I’m a huge fan of the weekly exploration feature, and was already fascinated with the few list I got, how good it actually already figured out my taste (i.e. I haven’t listen to much yet, but the suggestions are already full of things that I already know and like [but hadn’t yet scrobbled]).
But now I wonder: If every week I listen to my weekly exploration, would that impact the next weeks weekly exploration? This is especially interesting, if you don’t listen to much else; but even if you do - especially when the weekly exploration wasn’t much to your liking, do you run into the danger of getting into a weird recommendation spiral?
If yes, wouldn’t it be interesting to filter out the weekly explorations for the duration of the week (or two weeks, as you can access the last two weeks)? What do you think?
Before we had Weekly playlists, I created Daily Jams for testing purposes and for months each day I listened to the Daily Jams to see if I got into such a spiral. (incidentally, if you want Daily Jams created, follow this user: ListenBrainz )
And, the answer is yes, kinda. Early iterations got into a loop to repeat the same tracks over and over. To avoid this, we added a filter to not recommend any tracks that you listened to in the past 60 days (I think, I would have to look it up again).
That drastically improved things – but even still, if we listen to the Daily Jams for weeks on end things do get repetitive, but I think that has more to do with the fact that we still have very few users, so we’re not collecting a lot of data to make recommendations better. But, as we get more users, things will get better.
So, go ahead dive in and listen to all your playlists and if you feel like you’re getting stuck in a spiral, reach out and let me know!
Thanks for the explanation, that helps a lot. The playlists are really a great feature and started to use them more and more. One question I had was if skipping tracks does actually avoid recommending the same artist / track again, or if it’s better to “hate” the given track?
OK, thanks. I was a bit misled by the comment “…exploration playlists require more active listening and may require you to skip the occasional track that doesn’t suit your taste”.
It makes perfect sense, I will stick to hating tracks if necessary (or just skip it) Thanks for the clarification.
Thanks for the clarification.