Last.fm is not handling the feedback well, IMHO

Always fun to stop by and visit the thread each weekend. I see this thread continues because the issues it raised are still active, unhappy customers keep adding their feedback nearly every day, and these issues remain unaddressed by Last.fm. Oh, yes, I know, they gave the metalheads back their "paint it black" feature. And I know, that is supposed to appease us all in some way; but like the "adding the inbox link" if they hadn't taken that away in the new layout, they wouldn't have had to return it! They did fix the shoutbox bug, I grant them that, but again they wouldn't have had to fix it if they hadn't broken it. So basically, after six weeks, all they have done is make at most a half dozen minor fixes to correct blatant mistakes they introduced into the new site!

But, as enlil correctly points out (who oddly and hypocritical suggests I should not post in this thread; hint: if you really don't care, then don't reply, no one forces you to come here, read the posts and reply) this thread was about "last.fm staff reactions to feedback." That was one of the purposes of the original post. Everything I said in the original post is still true on the poor quantity and quality of response to feedback. One thing I think some misunderstand - the feedback I and others are referring to is not just the angry reaction over the rollout (which you have to admit was poorly handled aside from any issues of whether the new site is good or bad) but also that the feedback during beta testing was ignored. The reason some customers were so angry was they said: "this, this, and that sucks" in beta testing, they were told their feedback mattered, then and they saw those same bad features sucking in the rollout.

The other issue the original post raised was comparing the functionality of the old and new sites. Certain people want to always change the subject away from the functionality issue and send up a smoke screen about how customers are just complaining about the appearance of the new site. Well, yes a lot of people don't like the way the new site looks (BTW - the dismissive response from last.fm to that feedback has been part of the problem) but that is not the only issue. the bigger issue is the functionality! Post after post is made about the functionality and the feedback is "stop whining about how it looks." As I said in the original post (you should actually read it some time):

The problem with the new site design is far more than just not being able to like a new layout immediately. Anyone who says that all it is quite frankly is being insulting and a little ignorant and/or arrogant. The problem is the functionality of the new site design is horrible. See my Google analogy above. The new design makes Last.fm irrelevant for the majority of Last.fm users and their major use for Last.fm - to easily discover new music. The reality is that the vast majority of people will not suffer much inconvenience trying to get to where they want to go on a Web site (That's Web Design 101). People will just go to a different site.
People are leaving by the way, and I am NOT referring only to Alexa as evidence of that ;)

On the functionality, I just went to my "Recommendations" to partially demonstrate my point. Still no user recommendations - that functionality was taken away by Last.fm. Only Last.fm's bizarre "Recommendations." Of the first 15 supposedly most relevant "Recommendations" six artists were already in my Library and the other nine were not even remotely related to any of my artists. Just because your code says an artist is related doesn't mean it is. Real humans did a much better job of recommending music than Last.fm's new code.That is the real difference between the old and new Last.fm, as I have been long saying - human versus corporate machine.

Douglas

P.S. - I love the response someone made to my calling the moderator's bluff that he found ONE person who liked the new site. The response was: "yeah, well only $13k people joined a group hating the new site." How silly of me not to realize that one is larger than 13,000 (actually 14,000). :: snark :: LOL.

P.P.S. - I keep reading allusions made that I founded the "Bring back the old Last.fm" group. That is very flattering that you think I recruited 14,044 customers to form one of the largest groups on Last.fm, but please give Jedi_Amara who founded it all of the credit. :)

LordDANEgerous said:
perhaps not YOU bu i have found many non music related shouts where as in the old one i had found... almost none. and most tha did not apperar to where inside jokes that had to do with music. no longer.
You obviously didn't visit my (friends') shoutbox(es) very often. ;) It's just the "it's new, it's noticed" syndrome. Like when you buy a new car suddenly you see that model everywhere. I really doubt there's that much of a difference in the way people use the shout box (except folks might actually use it less since its visibility has been reduced) and really, does it matter? What does it hurt you that other folks are communicating in whatever way that pleases them (provided it's not trolling, spam, etc.)? Someone asked you why one shout was more valid than the other. Do you really want to limit everyone to post "music-related" shouts only? Again, silly.

LordDANEgerous said:
perhaps not YOU bu i have found many non music related shouts where as in the old one i had found... almost none. and most tha did not apperar to where inside jokes that had to do with music. no longer.
What's your point? It's a shoutbox. Not a music-related-communication-only-box. If I want to recommend a band or ask about a new album in somebody's shoutbox I'll do so, but if I want to ask them how they like their new job I'll also do so. Can you come up with any good reason I shouldn't? How does it affect you in the slightest what sort of things other people say in other people's shoutboxes anyway?

The problem with the new site design is far more than just not being able to like a new layout immediately. Anyone who says that all it is quite frankly is being insulting and a little ignorant and/or arrogant. The problem is the functionality of the new site design is horrible. See my Google analogy above. The new design makes Last.fm irrelevant for the majority of Last.fm users and their major use for Last.fm - to easily discover new music. The reality is that the vast majority of people will not suffer much inconvenience trying to get to where they want to go on a Web site (That's Web Design 101). People will just go to a different site.
People are leaving by the way, and I am NOT referring only to Alexa as evidence of that ;)
True, some people are leaving the site or using it less. Other people are joining the site, or using it more. There's really no way of knowing which of those is a bigger group. Would you be so kind as to point us to the other (non-Alexa) evidence you're using for this?

On the functionality, I just went to my "Recommendations" to partially demonstrate my point. Still no user recommendations - that functionality was taken away by Last.fm. Only Last.fm's bizarre "Recommendations." Of the first 15 supposedly most relevant "Recommendations" six artists were already in my Library and the other nine were not even remotely related to any of my artists. Just because your code says an artist is related doesn't mean it is. Real humans did a much better job of recommending music than Last.fm's new code.That is the real difference between the old and new Last.fm, as I have been long saying - human versus corporate machine. Well, that's a very different experience than I'm getting. My recommendations on the old site were rubbish, just a load of bands (The Cribs, The Kooks, etc.) I already knew and already disliked, but who sound a little bit like bands I listened to two years ago. Now my recommendations are great. None of them are in my library already, and they're all very relevant to what I'm listening to now (even to the extent that if I spend just a day listening to a lot of post-rock, all the post-rock bands in there will jump up to the top of the list). I won't claim I've listened to anywhere near all of my recommended artists, but those I have tried have all been good recommendations.

I already said I visit the site more often.
Same here...

He just loved the site. Just like I did, and I'm sure all the people in those anti-groups did. We all have our personal reasons and together we come to the conclusion that the new layout is a epic failure.

The huge images, senselessly scattered content, endless scrolling to basic stuff which was just THERE and fine before, bla bla bla. Enough has been said.
I personally think last.fm reached 0 of the goals they had with the new site.
You just ended up, messing-up peoples favorite place.

I find nothing epically failing about the site - its not an epic success either as a remake, but its an improvement in many respects over the old in looks, functionality, informativeness and layout. And its even faster to load, despite the redundantly large artist images in the library, so I am not even complaining about that.

The hyperbole used by people is quite fascinating - the site does nearly all the same old things it ever did, and added a few new tricks, yet this is deemed epic failure by some, destroyed functionality by others, and many other over the top statements. In actuality last.fm underwent an OK remake - hardly inspired as a design, but certainly not an epic failure. It continues to work well in its basic function to supply musical charts (in fact it works better than before), its still not totally coherent in its information flow, and its a bit more spread out than before. Epic failure? A mild disappointment that it wasn't a better remake possibly, but that's about it.

iglbebe said:
You just ended up, messing-up peoples favorite place.

Please change that into:

You just ended up, messing-up some peoples favorite place

stuartsjm said:
After more than a week there have only been 12 people feedback / contribute to the discussion in the Playground Forum, and a handful of relevant comments on the blog post. (Only 1 person has posted about the similar groups item)

But there's also only 105 members in the group; I had no idea it even existed! I'm in now though :)

WorldFusionRadio_com said:
Still no user recommendations - that functionality was taken away by Last.fm.
We never took away user recommendations, they just show up in the inbox now.

Here's a screenshot of the inbox overview with a few different recs in it (album/track/event):


And here's a view of an open recommendation message:


If this isn't working for you, please let us know.
--jonty

http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/434341/44#f7223013

I won't quote all of WFR's latest post, that link will do.

I was expecting something completely twisted so I saved it for later, I like a laugh from time to time...

Actually, there's not that much that's twisted there. A few skewiff comments that everyone else has already picked up on, but by and large, not a bad post.

On the point iglbebe made that he (WFR?) loved the site as it was, I think that's key. That's where all the emotion is coming from. I understand Last.fm had to improve its service and what we have right now is a work-in-progress. It's a gargantuan task and we're still pretty much at the beginning. As I said all along, the site won't be ready before Christmas at the earliest.

On user recommendations - I really miss how it was set up before, especially being able to play User Reco Radio. But, I have to say, I'm not getting any spammy recos from total strangers like I used to. Tell a lie, I think I got one. It's no consolation though, it was easy to delete recos in the old system. And I did. User Recos in PMs is daft.

On Last.fm listening to user feedback - I'm quite confused about this. I know they do. I know they have systems set up so all new threads are read and passed on to the relevant teams. I know they're working on improving comms both with users and in-house. But as WFR says, it's quite strange that some feedback hasn't been responded to since beta-testing days. It's the not knowing that's frustrating. On the other hand, it could be that Last.fm haven't worked out new solutions themselves yet. Unless I missed the posts where they responded.

The point about functionality is very important. It's true, people have confused it with how the site looks. I don't really care all that much about how the site looks (apart from making shouts and journals more visible), but I do care about how the site WORKS. That's what functionality means. I've had to wait and wait to do the things I used to do in the old site. And today tagging is up the spout so I'm waiting again. I think we've got a bad release, on top of last week's bad release. Great.

I'm not sure people are leaving. I have noticed people are spending less time here. But then again, to be fair, it's summer, we've had the Olympics and other events, people have other stuff going on in their lives, the summer trough is normal.

I didn't agree with the sarcastic asides in WFR's post. Just thought I'd say.

stuartsjm said:
The thing which I have trouble understanding is that this thread is about whether Last.fm listen to feedback, and there are all these people suggesting that they don't, yet when they are actually specifically asked for feedback the response isn't that great.

For example on a recent blog post about the new Neighbours service the following was stated:
Well, if they're asking for feedback on a medium not everyone reads, I wouldn't expect a lot. I don't read the blog myself. I forget it's there. Mostly because the link for it is smack at the bottom of the page. I believe the few times I have read any last.fm blog articles, it's been because they've been linked to by staff in my dashboard or by others here on the forums. It's just not that prominent. I'm not much of a blog reader anyway so the whole feed thing hasn't even occurred to me.

That's a back-handed workaround. We never had to do that with the old recommendation system. User recs simply played when you tuned into to recommendation radio. Besides, it would be a long time before I'd ever actually get to listen to user recs if I used the tagging/playlist method. There are requirements for both in the number of tracks one must have before it will play.

WorldFusionRadio_com said:
Real humans did a much better job of recommending music than Last.fm's new code.
well said. i mean, i was being recommended carla bruni recently. aaaaaaaaarrrghhh!

i really had hope in the beginning, about changes being made, and about last.fm handling the feedback better with time. but i guess i was being naive ...