Lets look at all of the feedback items–
“This Doesn’t Fit” isn’t a real item–it exposes three more–
There is one kind of feedback that I think makes a lot of sense with respect to your personal profile–“I don’t like this” – if you pick that option, it seems logical that we would keep track of that with your profile and let it influence future behavior for you specifically, due to the way it was worded.
“Not Related”, “Bad for Radio”, and “Holiday Music” are impartial judgements. It would make no sense for us to interpret those as evidence of your personal taste because they are worded to express an opinion of the algorithm’s performance, not something about you.
“I don’t want to hear this right now” is worded deliberately vaguely to give you an escape hatch that lets you skip something without really influencing future behavior (personally or globally). It is basically equivalent to giving no/neutral feedback.
The upcoming track thumbs-down shows the same feedback options as above, and behaves the same as the current track thumbs-down. If you know enough to thumbs-down something, your input is just as valid as if you’d heard it first.
The now-playing thumbs-up and upcoming track thumbs-up are currently recorded, but we aren’t doing anything it them beyond that. I am honestly not sure how we will take them into account, aside from using them as a way to measure algorithm performance. If we do so, we will be sure respect the ambiguity in the user interface that can’t distinguish between “I like this track” and “I think this is a good pick”.
It’s not in our best interest to interpret your feedback in a way that isn’t true to the words on the screen at the time when you made the click…we even keep track of the software versions that go along with the feedback so that we can understand it in full context even if the choices change over time.
I think there is nothing to be anxious about here, but let me know if you feel otherwise…