![]() “So we got tons of complaints from users about it not being random. “The problem is that, to humans, truly random does not feel random,” said Mattias Johansson, a Spotify software engineer, during a Q&A on Quora. “If you just heard a song from a particular artist, that doesn’t mean that the next song will be more likely from a different artist in a perfectly random order,” write Spotify on their blog. The phenomenon even has a name – Gambler’s fallacy. For example, we think that if we haven’t won anything on a scratchy in a while, we’ve got a better chance of winning the next time. It’s also programmed to expect something to happen if it hasn’t occurred in a while. ![]() Indeed, the human brain is basically designed to notice coincidences. “It will find patterns where there aren’t any.” “Our brain is an excellent pattern-matching device,” Babar Zafar, a lead developer at Spotify, tells the BBC World Service. Spotify has denied allegations of ‘fixing’ their shuffle option, and the science agrees. “It’s almost unbelievable to me that such a simple process is broken,” another user wrote. ![]() “On my 442 song playlist, the same 30 or 35 tracks play over and over again and the other 400 songs I have barely heard once,” one user wrote on a Spotify forum, via the Daily Mail. In fact, as the BBC reports, Spotify have had to change up their shuffle algorithm to account for our bothersome idea of what random is supposed to sound like, i.e. Well, it turns out the latter may have more to do with our flawed concept of “random” than with services like Spotify. ![]()
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