As a vinyl record dealer, I'm infinitely curious about the music discovery process. I suspect there are lots of other folks out there who want to just browse for music without the spectre of their past listening informing what they are able to browse. Does Spotify really not have a "private" mode?

As a Spotify user, I get the sense that there's less interest these days in refining the music discovery experience at Spotify. Hopefully someone can prove me wrong. The only feature I've used in recent years has been the "Blend" feature where I can combine my most-listened-to songs with a friend's.

I think Spotify sees their "power users" as people who getting the most out of their platform, but probably only provide a small chunk of their music spending on Spotify in particular. It seems that they want to make their money chasing the common denominator, as well as content that can have ads baked in easily (i.e. podcasts).

I think you can empathize with my frustration as a user here—the largest music streaming service with the largest catalog has seemingly made music discovery a secondary priority. That being said, there's more than just their own recommender system that you can use for discovering new music on Spotify:

- "Track IDs" Playlists are usually pretty good. It's the closest thing you'll get to some the fruits of some good crate digging by someone who really knows their stuff.

- The Playlist search feature is a killer app.

- Some record labels are actually listed as artists on Spotify, making it easier to search through their releases.

The core of Spotify's recommendation system is collaborative filtering[1], which means popular stuff often gets filtered to the top. When a breakout artist from a niche genre gets signed to a large label, I often have issues with the artist radio, because now most of that artist's audience isn't coming from the scene that shaped them.

1: https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/recommendatio...

I love Robert's Rules of Order! I'd love to see someone build video meeting software that implemented it somehow. Or does that exist? A brief search was fruitless.

The last copy I owned had a great introductory essay, describing the principles a rule of order could help realize: e.g. 1) to focus on potential concrete actions rather than some interminable search for agreement on beliefs; 2) to allow even minority/fringe opinions to get some hearing

That's a great idea.

for what it's worth "The only good fascist is a very dead fascist" is the title of a song by Propagandhi

I read this as "NHL partners with GoPro to deliver fans' unique perspectives of the game" and thought that would be very boring.