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Changes to Friend Activity

Changes to Friend Activity

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.

 

Hubo_0-1638967951767.png

 

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.

HuboSpotify Star
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this is all bull****!!! completely lost all friends activity

Hey Hubo,

First of all the issue of the friends activity not working at all has not been resolved, nor a timeline on when this will or wont be fixed.
Secondly, listening activity is not personal data as music cannot identify the data subject. The profile name can however identify the data subject. If data protection is all of a sudden becoming a thing at Spotify (well done on waiting 3 years to implement DPA by the way), then by default all user accounts would be hidden and an opt-in would be requested to make your profile public. This would subsequently be the end of any social aspect with Spotify. The only logical reason I can see why this has been implemented is due to someone being bullied/name calling for playing a song and has moaned to Spotify because the bullied individual forgot the turn on Private Listening or didn't toggle off the Sharing Activity. Realistically no actual harm can be done by sharing what music you are listening to.

During the pandemic and in times of isolation, it has been vital to know what friends are listening to, in order to gauge their mindset as well as identifying new tunes. With the likelihood of further lockdowns coming in, Spotify has picked the ideal time to break this function. Well Done Again Spotify!

Spotify make so many uneccessary changes, especially over the past 18 months. It is almost out of boredom or trying to satisfy every Gen-Z's whims and the testing of said changes is basically down to the customers. Who eventually vent their frustrations to no avail.

wow so congrats the feature is definitely broken. I had one friend left and now, despite the fact that we both share our friend activity I see the message to adjust my settings. I'll contact a CC rep, but I'm pretty sure this was Spotify's goal from the beginning: getting rid of the feature entirely.

Hey @Jack_Dillinger, thanks for your post.

 

First of all the issue of the friends activity not working at all has not been resolved, nor a timeline on when this will or wont be fixed.

Could you tell me which issue you're referring to exactly? I'll do some digging on that.

 

Secondly, listening activity is not personal data as music cannot identify the data subject. The profile name can however identify the data subject. If data protection is all of a sudden becoming a thing at Spotify (well done on waiting 3 years to implement DPA by the way), then by default all user accounts would be hidden and an opt-in would be requested to make your profile public. This would subsequently be the end of any social aspect with Spotify. The only logical reason I can see why this has been implemented is due to someone being bullied/name calling for playing a song and has moaned to Spotify because the bullied individual forgot the turn on Private Listening or didn't toggle off the Sharing Activity. Realistically no actual harm can be done by sharing what music you are listening to.

Personally I think music is something personal; which I would explicitly choose for to share. We might have different ideas about that.

 

As I've mentioned before, some people might not be comfortable sharing what they're listening to and might not have been aware they were sharing their music. People who actively would like to share with their followers, can enable it from the settings in the desktop/mobile app.

 

During the pandemic and in times of isolation, it has been vital to know what friends are listening to, in order to gauge their mindset as well as identifying new tunes. With the likelihood of further lockdowns coming in, Spotify has picked the ideal time to break this function. Well Done Again Spotify!

In that case, I really recommend reaching out to your friends and ask them to share their activity with the steps shared in the main post. They can choose to share their activity on Spotify with their followers, if they'd like to!

 


Spotify make so many uneccessary changes, especially over the past 18 months. It is almost out of boredom or trying to satisfy every Gen-Z's whims and the testing of said changes is basically down to the customers. Who eventually vent their frustrations to no avail.

I get that you're frustrated about these changes and you definitely are in the right place to share your frustrations and comments about this, but these changes are not going to be reverted.

 

I'll be happy to answer any questions you have about this feature or how it works, but I'd like to stop the discussion about this as I don't think we'll agree on this topic. 

 

Hope you'll have happy holidays!

Hubo

HuboSpotify Star
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If Spotify thinks user's privacy is such a great concern then they should be toggling the privacy setting to block cookies to be enabled by default, but they don't.

Yes music is personal, but so are people's settings. And sharing should definitely be a personal choice, but how about letting people know they have the choice and telling them about the setting, and please do not tell us all to tell out friends, that is not an adequate or large scale solution. You are just repeating the same corporate memo from weeks ago ignoring about 60+ different users each coming forward with more complaints and bug issues, and there are thousands more complaining on social media. Spotify really kicked a hornet's nest with this one.

The bugs everyone is complaining about are because the developers blatantly did very little testing or work on this update and users aren't satisfied with activity sharing taking hours to work after being enabled when Spotify is in instantaneous music streaming app. Along with user's friends now disappearing off their feed for no reason which I can only imagine is a combination of a bug and them reducing the last activity timer that keeps you on the feed from 7 days to 1.

Honestly it's just sad because it's becoming increasingly obvious Spotify is trying to phase out this feature by giving it updates that reduce its capabilities and not actually putting work into it to fix the issues. Seriously, how often do feature update forums get this much negative attention, with support being swarmed by requests and those staff don't even know what's going on based on some of the replies in this forum.

In 6 months time I wouldn't be surprised to see this feature removed with the excuse being "well nobody renabled the feature (they didn't know got disabled) so that means we can scrap it"

Dear Hubo,

this feature no longer works AT ALL. You all asking "which issue" is quite frankly ridiculous: we already told you extensively in this discussions and many many others all over Twitter and Reddit that this feature is broken. Re-enabling sharing activity DOES NOT work. No matter the toggling, no matter how many times we contact CC to fix it. It doesn't work anymore. Is that clear? Can we stop pretending we have to ask our friends to toggle to make it work?

Hey @GeeBzz,

Hmm, I'm not seeing this issue on my end. I can see that the issue regarding an empty Friend Activity - only showing "Connect with Facebook" should be fixed. Could you make sure you're on the latest version of the Spotify app?

If that didn't help, another Community user shared these steps:
"im reposting my answer from a few weeks ago where I had the same issue, to solve it all I did was follow an account which had recent listening activity then the facebook pop-up disappeared and the friends tab reappeared again. unfollowing them and closing the app seems to still have the friends tab back instead of the facebook one."

Could you give those a shot? Let me know how you get on!

Happy holidays,
Hubo
HuboSpotify Star
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this sucks. can we just go back to normal now and have the friends activity switched back on to normal …. 

 

they’ve just created a massive problem for nothing… it makes no sense !!!!

you had a perfectly running smooth operation and you “take away” one feature (the best feature. the worthwhile feature. the useful feature. the feature that wasn’t hurting anybody, really) and ruined the whole thing 

Surely the developers can understand this is a ridiculous solution, right? Asking every single one of our "friends" to change a silly Spotify setting? Was the default setting changed due to liability/privacy reasons? I haven't seen a proper explanation as to why this setting was changed, but it's the only explanation that makes sense in my mind.

The social aspect of Spotify is a large reason why I pay for a premium subscription. But I get Apple Music free from my phone provider, so I really don't see a reason why I shouldn't make the change. I'm really disappointed in this update

There has not even been a post about this on the official Spotify page on Instagram or Facebook. spreading the word on those platforms would be much more useful than sending emails.

what would it take for spotify to revert this? surely they’ll have seen by now how stupid and ridiculous this update is and how many issues it has caused for all of us… 

Hubo,

enough with nonsense. I don't have a problem with Facebook so your suggestion has nothing to do with my (our) issue.

After two days of back and forth with CC reps, this is the verdict: the feature is broken and they couldn't fix it.

I attached their final reply.

I suggest to everyone having the same issue (and I've read hundreds) to post about their experience cause apparently we are not believed.

 

 

 

spotify cres.png

@Hubo

I just received another in-app alert notifying and advertising upgrading to Duo Premium on Spotify Mobile. That's 2 in the last month so PLEASE explain why Spotify has not used the same feature to tell users to check their personal settings. Not even to single out the sharing toggle but just their settings in general. This isn't an email or a push notification so people's notifications settings won't be ignored and it would satisfy your and 99% of people in this forums belief that everyone should be informed and make a choice about the toggle.

I totally agree with you

I totally disagree with you: I cannot accept that to see friends activities I should log in Facebook. I don't like at all Facebook and when I subscribed to Spotify there was not any connection with it.

You said that the change cannot be reverse: most probably I will be forced to give up my Spotify subscription to move to another platform (there are hundreds equivalent in the Net)

Totally agree with you

Hey TMachado20 I am using a Mac and have exactly the same on my friend activity. Have you solved your problem as I cannot fix mine. I have everything enabled and also uninstalled and reinstalled the app! So frustrating. If anyone has answers I would love your help!! 🙂

Hi Mrhsfan,

 

I have exactly the same problem. I haven't been able to fix it yet so if you have managed to fix i would love to know why I cant see my friend activity??!! Cheers 🙂

i want the people at spotify to tell me straight up WHY they have done this. and i don’t want to hear that it was a “privacy” thing.. i don’t believe that bulls*** for even a second!!! 

 

if that was such a case - this friends sharing tool thing wouldn’t have been implemented when they first brought the app out. i refuse to believe that it’s taken them OVER TEN YEARS to realise this “privacy” concern…

 

it’s not a privacy or personal thing. it’s just music. it’s not personal information about someone’s life. if it was, you wouldn’t have allowed it in the first place. and you wouldn’t have allowed users to follow other users, which is the ONLY WAY you know what someone is listening to… 

 

I FAIL TO SEE WHY THIS CHANGE IS NOT BEING REVERTED.!!!! 

i am disappointed and disgusted and annoyed with how they have done this. 

 

no longer is spotify the “superior” app. 

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