[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. 

[Marlon1996]

[PLAYTIFY]

[Marlon1996]

This idea needs to get more recognition!

[Marlon1996]

What are the titles of your playlists? Do they begin with the word "Best"?

[Nanio]

If each of us convinces 10 friends/followers to vote on this idea, we should have enough to get to 500 and at least get an official reply from Spotify.

Who is in?

I've already gathered over 40 votes and I'm committing another 10 by the end of the week.

[PLAYTIFY]

Spotify knows this issue exists and they mailed me a few times that developers are working on making it bot and spam proof. It's not a feature, is a must for the Spotify platform. 

[PLAYTIFY]

Yes marlon.

[_Descartes_]

Upvoted. It's very disappointing that Spotify isn't doing anything to fix this problem that has existed for such a long time. I'm sorry to hear that all of you experience this problem. 

I have also fallen victim to these automatic bot reports. I therefore recently implemented an automatic solution that kind of works, but not completely.

1) I essentially run a cron job (automatically running code) every 2 minutes to check if I have received an email from Spotify with a playlist notice.

2) when an email is received, I parse the email to find the Spotify ID for the playlist in question.

3) I then use the Spotify API to automatically re-add the title and description for the playlist (I have the metadata saved in a dictionary). Although it's  possible with the API, I have not yet figured out how to properly send the base64 image via the API to get the cover art automatically added back. 

4) the last step is to automatically reply to Spotify with an appeal. I also include the number of times I have received a report the last 24 hours, week and month in the email, just to show how ridiculous this is. 

Unfortunately my solution is very specific to my setup (email system, cloud provider etc), but I just wanted to jump in and let you know that IT IS possible to make a bot to counter this abuse. 

I'd be happy to try to help if you have any questions about this, but it does require some programming experience in order to properly work and you need a server/service that can run code on a regular interval... 

I will provide an update in a couple of days on how things are going. I have sent automatic appeals 40 times today (often in 15-30 minute intervals). The bots seem to have stopped for some time now, but I guess it will start again soon. 

[Nanio]

@_Descartes_ You're amazing! Would it be possible for you to post your code and setup somewhere for others to use?

[PLAYTIFY]

Unbelievable. Spotify just deleted this idea because someone posted a bypass! Maybe fix it instead of silence us @Spotify???