Improve Soulmates Algorithm / Features

For the past year+ the soulmates feature has felt like its become almost completely useless. I do not understand how the current algorithm works however it seems to always choose 1-3 random artists which I listen to infrequently and don’t care much about then show me some people who also listen to those 1-3 artists. However I’ll end up clicking their profile and going to the compare menu, and the common tracks/artists are almost nothing and looking at their recent tracks they don’t listen to any of the same music.

Soulmates used to be amazing and would show me people with almost identical taste frequently, but now it feels like a forgotten half-broken feature.

Some possible changes to the existing soulmates section:

• If you need to keep the 1-3 artists matching, let us choose the artists, or atleast make it artists based on the last 4 weeks top artists, rather then however it chooses them at the moment. A great addition to this (but more complicated) would be to let us create a list of tracks/artists/albums and then it will find someone who matches that within the last 4 weeks, rather then just using our last 4 weeks / etc.

• Make it so we can match people based on the last 4 weeks top songs such that the compare menu between two users would be as similar as it could be to a % value it shows.

• Make it so we can find soulmates based on a specific track/artist/album. At the moment I manually click on it and go to the Top Listeners section and just find people around the same # place I’m at which ends up being much more reliable then the existing soulmates system.

• Make it so in all of the soulmates systems we can hide users which have not set an icon. I’m not gonna click on someone who hasn’t even set an icon as they likely don’t use the app much and wouldn’t see it if I added them anyways.

• Add the ability to see if a user is still “active.” This would likely need to be a privacy setting that could be disabled, but I’d like to be able to filter out users who have not opened the app in the last 6+ months etc.

• Please fix the messages system, when I message someone it sends, but if they send me back a message it doesn’t show up for me in the chat unless I close the chat and re open it. I only know they replied because I get a notification.

• It would be cool to have a feature where you can give people a “like” on their music taste. I currently just send messages to people who have similar taste saying that their taste is cool, but I think having a way to just give a small nudge about their taste without needing it to be a conversation would be nice. Adding someone as a friend is kinda similar, but I think just a upvote on their tastes would likely validate people more directly.

I’m sure there is even more you could do with the feature, I really feel like statsFM’s biggest ability is its massive user base, just feels underutilized at the moment and more of an afterthought.

Cheers’