actually work along with a meaningless platitude. I have had a problem for a month now where Spotify literally only play suggested tracks and I can’t listen to anything I actually choose. I have made so many posts here and reached out to customer service, but the posts were ignored and the “customer service” was just a chat with a useless bot. Took two hours of sitting around waiting and when I actually got a human on the chat they asked some vague questions and then disappeared. They gave me a test account to try to see if the same problem occurs and when I told them it did it was radio silence. 

I’m well aware that this post will also be ignored or deleted and that the problem evidently will never be fixed. I’m just letting out frustration at this point. I’m also pretty sure the “bug” I’m dealing with isn’t actually a bug, but a plot by Spotify to force more people to pay for premium. If that’s the case their scheme is failing miserably; why would I pay for something that is clearly broken with no intention of being fixed? 

[Adam1313]

Such a great post.