I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.

I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.

This was/is a long standing feature request to block podcasts and video podcasts completely. Even worse two years ago unrated podcasts were available to kids. Not quoting the stuff I could find there. Highly unsuitable to kids.

Zawinski's Law* except now it’s a social media messaging app.

“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”

Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.

Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.