Flow repeats tracks

Your feedback is valuable, as they are working to improve in exactly this way as we speak.

Please stay for a while to see it yourself.

We're aware of some of its limitations @alice07 great input from you! Our devs really appreciate this kind of feedback so that we know exactly how it feels with real examples 

Hey @Rudi , is there any update on this? It's crazy that this is still a problem. It should be really easy to fix. One, maybe two, lines of code.

Hey @maxkshaw I don’t have a clue about coding and developing so I am not sure if the fix involves juts a couple on lines of code.
However, if you are experiencing this problem on a daily basis, please let me know and I can contact our devs in order to check your Flow on their side to make sure what’s going on.
Thanks and apologies for any inconvenience.

Hi @Jaime. 

Yes, please contact the dev team. This problem has been going for as long as I’ve been using Deezer (since early 2020). This problem has been raised multiple times by various members of this community.

Frankly, I can’t believe it hasn’t been fixed already. It’s embarrassing.

Guys, are you crazy? This thread is 3 years old. This is still an ongoing issue. Do you know how many people are listening the flow? I don't know, but I think a lot of people do. This problem is corrected by two lines of code. Programmers know this. There is 2 option here: either this problem is not brought to them, or they simply do not want to solve it.

Exactly. It would be so simple to fix...

3 years.. still no fix, c’mon guys.

The fixes are here, we’ve been telling them to you for years, its not rocket science guys, we do coding, we KNOW how complicated this is and SERIOUSLY does not take 1 programmer more than maybe a day to code and test it, and if it does you need better programmers or there’s something seriously wrong with your codebase…

We understand a full blown super nice solution takes months of planning, checking with multiple  teams, lots of approvals, the  GUI team needs to OK every pixel just how they like it OR ELSE!, code it properly onto the engine etc, that we get but were not asking for that ATM,

We know you guys have other code issues and priorities on the pipeline and you cannot reroute resources to this without causing a major problem to your schedule.

What we are asking is not a large resources commitment, just a small “hotfix” in the meantime, while you get, someday, time to do it right, and again we understand it takes time, even to do this, but if in 3 years you havent done it then lets just all accept its just never going to get done, its not a priority, period.

If you want to fix it /please us just do this:

The quickest/simplest solution is just as we’ve been saying forever.

Add an option to the app settings page that allows us to set the minimum delay before listening to the same song again, just a simple/basic slide button that says ENABLE/DISABLE (you already have tons of those there, copy paste the code), then a text box beside it that says:

Prevent the same song from playing again for XX minutes, hours,  or days with a dropdown to select the time scale.

Then add a “last played” tag field to the songs data/labels in your customers flow database, the last played data will always be populated by the last time the track was played, immediately after also zero hard.

Nothing in those 2 things should be overly complicated, break anything or time consuming to code.

Then when the customer starts listening to the flow algorithm, let the flow thing do its thing as it does now, change nothing there, but AFTER the part where the algorithm decides what song is going to play next but BEFORE the song is played, add a code check as follows:

READ USER_LASTPLAYED_DELAY variable, if variable exists(the option is enabled), read value.

READ SONG_LASTPLAYED_TIME variable from the customers flow database, IF SONG_LASTPLAYED_TIME is lesser or equal to CURRENT_TIME minus USER_LASTPLAYED_DELAY, then SKIP TRACK, ELSE do nothing and play already selected for next playback track.

And that’s it that’s all you need to do.

That will make sure we wont listen to the EXACT same tracks over and over again, and you don’t need to change or mod anything in the flow algorithm or the way the software works, or anything complicated to make this fix, you are just essentially clicking the skip button for us, saving us the hassle.

With this change you can even add a “songs_auto_skipped” flag, where every time a song gets auto skipped using this method, a counter gets added to the songs_auto_skipped variable of the users flow database, then your engineers can go back and check how many times a users flow skips tracks due to repeat, if you see users with hundreds or thousands of counters on their flow’s autoskip variable , then you can quickly single those anomalies out and see  why these users get so many repeats, and pass these on over to the engineering department so they can take a better look at what’s going on and do a proper fix… someday.

As you can see the  solution is not that complex, and you would even get an awesome data metric in the process to improve your flow algorithm a lot more.

All you need to do now is grab your best guy that’s working on something else, sit him down for a minute, tell him you need him to do some overtime over the weekend, give him near unlimited access to the company’s ubereats/doordash paid account, offer him a handsomely priced overtime bonus, and tell him in addition to what hes doing,  you need this done, tested and working by Monday, and he will get it done.

You will get all of us off your backs, and make all of us happy in the process, not to mention keeping our subscriptions “flow”ing (pun intended).

I Hope this helps drive the point across we’ve been telling you guys for years, stop procrastinating, its not that complicated, get it done.

Cheers!

Thanks for your feedback @XionicFire @Ivan16 @maxkshaw. Many users want less repetition in the flow and we need absolutely to address that. 
I have forwarded your message to our developers and they mentioned that it is a bit more complicated than a 2 lines of code fix as it has an impact in the interface and also implies mobile development. Also, flow is considered to be a simple button.
Devs are fully aware of the problem and this is a priority now. We have a dedicated datscientist team that has been working on that precise problem for several weeks, since the release of the new flow version in December.
They have collected first some data to previously analyse when a repeated track gets on the nerve of our users.
AB test is the next step, and once I have news on any fix or implementation I will let you know.
Thanks for your patience and all your feedback. It is very much appreciated it.
 

I’m glad this is finally being recognised. It’s crazy that the devs haven’t done anything about it yet. Perhaps they don’t personally use Deezer for their music needs?