The “flow” feature is supposed to play the songs I liked, and other songs it thinks I might like. A lot of songs have “duplicate” variants - e.g., the same song in one of several “greatest hits” albums, or perhaps a subtly different version. The problem I want to raise is that flow sometimes picks those variants to play.
This is a problem because when flow plays such a variant song - and this unfortunately happens often - I see that it doesn’t have a heart, and quickly “heart” this variant song, happy that I discovered another song I missed. The result is that my favorite songs list now includes many duplicates of the same song. Then, when I play all my songs, a song that has many duplicates on my favorite song list has a higher chance of being played. This is annoying.
Many people have raised ideas in the past about to preventing the addition of duplicate songs to the favorite list (when you press the heart it can warn you). But what I claim here is that this duplication problem would not have existed in the first place if “flow” was improved not to suggest all these duplicates.
If you’re still not convinced that my idea of modifying flow to avoid duplicates, please consider this: The flow feature would have 100% “success” if it were just to take the songs I liked, and play all their duplicates and nothing else. Because surely, if I liked the song, I would also like it’s duplicate, right? Well, doing this would make “flow” a useless feature, and this is exactly what I’m suggestion that flow should not do: Flow should avoid duplicates, despite being easy pickings (after all, they are identical to a song you already liked).