I unfortunately and occasionally end up on official support-forum pages. You know the ones. <img attachment="table-flip-trollface_(1).png" align="right">The ones where a community member or MS expert or Apple expert will tell you to restart your computer in safe mode because you asked why an app keeps losing focus when it shouldn't. They will think of literally anything to waste your time, your life, but they will never cop to the actual problem you're reporting. Most of these answers don't really relate to the question at all. It's just a way for the user answering the question to gain points for having answered and for Apple or MS to be able to close the question for "no activity" after a little while. The reason there is no activity is because what's the point of engaging an answer that's come from an obvious bot or human idiot who's actively uninterested in helping you? In the end, none of these forums are there for the purpose of helping people---interested just there for companies to pat themselves on the back for fulfilling KPIs. The answers are almost always along the lines of: have you tried it with another computer? With another user? Have you tried rebooting in safe mode? Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software? How about your operating system? THE UI HAS A FUCKING TYPO, YOU DOLT. THE UI SCROLLS RANDOMLY, YOU UTTER WASTE OF OXYGEN. I am not here because I think this bug is my fault. I did not describe the issue in exquisite detail because I wanted someone to tell me how to unplug and re-plug my computer. This rant was triggered by the following example, <a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254067121?sortBy=best" author="Aleks_Bromvig" source="Apple Community">Apple Music automatically scrolls down playlist</a>. This poor person---the one who originally reported the issue---succinctly explained what was happening. I was one of about 30 people who clicked the "Me too" button to indicate that they'd described the problem that we were also having. <bq>When I rate music or add a comment the program will suddenly scroll all the way to the bottom of the playlist. I have been having this issue for quite some time and I can see other people asking about this problem seemingly without having their issue resolved.</bq> They're right: this has been happening for version after version of Apple Music. They're absolutely right. What was the response? Well, the indubitably human "Community Specialist" Grace2211 responds and I'm going to quote in full, <bq>Thanks for reaching out in Apple Support Communities. We understand that the Music app is not working as expected when trying to enjoy your Apple Music membership. To clarify, do you experience this behavior with another device as well? We'd like to provide you with a few steps that may help resolve the issue and allow us to determine if the issue could be software related: • Verify if the issue persists in safe mode. Your Mac will load slowly and your screen will flash. This is expected behavior for this mode: <a href="https://support.apple.com/HT201262">How to use safe mode on your Mac</a> • Test the issue in another user account: <a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-other-users-on-your-mac-mtusr001/mac">Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac</a></bq> If this is just a friendly ESL person helping out, then fine. But my experience has been that this is the only kind of response you can expect. It's a poorly written, overly wordy nothingburger of a response that blames the user for the entire problem, when it's an obvious bug that has been happening forever. It covers all of the bases: it starts with a useless, time-wasting paragraph: <iq>We understand that the Music app is not working as expected when trying to enjoy your Apple Music membership.</iq> There is nothing more infuriating than this. It just means you didn't read the question. You've copy/pasted this bullshit from a standard template. I wasn't trying to "enjoy my membership"; I was trying to use your buggy product, for which I pay money every month. This is only going to get worse as companies ramp up their production of such useless copy with LLM-produced text that desperate users will be forced to wade through in the dim hope that an answer for their problem lies buried in the tsunami of meaningly and soulless text. But I digress. Then, it asks you to try another device---buy another Apple laptop to see if Apple Music is just as shitty on that one!---then says "hey, what about a long, involved reboot into a crippled-Mac mode in which Apple Music probably doesn't even work?"---waste tons of your own personal time rather than a second of Apple's support time---and ends up by telling you that, if you only have the one device, you should set up a completely new user account, log in with all of your Apple stuff so that you can even access your music and ... then what? Of course and obviously, Apple Music is going to do that stupid scrolling shit there, too, because it's <i>obviously intrinsic to the software.</i>. It has been for years. The only answer you should give is: <ol> Ask the user if any other actions cause the list to scroll, like maybe "liking" a song? Does that cause the scrolling? Or just the by-now frowned-upon 5-star rating system that has been in Apple Music forever, but which is only available in the MacOS client in anything approaching a usable manner?<fn> Tell the user about a plausible workaround, if there is one. Tell the user that you've sent the bug report to the relevant team within the organization and are awaiting feedback. </ol> But my experience is that, the bigger the company, the less likely it is to have an in any way responsive support for its software products. By the time I got to the page, it had already been helpfully marked with something like, <warning>Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.</warning> Thanks, asshole. I'd love to start this conversation anew, so that you can continue to make it look like no-one else has ever had this problem. The only thing useful on that page is the "similar questions", of which one was actually similar enough to be worth clicking on, so there's that. That took me to <a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254291022?=undefined&previousThread=254067121021&sortBy=best">Mac Music app bug?</a>, where the helpful user "turingtest2" pointed me to <a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253313185?sortBy=best">Songs View Jumping to Random Spots After Action</a> instead of trolling me to buy another computer, restart in safe mode, or set up another user. That page is from over two years ago, has an astonishing ~850 "me too"s on it---and the bug still hasn't been squashed by Apple's veritable army of engineers, at least in the version that everyone's asking about. It actually <i>has</i> been squashed on the newest version of Apple Music. 🍾🍾🍾 I reported this in that forum, to lend hope to the ~850 other users who are looking for an answer. <bq>The title says it all. When I rate a song with either the stars or the heart, the playlist jumps to a different scroll position in the list. This is happening in Apple Music 1.2.5.7 on MacOS 12.7.2. I can verify that it's not happening on Apple Music 1.4.1.29 on MacOS 14.1.2, so you must have found and fixed it. Any chance of backporting it for those of us with hardware that works perfectly well, but can't be upgraded to the latest Apple Music (which is bundled with an OS not supported on this hardware)?</bq> Just in case you think I'm raging about an isolated instance, here's another example, encountered just in the time since I created this draft. This one is about another perennial favorite: <a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251947794?=undefined&previousThread=254384363021&sortBy=best" author="Brittlopez" source="">Notes app lagging</a>, which writes: <bq>Is anybody else experiencing lag when typing in notes. I’ve closed all apps prior to using it I’ve tried resetting and I’ve used a different apple device. Typing everywhere else is fine but typing in the notes is so slow.</bq> Look, this has been happening for years. The goddamned app sometimes seems to sync about forty times per letter typed. I've had it drain most of my phone battery within a half an hour, simply because I was writing a journal entry---because I didn't have my laptop handy and I was inspired. It shouldn't be this hard to write a collaborative tool, but it apparently is. To add insult to injury, if you type a bunch and it feels like it's sucking your battery dry just to sync a few paragraphs, then that text <i>still</i> doesn't show up on other devices. You have to start typing in that note on the unsynced device, then wait several seconds. The synced text will finally pop in. It's quite sad, actually. But, sure, let's make <i>Freeform</i> and <i>Journal</i> because if you can barely sync text over a gigabit connection, then you should be ready for all sorts of even meatier content. But I digress. Again. Anyway, the people on these forums are just castigating themselves for having a few photos and some longer text. Stop it. You are not the problem. The problem is a $3T company that can't seem to get its shit together to make an app that syncs reasonably well. There are real-time collaboration tools out there, and Notes is still a dumpster fire. I use it because it works for me and I don't sync that much---it's not a main tool, by any stretch of the imagination. Anyway (again), the top response in the forum is as follows: <img src="{att_link}reboot_instructions.png" href="{att_link}reboot_instructions.png" align="none" caption="Reboot instructions" scale="75%"> <bq>Try and Force Restart your iPhone EXACTLY as shown below and see whether that resolves the issue:<ul>Press and quickly release Volume UP button Press and quickly release Volume DOWN button Press and Hold the SIDE button until an Apple logo appears and then release the Side button (Can take up to 20 seconds. (DO NOT release Sid</ul></bq> The comment is cut off, but you get the gist: they just copy/pasted the instructions for restarting your iPhone. That's the solution? Do I also have to restart my Mac when Notes gets laggy? That's the only option? Am I to reboot my devices as a Hail Mary every time one of your buggy apps misbehaves? Then, by the time I've rebooted, I'll have forgotten why I did so? Is that the hope? Can't you just fucking fix the bug? <hr> <ft>BTW, it absolutely does scroll around when you rate with a "like"/heart instead of the star-rating system. It's a bug. It's a pain in the ass. Whenever you rate a song, you have to wait for it to scroll, then type <kbd>(-cmd)</kbd> + <kbd>L</kbd> to show the currently playing song again.</ft>