[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. 

[NT88]

@aarongrubb Yeah same here, I won't be giving up on Spotify completely. Being an Artist there are still plenty of opportunites on there. I think playlist creators are just going to have to use the script program to repopulate their descriptions for now.

[edyedy]

How can you actually reach customer services chat? Any link?

[andypolack]

https://support.spotify.com/uk/contact-spotify-support/

Then choose the options and continue to chat I think. 

[NT88]

If you manage to get through to the specialty team on the live-chat and they say it takes longer for them to respond because they are looking into your issue, they are mainly just wasting your time. Keep chatting to them, ask them questions, and tell them more information. They are super polite which makes you want to be polite and patient back but we need to be more direct and assertive.

[Top50Clean]

Ooh, I must have made someone mad. It's been pretty quiet for the last few months on my playlists, but today someone decided to take a crack at me. I got almost 50 reports in half an hour. That's the most in a long time.

Too bad they're messing with the wrong curator. I really hope the culprit is reading this thread. If so: bring it on, chump. You'll lose. I can automate circles around you.

But in all seriousness: Spotify, C'mon. This has been going on long enough. Grab one or two competent programmers and fix this glaring issue.

[michelleblaho]

So ridiculous that this is still an issue. Its so unfair and spotify doesn't want to fix it. This person is just bullying me by reporting my stuff. My mental health is starting to suffer. I don't think any other company lets their users falsely report stuff like Spotify does

[_Descartes_]

Did anyone else get their accounts falsely disabled recently with the accusation of doing paid playlist placements? If so, have you gotten your account back? 

[NT88]

@_Descartes_ Yeah I know of two accounts who were falsely disabled for that reason a few weeks ago. They still haven't got their's back... they were just self-promoting their own music. Spotify are cracking down on fraudulent plays at the moment... but their detection algorithm is heavy handed. But I wouldn't be surprised if its somewhat intentional to stop peoples accounts getting too popular... I have a feeling user generated public playlists will mostly be phased out over the next few years so they can better control who gets heard... turning into a pay to play platform similar to how FB and Insta turned out to be... I hope i'm wrong. 

[_Descartes_]

@NT88 Thanks for sharing! That's a shame. I'm in the same boat - I have a few popular playlists promoting my own music (only my own) and Spotify disabled my account with the accusation of selling playlist placements to other artists.

Interestingly enough, after talking with the escalations team in live chat, they actually confirmed that my case was a manual review and that there wasn't any algorithm involved (which was my first thought). Even though it didn't make any sense, they refused to provide further details. 

Overall it was a very strange experience so I hope they come back to me via email instead. I encourage everyone to not give up asking for some kind of justification or proof if they kick you out based on an untrue statement.

[lovuline]

Hello. I didn't know, there is this huge topic here, so I posted a few months ago my whole experience here, on a similar thread: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Playlists-Being-Falsely-Reported/m-p/5266323/highlight/tru...

But I'll post it here too, so here we go:

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Ok. I can't see this sht anymore.

This is getting more and more crazy.
We just want to create playlists and give other people the possibility to follow the playlists.

Today I was thinking:
"Ok. Spotify is literally giving a fck about their customers. That is (sadly) kinda normal with huge companies. But there MUST BE a way, how we can protect this random/targeted reporting?!"

And I remembered- yes, there is a possible solution: Private playlists.
This playlists will not appear in the search results of spotify- so all this crawler/bot/fame-companies won't reach my/our playlists, if we turn them private! Maybe they won't be also possible to report them!

But guess what? No. Holy ****!
I've just read this spotify post: "[...] Abuse even when Playlist Secret"
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/False-Reporting-Abuse-even-when-Playlist-Secret/td-p/50996...

WHAT in the f-ing **bleep** is this?!!!! EVEN OUR PRIVATE PLAYLISTS can and will be reported?!!!
(*Meditation mode turned on* "OK, boy, just .. come down ... chill ...")

I just lost my f-ing mind. SPOTIFY. Some of us have more than 200 playlists.
For some people this is hundret hours of work! And we can NOT protect them agains funny lol abuse because you are too [insert your word of choice here] to protect this abuse method?!
Guys, remember: If your playlist gets reported, you lose INSTANTLY (!!!) the name, description and the artwork/cover of your playlist. So, if some reta... uh, sry, some not nice person/bot will just4fun report many of your playlists: Good luck and have fun with restoring all your playlist.

WHAT. THE. ****

The ONLY way now (until now, we don't know which funny ideas spotify will get in the future, wth...) is to copy your playlists and make/create them instant private, so bots won't find them in public searches or on your profile and won't be able to report them. What the f...

But that is only a possible solution, if you want to keep the playlists for you- not, if you still want to share them public.

Big, big massive shame on you spotify.

Because, the most insane thing is: People got banned because their playlists had been reported so often. WHAAAT.
Invalid reporting and the users get deleted?!! Are you f-ing serious spotify?!!!!

Proof: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/False-Reporting-Abuse-even-when-Playlist-Secret/m-p/516400...

I feel mentally so crazy and restless now, because- theoretically someone could report all of my playlists.

I've never been that much disappointed of a company like you.

That is so disgusting, that spotify is ignoring this problem for 2 years now. And guess what? Spotify ignores btw. also more bigger problems- yes, lol, really funny 😄 check this out: Spotify still allows stalking of your profiles 😄 hehe, that's really funny, isn't it spotify? 🙂 We are still not able to remove or block followers- wow. Nice.

For more information, here is the big big post about it: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Social-Block-Followers/idc-p/5126727#M211648

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SO. This post was made on september 26th in this your.

NOW I'll tell you what happend until now and why I'm back here at this community board.

I have a nice playlist with ~15k followers. I've put so much effort into it ... and yes.

Because I was mentally completly destroyed about the fact, that SPOTIFY GIVES A FROG about it's customers and it really seems, that they don't want to solve this problem, I took ALL my 250+ playlists offline (right click on spotify desktop, "remove from profile"). Now they didn't appeared in the public search results.

I just stayed like this for ~1 week. Then I thought ... why ... why. I have 120+ followers, who are also following other playlists of me. People, who choose to follow this playlists, because they fit their requirments or idk 🙂

So I sat down, and for god f sake I turned them all again into public playlists. This was at the beginning of october or a little bit later. And now, one week ago, it happened again ... I'll keep this playlist now private and wait. People following this playlist will still be able to listen to it and see it 🙂 that's the only good thing .. so I restored description, picture and playlist name and I'm keeping it not public for maybe one or two more weeks and will then put it back public.

SUMMARY of all experiences made by myself and reading hours of hours of other users is the following:

• Restoring your playlist can sometimes be done for about ~285x - 8000x without any consequences for your spotify account BUT there are ALSO experiences, that spotify profiles got banned  after some playlists reports (All sources / proofs linked, just click on it)
  
• As a result of this knowledge, there are only a few options in my opinion as far as I know:
  • If you want to keep your playlist online/public on any cost:
    • Using one of the user-made scripts, to keep your playlists automatically updated- hundreds of complaints/reports are possible, maybe at some point your account get banned ... + it needs some technical knowledge to setup this script (at your local computer or a small VPS (virtual private server, only a few bucks a month)
    • fighting again the bots by yourself, I created a folder with a .txt file with the name and description in it and the cover picture in this folder and when the playlist got reported, I opened my browser, where I had a bookmark to this targeted playlist --> opened it, quickly restored the playlist details, and moved on ... but probably it'll be reported soon
    • waiting one day or a week and trying to restore it then and hoping, that the bots stopped tracking your playlist
      • and if you want to fight back: check, if there is a similar playlist to yours, with the same cover-art, same description and same songs as your playlist- that happened to me. Then you see, that someone is trying to push "their" playlist, you could also report this playlists for no reason- but remember kids: reporting for fun is most likely fORbiDdEN!!11! 😉 Yes spotify. Sadly, spotify, you allow this almost unlimited for abusers 😞
  • If you are worrying about more, worse attacks against you (for example reporting your profile picture, reporting all your other playlists) and you just want to keep all playlists for yourself:
    • In settings you can changed creation of public playlists by default do "no / deny"
    • for your already existing playlists:
      • remove them from public search results: on the pc --> right click on the playlist or "three dots" --> remove from profile // on the smartphone --> clicking long on playlist or going into the playlist and "three dots" and then also --> remove from profile | BUT: in this case, your playlists are STILL accessible if people saved your playlists as favorite or if someone has your playlist link / URL. What you can do to avoid attackers to still report your already not-public playlist is the following:
        • changing your playlist into private playlist, then nobody except you can see it. This works until now only on smartphones in the app. on the smartphone --> clicking long on playlist or going into the playlist and "three dots" and then "make playlist private"

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Wow. Long post, but hopefully it'll help someone 😕

Meanwhile I'm just restoring and taking down (making not-public) the playlist, which got reported. I wait one or two weeks and hope, the attackers won't track it that long and then making it public again

And always, always hoping spotify will for god f* sake changing their reporting system.

But it is (sadly) like with everything in life: If your problem belongs to a minority, then almost nobody will care about it. Especially if the responsible people are not affected by the problem.