Disclaimer: I am an SRE at Google, opinions are my own.
There's an excellent talk by Google VP of SRE Ben Treynor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF9NoqYBb4U. tl;dw: try to measure actual user experience, and make sure that even the long tile of customer still gets a good product experience. What "good product experience" means depends, on your product.
The rest of the error budget is for you to spend on releasing new features, changing the underlying architecture, etc.
My discover weekly playlist ALWAYS contains at least one song in Portoguese and at least two in German. I speak neither of those languages, and I've never willingly searched and played songs in those languages (except for "99 Luftballons" once).
I also get some terrible variation of "Here comes the sun" at least once a month despite not listening to The Beatles at all. [0] is the one that I hate the most.
Spotify, please sthap. I can't take any more Portoguese, German, and "Here comes the sun" cover songs.
You may have had an auth token compromised.
I used a dodgy third party Spotify Connect for Raspberry Pi library and had the same issue. Changing my password and expiring all current auth tokens returned my Discover Weekly back to normal after a month
So is there some library author out there, stealing people's auth tokens and playing German and Portuguese songs on our accounts, cackling to herself with glee, and waiting until we discover (today might be the day!) her utterly-harmless mischief?
As much as I love the notion, I have to conclude that Discover Weekly's mediocrity is just another piece of evidence that the world actually did end in 2012, and ever since, we've been living in a simulation. A simulation where the level of petty annoyance is carefully adjusted to a maximum, remaining ever so slightly within the bounds of believability. (In November 2016, someone spilled coffee on the controls.)
Also explains why Swiftkey (keyboard app) stopped working around that time. They say it's their new deep learning framework that provides superior feedback, I find it pretty useless compared to the old version.
I once played a Mulatu Astatke album on a friend's Spotify account during a social gathering at his house, and he complained his discover weekly playlist was mostly African music for the next couple of months.
The discover weekly algorithm seems to latch on to outliers, I guess.
I have this feature on my Android. The thumbs up and down appear to the left and right of the big Play button on the Now Playing screen, only while you're listening to Spotify playlist/album radio.
Disclaimer: I'm an SRE at Google, my opinions are my own.
We actually release a decent amount of information, see [0]. I particularly recommend "Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google's Datacenter Network" [1].
