[Playlists] Solution to false/abusive reporting

[CloudlightRec]

Whenever someone reports a playlist - the title and cover art are removed immediately. This is often abused to hurt record labels and playlist curators. After contacting support - the account of someone who abused this system gets taken down. This person then creates another email and free Spotify account and repeats the process. 

There is a simple solution to the problem - enable reporting feature only after 10 hours of music/podcasts were streamed using the account. It won't change the experience for a normal user but makes copyright abuse impractical. It's cheap and easy to implement and would stop 95% of false claims.

Thank you for your consideration. 

[Top50Clean]

Yes STP444! Simply adding Captcha to the report form would practically eliminate the bot problem. It stinks that it looks like someone is targeting your playlists. As I say in my emails back to Spotify: it's harassment.

C'mon Spotify! Help us out here! Please!

[Top50Clean]

Hi Spotify,

I just received a total of 47 reports on the same playlist in a span of 40 minutes. Each time I reset my metadata it would quickly be followed by another report. I can't tell if this was someone repeatedly submitting the report form and going through the email code verification, or if they managed to build a bot to do it for them.

How they did it doesn't really matter. I don't know if they just gave up for now or if their account was suspended. I'm sure they'll be back. For some reason they really don't like my playlist that only has 32 followers.

Can we add a CAPTCHA to the reporting form? Or like the original idea poster suggested, only allow reporting from users that have streamed for a certain amount of time? This harassment is frustrating for paying customers, and I'm sure it is taking valuable time away from your support staff who have better issues to tackle.

Thanks.

[STP444]

The reports have been relentless for me over the last two weeks. It's very disappointing that Spotify hasn't addressed this. It doesn't look like they even read the email appeals anymore as I don't even get a response or acknowledgment. I imagine that most of us here are paying customers so it's a shame that they don't value us. Considering that one of Spotify's main features is the ability to create and share playlists with people, you would think that this issue would be a priority. 

Anyone reading this please log in and upvote this idea/thread and leave a comment to help get this issue more attention. I believe that if they can at least get rid of the reporting bots then most of our problems would be solved, and Spotify support staff could investigate genuine reports instead. 

[nminto]

As someone that has been dealing with this on and off for over a year now, this thread is really disheartening. It was at least tolerable when I'd get it once or twice a week, maybe a few times on a specific day, but now it's to the point where I fix it and the data is gone within an hour.

Clearly spotify doesn't care about this, which is a shame. It's sad that this company has sold out so much from what the original "community" "social media of music" model was. Descartes, I'd love to connect with you off this forum about that code you've used to prevent this. That seems to be the only way I'm going to be able to deal with this without having to remember to check my email or spotify app every hour. Not to mention that just manually fixing it gets really annoying...

[Top50Clean]

For anyone that is still dealing with these false reports, I cooked up a Python program that should help. Once you get it set up and running, it will continually check your playlists to see if they've been "taken down" by a report. If any have, it will update the name/description/image for you. Leave it running in a command-prompt window and feel good knowing your playlists will stop falling in search rankings.

Note that this is only for those of you that know your metadata is following all of the rules and is OK to repost. If you really are infringing on copyright or doing something naughty, this tool isn't meant for you.

Check it out and give it a try! 

[Jacob]

Updated on 2021-05-20

Your suggestion has at least 180 votes! Keep gathering votes. If this idea gets enough votes, Spotify will check it out and post a status update. You can read more about the idea process here.

[SneakyTomato]

Let me get this straight. It's been a year since this topic was started, and still Spotify has yet to do anything about this glaring flaw in their report feature? I made a playlist public originally to share with some friends, but as time went by it was gaining more new followers which made me spend a bit more time adding new songs to it and "trimming away" those that didn't quite fit with the theme I was going for. But as of the last few weeks I have had my playlist reported over and over again and there is nothing to be done. It's frustrating and annoying. 

[PLAYTIFY]

@sneakytomato try to google on apple/IOS shortcuts and Spotify. Might help

[Mario]

Updated on 2021-06-14

Hey everyone,

Thanks for bringing us your feedback in the Spotify Idea Exchange.

Your suggestion has gathered the votes necessary and your feedback is now reaching the internal teams at Spotify. They're aware of the vote count and popularity of this idea. We'll continue to monitor and check out the comments here, too.

As soon as we have any updates on its status, we'll let you know.

More info on how your feedback reaches Spotify via the Idea Exchange can be found here.

[russrichards]

How does it take this long? Theoretically those stupid emails that you get notified about from spotify, and you are supposed to reply to, Spotify should have literally thousands of points of data to do something about this! lets get on with it.  By the way, Spotify doesn't even reply to the notices anymore, such a dumb protocol.  Fact is, Spotify cares more about maintaining the  integrity of its own editorialized playlists then it does the community that built it up.