Changes to Friend Activity

[Hubo]

With Friend Activity you can see what your friends are listening to. Personally, I love Friend Activity because I can really get to know my friends’ tastes in music and dive right into what they’re listening to.

As of recently, if you want to continue sharing what you're listening to, you will need to enable it for your followers in Settings. If you’ve never turned this setting on before, you’ll need to turn it on to share your activity with your followers. This way, you’re always in control of what you’re sharing.

Also, you may find that you don't see much activity from those you follow - that's because they might not have turned this setting on yet. Let them know you want to dig in on the cool stuff they're listening to! 

Check out this article for more information about Friend Activity. 

You can also block followers if you don’t want them to view your listening activity. Check out the steps under: ‘Block someone’ here for more information.

[tomaszko99]

Another great improvement, well done Spotify, we all needed this. Who needs fixing bugs? Just create more of them.

[user-removed]

So to them, this privacy thing is not a bug?

[dreαmlαnd]

social media founders aim is to attract the public into using their platforms. we used spotify for many years without issues. 

they made changes to their mobile app but not so many to their desktop one. but in under 3 months they went changed it completely. 

you're supposed to make the platform engage with the audience and help make it grow by making changes that the people want. NOT WHAT THEY DON’T WANT !!! 

you want constant feedback about to make YOUR PLATFORM BETTER but you’re NOT listening to us when we say we want you REVERT the UPDATE !!! 

i’m sorry but i don’t understand that logic 

[LouisDavis]

It's crazy that since this change has been recognised, more and more people are coming forward with thei own issues that  show just how rushed and short sighted an update this was.

People have been complaining all over the site and on social media about how they can't see their friends activity once they've renabled it because it takes hours to take effect rather than seconds which you would expect. It shows Spotify really did just go into peoples settings and change them rather than doing any comprehensive testing or checks. They haven't even bothered to create an adequate fallback message in the friend activity sidebar. Everyone's so used to users having sharing enabled, including the developers it seems, that apparently the only way your sidebar can be empty is if you don't follow anyone, which now obviously isn't the case. Your sidebar is more realistically empty because users had their settings changed and haven't renabled sharing but that isn't the message being displayed. Telling users to reinstall your app multiple times when the issue is actually in your software is just disappointing.

While Spotify claim this is a privacy issue it's interesting to note this setting toggle is in the Social section, not the Privacy section. What is in the Privacy section is a toggle to block cookies but strangely this isn't enabled by default even though Spotify claim to be so concerned about user's privacy according to their reponses as to why they went and changed user's setting, without their permission, but apparently it was in our best interests.

Even forgetting about those toggles, the excuses, the lack of UI changes and ignorance towards UX, Spotify changed millions of users' settings without permission or providing notification of the change. While sharing listening activity may not be the biggest of users' concerns, it sets a dangerous precedent that any company can be allowed to go into a user's setting and change things because they deem it "in the user's best interest". Spotify will claim that because they only changed a setting for users that never changed it themselves that all this is fine, but as I've pointed out many times in this forum, you don't know who's seen that setting and left it.

Even now after almost 2 weeks, still a notification has not been sent out to users informing them of this change, even just so Spotify can stop getting support requests from countless users thinking the feature is broken. This is probably the most active this site or any of their social medias have been for a while regarding a singular feature and yet they seem totally unbothered about all the complaints.

[dreαmlαnd]

i don’t know why i’m so shocked to see the reaction and how much reaction this little update has caused many people but i am actually really glad i’m not the only one who is causing a storm with this and wanting spotify to revert back. 

thank you guys for standing strong with me !!! i really want this feature reverted because it really did make spotify worthwhile. 

i don’t think i’ll become a premium user again until they revert it 

[Hubo]

Hey folks.

Thanks all for coming to the Spotify Community to share your thoughts about these changes. Your constructive feedback on how to communicate this to Spotify users is really appreciated and passed on to the right folks.

I would really like to ask, if you’d like to share anything about this here, to keep it respectful and to follow the Spotify Community Guidelines: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-Answers/Spotify-Support-Community-Guidelines/ta-p/4575166.

Furthermore, I understand your frustration here but as @Alex mentioned and to be transparent about this: these changes to Friend Activity are not going to be reversed.

Friend Activity is still here and you can still ask your friends to keep sharing their activity with you by following the steps from this article.

Thanks again for sharing constructive and respectful feedback here.

All the best,

Hubo

[LouisDavis]

Why is Spotify so intent on relying on the users to spread the news about this settings change?? It also shows a lack of listening to feedback because as many people have stated, they may not know the people they follow and have no way of contacting them. Just 10 minutes ago I recieved a notification in app on Spotify Mobile trying to get me to purchase 'Spotify Duo', and yet Spotify won't put out a notification for users just to go and check their account settings. Doing that alone would reduce so much of the frustration in these forums and I fail to see why it hasn't been done. My settings didn't prevent me from getting that subscription notification so they wouldn't prevent me, or anyone else from being notified about account setting changes. It feels like Spotify is scared to explain themselves or scared of letting a larger audience know of what they've done.

[Dakede]

There are reports of problems with the friend activity from 2015, 2018, 2019 and marked as "not right now". Even though my friends and i have both turned one social activity sharing we are unable to see each others music after days. Whatever changes spotify made, it broke the feature to many (not all) and Spotify don't seem to have any hurry in fixing it.

It is not a simple "tell your friends to turn it on" sadly.

[Hubo]

Hey @Dakede, thanks for your post here.

This post is about the recent changes to Friend Activity. If you're having issues with this feature, I'd love to help you get those fixed. Could you send over a link to these issue reports? I'll check to see if there are any updates on them.

Thanks, keep me posted!
Hubo

[mrhsfan]

I’m still having the same issues, as well, as I mentioned much earlier in this thread. I’ve done two clean installs and toggled the settings switch dozens of times. I can’t get it to stop asking me to change my settings. I’d appreciate your help, as well. Especially since I’m a longtime Premium customer whose never had so much trouble from this service before but who is considering dropping my Premium service because I’ve gotten ZERO help to actually fix this. 

[GeeBzz]

As much as your motivations not being transparent at all about this IMHO, (I'm guessing you can't just be "concerned about privacy" after ten years), what's the next move? Removing the feature entirely? Cause re-enabling listening activity isn't working anymore for most of those accounts you grayed out.

[Douxie]

It would have been great to be informed about this update because I initially had no idea what was wrong with my Spotify and tried fixing it with suggestions that were given to people in 2014. It wasn't until I landed on a community complaining about the dreadful update that I knew my settings and everyone else's had been defaulted to private. Millions of people don't know about this change, so it's doing way more harm than good.

[dreαmlαnd]

i just have no words. 

apple music is officially the superior app 

[concordia]

this!!

[concordia]

Why not just add a privacy-status and/or toggle on the main interface within the friends area so people are more aware of their current setting.. even a green or red dot with mouseover would do the trick. Many of us here had to google why in the **bleep** we cant see any friends anymore. I used to see dozens of people, now I see 6.

[noralta]

Not a happy camper with this change. I do not have a Facebook account and never will. So now how does one reconnect to their friend activity. Seems wrong to me to have to use a third party.

[noralta]

I agree may drop premium.

[Douxie]

I don’t see anyone on my feed because the individuals I follow were never notified about the update. If you’re on mobile, you’re completely in the dark. It’s a shame an update no one asked for nor wanted was implemented when things were fine as they were. 

[dreαmlαnd]

why can’t we go back to a few months ago when the first major update hasn’t occurred. spotify desktop looked how spotify desktop has for many years before and friends activity was on and it showed up real time sharing. 

like if you followed someone new (and they had their sharing on) it would come up straight away. you wouldn’t need to close the app and reopen it to see if what the  new person you followed, was listening to… 

these new updates in the last couple of months have been absolutely shambles… it’s a disgrace that a well owned, well popular, company like spotify WILL NOT listen to THEIR AUDIENCE to HELP MAKE THEIR PLATFORM BETTER

we are trying to help you guys 

[AnaStone]

This is so stupid.

First, I don't even know some people I follow or they're artists. How can I reach them?!

Especially one guy who's really important for me and he's out of reach now. And the only way for me to see if he's okay is watching what he listens to. And now I can't even do this "thanks" to you. 

And this sh*t doesn't work anyway no matter how many times I switched the setting on. If you made this change permanent at least make it work. And notify people after all. I hadn't used desktop version for days to come back to this. I'm mad! Really mad! And I'm sure others feel the same way.