Mastodawn

Marco Arment Sep 21, 2024

This is why I've said that if I were starting from scratch today, I'd NEVER offer an episode-limit feature.

It's not that it's hard to delete the oldest episode when a new one comes in. That's trivial.

The hard part is meeting people's expectations.

Because when people say "Just keep the latest X episodes", what they really MEAN is a list of exceptions and behaviors that may be different from that… but everyone wants *different* behavior, because it's complicated!
https://mastodon.social/@overcastfm/113176856728462429

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Marco Arment Sep 21, 2024

For instance, when evaluating an episode past the limit for deletion:

- What if it's an old episode that I went back and added?
- What if I've partly listened to it?
- What if I partly listened, but never finished it? (How long ago? How much is left?)
- What if I'm currently listening to it?
- What if I'm listening to it, but on a device that hasn't been used in a while?
- What if it's downloaded to the Watch? (How recently has that watch been used for standalone playback?)

So many questions.

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sayitintexan

@marcoarment I often stop the NPR news before the end (last stories boring). I collect a bunch of them with 5-10 min remaining. I have to manually delete them from time to time. I have another podcast about history that I ALWAYS want to finish. I agree there is no simple solution to this. You either have very complicated fine tuned preferences with all the options you outlined, or infuriate users by forcing a solution that goes against some users use case wishes. Your current solution is fine.