This makes sense as an explanation for where the anxiety is coming from. Then again, Pandora operates in a very different environment–they start by knowing nothing about you and have to learn everything they can learn from radio play. And anyone who uses it on lots of devices (car, tv, roku, computer, …) is likely not to even have a single login, so they are really prone to amplifying “noise” from a small number of interactions.
On the other hand…we start with your library, play history and favorites, and have a far better picture from the get-go. We will probably add some kind of initial taste profiling step to the onboarding flow in the app in the future to help “bridge the gap” for new users. This is less important for radio, because even if we don’t know about you at all, we can still organize picks around the seed. When we build more recommendations-oriented stuff, even something relatively straightforward like a “New Releases For You” list, it will be crucial to know something about you to get the out of box experience right for new users.
Anyways–we have much higher-quality sources of information about you than the radio thumbs. Pandora has no other choice but to amplify a few feedback interactions into a noisy picture. I view radio feedback as being primarily about improving the radio experience.