[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. 

[OnesZeros]

furlan_tv

If it's truly a bot system (which really looks more and more like it is), then 20 hours of listened music is unlikely going to stop it. If one can construct a bot to report playlists non-stop, what stops such a programmer from designing a bot to stream music non-stop for 20 hours and THEN keep on reporting competitive playlists?

I'm afraid this solution won't have an impact at all. If Spotify decides to go this way, we will be shouting again quite soon that the problem is not solved.

In all seriousness, it looks like the only real solution here is to "vet" playlist covers/descriptions after they get reported once - before they are reinstated again. Vetted playlists shouldn't be "reportable", just as all those Spotify editorial and Filtr/Digster/Topsify playlists (I believe Sony/Universal/Warner playlists are never taken down, even if the menu option "report" is seemingly functional).

Unfortunately, this "vetted playlists" solution does require additional budget/human resources. Therefore, it's unlikely Spotify will go forward with this unless user experience on the platform really becomes a major widespread issue. And it will come to this of course, it's just a matter of time. But that means playlisters will keep on suffering for a while in the meantime...

[furlan_tv]

Yeah, if we could verify an account would be really great, or even, taking down a playlist after 50 reports, because bringing down a whole playlist with just ONE report is the dumbest thing i’ve ever seen ngl. 

And the fact that i KNOW who is reporting my playlist and Spotify won’t do anything to him because his bots are using another account and not his main gets me sick…

I’m just wondering how is taking so long to get fixed? It’s just a simple fix that can be implemented in just a week of research but they choose not to fix it… I just don’t get it. I’ve seen people submit report files about this problem since 2017, it’s stupid how this is still going

[STP444]

Yeah some good points made here. Maybe phone number verification would help... or adding a multiple captcha system... But at the end of the day I'm sure Spotify could run an algorithm and locate all the accounts that make hundreds of reports a day. They could send them a warning email saying that their account will be suspended/terminated if they don't provide a reasonable excuse for all the reporting...

[furlan_tv]

@OnesZeros

That would be great to have implemented, or just make it something simple at least like the account can report that playlist for once and never again, i think this would be a great start at least.

[furlan_tv]

@STP444

We have gathered many ways of countering this just on this page, if Spotify really wants to fix it they can do it very easily, but i’m afraid they won’t fix it soon…

[_40998nld-y5r]

My playlist has been reported 300 times in the last 3 hours. This is ridiculous.

[PhxnkLxrd]

I've been a target of spam reports, just like many others from the phonk community.

The fals reporting started months ago but the highest was a few weeks ago. It got so Crazy that when I added the edited content back in it sometimes didn't even take 60 seconds for it to be reported again. I was trying to fight it when it first started and I literally got 60+ reports in one day. There can't be a way that something so obvious and obnoxious can't be noticed by staff.

And as a Playlist creator this spam reporting basically let my Playlist die, now I have nearly no growth, inactive listeners and a bad ranking to get traffic on it again.

Some members of my community have a high suspicion of who it maybe have been. A Playlist just came out of nowhere and got to the time of me writing this 38.5k followers and its the only Playlist that isn't getting actively reported... Very sus.

But the worst thing about all is that staff just won't reply to anything, I probably wrote 30 emails and did I get a answer... no.

There needs to be a system to counter spam fals reporting and a change to the community guidelines that will prevent further exploitation of this spam reporting.

[STP444]

Yep the reporting has been insane the last few weeks... the only thing I can think of is to keep commenting and retweeting this tweet for now... click here

[_40998nld-y5r]

3,377 reports in the last 24 hours. This issue has been reported for far too long with no fix. This DEMANDS a solution.

[Marlon1996]

Spotifys customer service is disappointing! My playlist gets reported every 30 sec.