Remove Star Ratings

[danirabbit]

Star ratings are dumb

[cassidyjames]

★★★☆☆

[cassidyjames]

@danrabbit do we want to replace with 👍/👎 or naw?

[danirabbit]

I mean, is there really a point to :-1: a song in your own library? :p

[cassidyjames]

@danrabbit possibly no, but I do have a lot of full albums in my library with a few songs I don't like. But I'm not going to delete the song, because then the album would just be seemingly missing tracks. 😛

[cassidyjames]

And a 👎 would let us know not to play this track in like a radio setting, but it's still there if the user plays the album or track specifically.

[ghost]

What about a heart button?

[danirabbit]

Ah yeah. A heart would probably be a good compromise

[Nine-H]

I dunno, if you only want singles in shuffle that's a use case that's covered far more elegantly by making a playlist. thumb up/down is usually a social feature and we don't have a social backend.

I like the idea of favourites, because it's just a boolean field in the table, it doesn't have the user fatigue of individually rating or thumbing up or down, it doesn't mix user sentiment with an otherwise basic feature like shuffle, and lets us keep cool things like a faves smart playlist or add them like exposing a keybind to fave the playing track without opening the player.

[danirabbit]

Alrighty, so after some discussion on Slack here's some thoughts:

We do want some way to rate a song as :-1: or :fast_forward: because of the case where you have like a skit or an intro in an album and you don't want to delete the song, but you also don't want it play in shuffle.

There's some thoughts around the usefulness of :+1: / :heart: because we might be able to know which songs are your favorites more accurately than you do based on things like play count or how often you add them to a playlist. But it does sound like some people want the ability to mark their favorites explicitly.

So it sounds like the current stance is that 5 stars plus unrated is overkill and it's unclear what it means. But we do want to have 3 states: positive, neutral, and negative.

There's some discussion about using :fast_forward: instead of :-1: because it seems more explicit about the implication of what the rating means: We're going to skip these songs in shuffle. But on the other hand :-1: is more of a flexible metaphor when you're making smart playlists, but it will require some extra explanation to make sure it's clear what it implies.

[cassidyjames]

I definitely agree on having three states, and love the concept of skipping negatively-marked songs in autoplaylists and shuffle.

Regarding which metaphor to use, I can see either one but I'm leaning toward ❤️/⏩ (heart/skip). Hearting a song is a very clear "I really love this song" signal. And skip does a better job at signaling the implications of the negative rating. I do think thumb up/down could still work, but I think this is clearer.

[jhit]

I like the :star: icon to flag outstanding things like it was done in Picasa. This follows the logic of "Music show me my starred tracks" and it is more neutral than the :heart: icon. There might be different reasons why people flag tracks it may not always be Love :smile: