Cultural and product focuses that emphasized engagement quantity rather than engagement quality.

Comments would be littered with things like "hey, great, check out my stuff!"

That type of shallow "like for like" culture is absolutely cancerous for what was previously a very maker-heavy audience.

> Comments would be littered with things like "hey, great, check out my stuff!"

> That type of shallow "like for like" culture is absolutely cancerous for what was previously a very maker-heavy audience.

Man, I've been in there since day one practically and it was always like that, as has been every service of that kind I've ever used (hands up anyone who ever maintained an MP3.com playlist). Music runs on shameless self promotion. Players gonna play. Etc.

Ideally, promoters would always be trusted experts. Question is: How do those experts, without engaging other promoters, discover potential tracks for promotion?

The slush pile or spending an ungodly amount of time in low end venues.

What would be your solution to this?

The amount of music in my feed and the trouble of curating it all. I found new songs I loved every day, but being a programmer, and having to switch to the SC browser window/tab to hit shift-right-arrow to skip a song, or space to pause it, became too troublesome.

I eventually switched to Spotify, since I could have global keyboard shortcuts for the app. If SoundCloud had a desktop app I would use that instead of Spotify in a heartbeat (assuming I could play my own music as well).

http://www.streamkeys.com is a chrome extension that gives global hotkeys for many streaming media sites (including SC).

I wish there was a firefox port.

I use this desktop app, opensource and cross platform, constantly

https://github.com/Soundnode/soundnode-app

I was aware of that, but if a company fails to understand it's users' needs, I don't have much faith in them, so I just move on to something else.

Not to mention that the limitation in the API usage made the soundnode app useless, as it hits the API limit in a few hours of use.

They are failing not to provide an alternative and to prevent you from using an alternative.

Is the API dependent on popularity of songs you listen to? Because I find I dont hit limit until a whole day of use (4 to 6 hours) but guessing this could be because I don't have much popular music in my queue. I ask because I notice that now they introduced advertisements but these also only come up on songs with over 60k plays