i made tinder for my playlists

Music has always been a large part of my life. I even attribute a large part of my character growth to my willingness to listen and connect with music I once disliked, and to attend events and make friends through songs I've just discovered.

The problem is, I also have a short attention span. I use Spotify like a caveman. If I like a song, it goes into my liked songs. Any step beyond that feels like largely a chore, and explaining this would likely highlight a core deficiency in my long-term planning due to a craving for short-term dopamine. In theory my workflow tends to be:

1. find a song I like
2. like the song
3. sort the song into a playlist sometime in the future
4. repeat

It's okay, but painful, and I really dislike the process of making sure that songs I actually like and are new go into my playlists. The way I sort songs into playlists is also slightly unique; I hate having lots of different ones, so I have 3-4 main playlists that I sort by vibe, and put all the songs I "feel" like belong in that vibe into the corresponding playlist.

Enter ML

just kidding. you thought I'd build a classifier to automate sorting my songs into playlists, didn't you. No. As I said earlier, I value music a lot, and I want to make the decisions myself. That being said, I wouldn't mind making it easier.

The spotify UI isn't especially conducive to my workflow. To cleanly arrange songs into playlists I care about, the experience leaves a lot to be desired...

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3 nested menus to add one song to a playlist, yuck!

so, what to do?

triage is a solved problem

While deliberating this problem, curled on my clean mattress in my messy room, it occurred to me that the highest-throughput interface ever designed for making yes/no decisions about things you might love already exists, and it's tinder.

A song comes up, and much like its predecessor I can make a split-second decision on what place this song holds in my heart. Of course, the difference being that the songs actually have emotional depth to them.

The problem is, my nostalgia is rather elastic and so is the way I feel about a song. I may have once thought "Good Things Fall Apart" was an energetic song, but I now know why so many people break down crying every time it comes on (I am one of them). I need to periodically review how I still feel about a song, in a non-annoying way. This is where my language-learning background comes in, because I was already very familiar with the answer to this: SRS. By putting all the cards on a schedule that follows a fancy algorithm that spaces out when to prod my thoughts, I can re-categorize songs constantly.

the experience

the ui, nothing crazy

As soon as I get in, the song starts auto-playing and I can take an action:

• swipe right (or →) — keep. commits whatever playlist pills are lit
• swipe left (or ←) — not now. come back later
• D — the nuclear option. removed from liked songs and every playlist it lives in
• space — pause, for when I need to think

it is pretty satisfying. I have made 942 of these decisions so far and I'm not tired of it yet.

anki for songs

if you're a nerd and want to know slightly more about the SRS, there's a "due score" that gets added to depending on the action I take on the card

• never been reviewed: +35
• overdue: +2.8 per day (capped at 35)
• added in the last two weeks: +18
• haven't played it in over a month: up to +25
• every time I've deferred it: +6, every "unsure": +8
• liked but outside any playlist: +12

Then cards are given for me to rank in descending "due score" order, and after each decision, classic SRS scheduling multiplies the intervals by some ease factor:

Songs I keep confirming will drift out to months-long intervals, and songs I keep hesitating on come back sooner so I make up my damn mind. If I keep doing it it just nukes it, and I made sure that it wouldn't tell me about it. A song you've deferred three times is a song I already know the answer about but it pains me to admit it.

the graveyard

Once a song gets removed from my playlist rotation, it does not die. It was still once a part of me, and I'd like it to keep witness. So every year, one playlist is generated. A graveyard playlist, created automatically the first time a song dies that year.

This was a non-negotiable mechanic to me. Deletion always felt wrong, and now if I ever miss something I can resurrect it

And as a side effect, each year I get a time capsule of a person I stopped being.

did it work

yes, now I like doing it

conclusion

it's a single-user app wired to my own account, so you can't have it. this is possibly the worst product pitch ever written, but maybe I can make it public if anyone cares. I'd more like to urge any fellow borderline-hoarders to try something similar of their own: make two piles first, before making four. It should've been obvious to me in retrospect; it's the only way I like doing laundry.

the playlists themselves live over on music, if you would like to judge me. you can also anonymously recommend me a song there if you feel so inclined.

get out there and clean something. or don't, and instead build an elaborate interface that allows you to pretend cleaning is a form of self-expression.