“About not delegating your brain to machines, that’s a fair point, and I would encourage people to consciously choose where to use machines and where to use their brain”

Yeah, big agree on this front. We should be using technology as a tool to aid us to do the stuff we care about, rather than letting ourselves be made subordinate to the tech itself. For some people, that kind of agency means using an open source system like Listenbrainz, and for some, like the person you’re replying to, that means continuing to discover music in their own way. Both of these approaches are fine — indeed, the whole point of building tech that serves as tools is that if our experience tells us that we have a task that wouldn’t benefit from the tool, we can just leave it in the box.

Personally, I enjoy going for a combination approach — I sometimes use listenbrainz as a catalyst to help me discover new stuff beyond my experience, but once I have a few new artists I’m interested in, I then go and do some manual digging around them. I don’t need to do this manual work part of it, but it’s a key part of my enjoyment of the music discovery process — so I can somewhat relate to the person you’re replying to’s preference