Keeping this thread alive. I don't understand why this feature was removed. We lost the ability to see our Playlist followers, now we lose this. Honestly one day I fully expect to load the app up and see the "Friend Activity" window completely removed from the app at this point (not to give Spotify any ideas - I'm sure someone will run straight to the board room with that one and get a high five). Why even allow us to have Friends at all if there is no functionality associated with them left? Clearly, Spotify only wants you to receive music recommendations from their algorithms. They have no interest in social features from what I can see.
In my experience their algorithms helped me get a few good recommendations early on, but since then they've been beating a dead horse with stuff I already know. Since then I'm back to recommendations from friends and online publications. I miss the days of Soulseek (which compared to Spotify was much less "feature rich) when you could just chat with people and view what albums they had in their archive. Find someone with similar tastes, see what else they're into. It remains one of the best ways to find new music, requires no algorithm programming, and is still consistely more effective. But nah, let's over-design our application to do a bunch of stuff the users didn't ask for and doesn't even work better.
Look, I know I'm "butthurt" over the loss of these features and looking to vent about it. But the decisions completely blow my mind. I applaud Spotify for being innovative with its algorithms and recommendations. Some of them are pretty cool. But I don't know why they had to turn their back on older, reliable features. People like these social features, and someone else will do them better than Spotify. In fact, if someone creates a product as robust as Spotify but completely nails the Social side of things, it might make Spotify less relevant because it's just a bunch of lonely algorithms. So please reconsider not only the rollback of these social features, but expanding them and making them more robust. It will breathe life into this app.
