There’s been a lot of complaints about Apple Music from the technorati: a confusing UI, flaky search, unreliability, and general confusion abound. Plus the actual bugs. Though, none has been quite as damning and harsh as Jim Dalrymple’s recent, rage-filled, piece on The Loop

As if all of that wasn’t enough, Apple Music gave me one more kick in the head. Over the weekend, I turned off Apple Music and it took large chunks of my purchased music with it. Sadly, many of the songs were added from CDs years ago that I no longer have access to. Looking at my old iTunes Match library, before Apple Music, I’m missing about 4,700 songs. At this point, I just don’t care anymore, I just want Apple Music off my devices.

Wow.

Normally, I try not to join a dogpile when it’s going around the tech blogs. I figure I have bigger issues to focus on. This is an exception.

I’ve been using Apple Music since day one, and I’ve largely adapted to its UI quirks. As a streaming service—and only as a streaming service—it’s quite good. The human curated playlists are great, Beats 1… well, it has a show with St. Vincent making mixtapes for fans, so that’s cool. I’ve used it with some regularity to change up my listening habits. But the streaming service alone isn’t worth $9.99 a month to me. What is worth it is having my entire music library, both the stuff I bought on iTunes, the stuff I bought on CD and vinyl, and stuff that, er, fell off the back of a truck, everywhere. Apple Music promised me that with iCloud Music Library. And iCloud Music Library is a turd.

I actually can’t use iCloud Music Library with my iTunes library. I have 31,815 songs in iTunes right now, the end result of spending more than half my life acquiring music. The limit, at least for now, is 25,000 songs. So, in a fit of exuberance, I took a knife to my iTunes library, excising almost 7,000 songs so I could try iCloud Music Library. The result was a car crash, with mis-matched songs, screwed up metadata and album artwork, and several days of frustration as I restored 200GB of music from backups. All I can say is that Serenity Caldwell is my hero for posting how to reset one’s iCloud Music Library.

There seems to be a common theme among the iCloud Music Library horror stories: people with large collections of music, with meticulous tagging that doesn’t conform to the iTunes Store, and a lot of live recordings, remastered versions, remixes, or duplicate song titles in their library. I am very meticulous about my metadata in iTunes, and meticulous in a way that Apple themselves are not. I hate having crap like “(Deluxe Edition)” on my albums, unless I’ve kept the non-Deluxe edition around for some reason. If I have a live album, I don’t need “(Live)” appended to every song title. I know it’s live—it usually says so in the album title!

Whatever Apple is using to identify the songs that exist in their library to match, it’s naïve as hell, and will match whatever is the first likely thing. If your song is on a greatest hits album, it’ll match the greatest hits track. Got a live recording that’s missing “(Live)” in the song title? Here’s a studio version for you. Hell, my friend Andrew Marvin from Crush On Radio reported that iCloud Music Library replaced some of his studio Primus songs with live versions! How does that happen?

It’s possible that Jim, Andrew, and myself are just edge cases. We’re crazy music fans with gigantic libraries, custom metadata, live recordings, and other stuff in our library that throws the matching algorithm for a loop. The problem is, the crazy music fans are the ones who are most likely to throw a shit-fit when something goes wrong. And here we are. Something’s gotta happen, even if it’s just a way to tell Apple “HEY! YOU MATCHED THE WRONG SONG. UPLOAD THIS, INSTEAD.”

At the start of the new year, I resolved to reduce the points of failure in my technological life, and iTunes came up:

[T]he reality of iTunes Match in execution, at least from what I’ve heard from people who try to use, leaves me quite content with having to plug in my iPhone, and manually manage the music I carry with me. There’s less chance of failure with locally stored music, instead of relying on the cloud. I don’t have to worry about having Wi-Fi, or a cell signal, or if the servers are behaving. The minor inconvenience of plugging into my computer is more than made up in reliable access to music.

So, I’ve divorced myself from iCloud Music Library, and unless this crap gets resolved by the time iOS 9 drops, I’m not likely to pony up $9.99 a month for the privilege of human-curated playlists and a streaming radio station I don’t care about. What sucks so much is that iCloud Music Library should be the feature that sets Apple Music apart from all the other streaming options. Until they fix it, Apple Music might be doomed to be an also-ran in the streaming space. Considering how skeptical I’ve been of paying for music you can’t keep, I think I’m going to be just fine when my trial ends. And that’s only a problem for Apple.

Ben Hammersley has some thoughts on how we interact with our personal AIs:

“It’s a little wrinkle in what is really a miraculous device, but it’s a serious thing: The Amazon Echo differs from Siri in that it’s a communally available service. Interactions with Alexa are available to, and obvious to, everyone in the house, and my inability to be polite with her has a knock-on effect. My daughter is too young to speak yet, but she does see and hear all of our interactions with Alexa. I worry what sort of precedent we are setting for her, in terms of her own future interactions with bots and AIs as well as with people, if she hears me being forced into impolite conversations because of the limitations of her household AI’s interface. It’s the computing equivilent of being rude to waitresses. We shouldn’t allow it, and certainly not by lack of design. Worries about toddler screen time are nothing, compared to future worries about not inadvertently teaching your child to be rude to robots.”

— The Miscellaneous Tumbling of Mr Ben Hammersley – Possible Problems of Persona Politeness

I’ve not tried Alexa—the idea of having Amazon potentially listening in on everything in my apartment kinda freaks me out—but I use Siri. Now that I have an Apple Watch, I want to use it more. It’s telling that there’s still, four years on, people talking up Siri’s “Easter eggs” when you speak to it, and nobody’s said a thing about Alexa’s personality, or lack thereof, and what it could mean, until now.

“There are a lot of digital “truths” that have been instilled in our society about accessibility and findability, meaning we were taught, as users, that we needed to be trackable, we needed a visible footprint to exist in society, such as credit, a listed address, etc. Being trackable, and being “seen” meant safety. But online harassment has proven otherwise.”

— That Time the Internet Sent a SWAT Team to My Mom’s House | Narratively | Human stories, boldly told.

Frightening. Just frightening.

The web has become noisier and noisier of late, with the constant chatter of its denizens. Not just the din of ads, trackers, and signup forms, which can be avoided with minimal effort, but with “social” interactions. Not just our streams, like Facebook and Twitter, but on social aggregators, news sites, anywhere that needs people to come, and people to stay. Social is the glue on the flypaper of the modern web, and the flies will not stop buzzing.

Why is “social” so prevalent? It’s easy, it’s cheap—if you don’t want to bother with moderation—and it’s effective. More clicks, more impressions, more ad views, more metrics: social is an easy way to get it. The voices of friends and strangers alike cry out into a din, filling the Internet, that void that cannot be filled, with endless noise.

I want out.

Part of why is because too many of the voices you can make out above the din are those of anger, violence, racism and sexism, transphobia, and hatred of all kinds. They drown out the good voices, the voices of kindness, understanding, acceptance, and support. And, worst, the people running the sites, setting out the flypaper for us to land on, they don’t see this as a problem. To them, the noise is just noise, a sign that people are coming and people are staying. Sure, if someone gets too loud, too obnoxious, does something truly beyond the pale, they get a smack down, but this happens all too rarely.

I find myself seeking places of calm online, or making them myself with clever hacks from other people just as fed up as I am. There is a wonderful browser extension called “Shut Up” that hides comment sections on websites, so that when you hit the bottom of an article, you don’t have to see someone screaming vitriol into your face. A clever programmer recently found a way to create a fake comment section where the only comments a user sees are their own. You, the site owner, see nothing.

This isn’t to say I want to become a digital hermit. We all, even the introverts, need some human contact in our lives. There are some wonderful oases on the social web. If only they weren’t enmeshed between the garbage fires. It just seems like there’s more garbage fires than oases these days. Fourteen years ago, I met the love of my life on a message board for a now defunct humor website. The web was different then, less interconnected and more siloed. There’s always been a social component to the Internet, but it happened at a slower, quieter pace. You could negotiate it on your terms.

There’s an idea, now twenty years old, of calm technology, “in which technology, rather than panicking us, would help us focus on the things that were really important to us.” A more recent manifestation is “The Slow Web”. Neither have gained much traction, largely because calm and slow isn’t the sort of thing that gets the big VC bucks. The current social web, and its constant demands, constant clamoring, and constant conflict, is the opposite of calm technology. Part of it is a function of volume in that there’s more people using the Internet and its social spaces now than ever before, and we’re still navigating the societal changes that come when everyone has a megaphone. I’m sure it’ll shake out in time, but that doesn’t mean we all have to be standing in the middle of it.

“Reddit is the Internet, and it exhibits all the good, the bad and the ugly of the Internet. It has been fighting this harassment in the trenches. In February, we committed to removing revenge porn from our site, and others followed our lead. In May, the company banned harassment of individuals from the site. Last month, we took down sections of the site that drew repeat harassers. Then, after making these policy changes to prevent and ban harassment, I, along with several colleagues, was targeted with harassing messages, attempts to post my private information online and death threats. These were attempts to demean, shame and scare us into silence.”

— Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: The trolls are winning the battle for the Internet – The Washington Post

After this, I’m amazed Ms. Pao is as optimistic as she comes across in this piece. One thing is certain—the lassiez faire, “free speech” above all attitude is no longer going to work on the Internet and its communities. The trolls are winning, but only because the opposing forces are just beginning to mobilize.