Michael G. O’Connell ☠️ 🖤

Let’s be clear. Chuck Schumer gave Haley Stevens $10m because of her devout love for Israel. He gave Angie Nixon zero because of her opposition to genocide. Haley lost to Abdul (twice!) Angie lost by 238k votes. His selfish, incompetent and treacherous actions cost us a Senate seat.

A man paid Spotify $1,400 over 10 years. He listened to the same 60 songs. Not "mostly" the same. The same. The same playlist he built in 2015, the same artists he already knew, the same Tuesday-morning shuffle on the same commute to the same job. Every few months he'd skip past a song he'd heard 300 times and tell himself the problem was him. When friends asked what he was listening to lately, he'd shrug and say, "Honestly, I'm kind of over music. Nothing new really hits anymore." He actually believed it. He thought he'd outgrown music the way some people outgrow video games. He'd even started wondering whether he should cancel the $12 a month, because what was he paying for? Then his sister came to visit. She spent six years as a playlist curator. Her job was to build playlists that millions of strangers would open and never want to close. She took one look at him humming along to the same intro for the 400th time and said, "Give me your phone." She scrolled through his account for 90 seconds. She didn't say a word. She just kept opening menus, shaking her head slowly, and raising her eyebrows. Then she handed it back and said: "You've never turned off Autoplay. You've never cleaned your taste profile. You've never used Blend. You've never enabled Crossfade. You've never built a Smart Shuffle queue. You've never opened Daylist. You've never told Spotify what to stop playing." "Spotify has over 100 million songs. You've been listening to the algorithm's laziest guess about you." He laughed it off. "It's just music, it's fine." She said, "Give me 12 minutes." She changed 10 settings. When she handed the phone back, he hit play on his own playlist and sat there for a second. "Wait," he said. "This is what Spotify is supposed to feel like?" He hadn't gotten tired of music. He'd been stuck inside a factory-default version of an app that was never designed to help him discover anything. Here's every single thing she changed 🧵