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> Is hacker news now the place SEO spammers go to get support? I doubt the OP is a SEO spammer. Buying 4 different CDs in a week is a normal operation for a mu

> Is hacker news now the place SEO spammers go to get support? I doubt the OP is a SEO spammer. Buying 4 different CDs in a week is a normal operation for a music aficionado. Back when I regularly bought CDs I would buy maybe 10 or 15 new albums in one go (and then nothing for a while). I think it's a perfectly reasonable and legitimate thing to do. I understand Amazon's predicament with SEO spammers, but essentially it's a somewhat user-hostile "fix" for their broken rating system. I don't understand why they don't limit the amount of returns, which also makes this type of spam harder. Or maybe rethink the entire "crowd-sourced rating" thing as it keeps being problematic in various ways. Either way, there are many things you can do better than "fuck you legitimate customer".

swarnie 5y ago
I dont think i know anyone who's bought a cd in the last 15 years, four per week should last most people a life time.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  But you can buy more than one pair of Wolverine meat shredder claws despite the fact that you only have two hands. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N5U14FA https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N5U14FA
  - swarnie 5y ago
    - jraph 5y ago
      And then allows you to lose access to your entire collection of Wolverine meat shredders the day you cancel your subscription (or the service goes out of business). Or silently and suddenly lose access to some of them because of some contract issue between the right holder of these shredders and the service provider. Or prevents you from using your shredders if you lose your internet connection. > on any device I still have a table that won't accept DRM-encumbered Wolverine meat shredders and I would rather not put anything DRM-encumbered on those which could anyway. I also have some tables that are not so widespread but accept standard stuff, but the services won't use the standards. That's why I go out of my way avoiding any subscription-based Wolverine meat shredder providers.
      - orf 5y ago
        What a waste of plastic and resources. > I also have some tables that are not so widespread but accept standard stuff, but the services won't use the standards. A chromecast audio is cheap, and so are one of the AirPlay equivalent adapters.
        jraph 5y ago
        Well, I was more arguing against subscription-based services than for CDs. As a matter of fact, I don't really like CDs and I don't have anything reading them at home. I like my local playlist that I can play offline and randomly. CDs are per album, and I often get bored really fast when listening to the same kind of music for more than a few minutes in a row. I also don't like CDs for the physical place they take and yes, the plastic they require. I just plug in a jack and here you go. That seems far less wasteful than buying a Chromecast or an AirPlay adapter and streaming all day (from the Internet and/or to the adapter). A Chromecast. Talk about a waste of plastic and resources. Hundreds of CDs probably don't come even close.
        k12sosse 5y ago
        Chromecast with Google TV is the best streaming device I've ever used, and I've tried a whole landfill worth of alternatives.
- simion314 5y ago
  Maybe you want to buy someone a gift, maybe you never buy books but know someone that loves books and for their birthday you want to gift them a book series, same with CDs, even if that person does not have a CD player I think they can appreciate a CD/DVD with all artwork and stuff that comes with that.
- Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  I do. I buy CD of the albums I like to collect them.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  I buy CDs because I want to own my music, instead of renting low-quality versions from a company that can unilaterally block my access on a whim, degrades quality with watermarks, includes DRM so I can't listen where I want, and forces me to use their shitty software that only works on half my devices. CDs are often cheaper than renting the vendor-locked versions, and it only takes a couple minutes to rip a high-quality version. That said, I'll pay even more if they offer high-quality downloads on Bandcamp.
  - blacklion 5y ago
    > and it only takes a couple minutes to rip a high-quality version. Which drive do you use? My specially-selected-for-the-task drive (selected 10 year ago, to be honest, and I don't know what I will do when it dies, all modern drives looks to be crap) with firmware tuned for audio grabbing takes ~1.1x to grab CD, so 45 minutes CD will be grabbed in 1h20m (because you need check pass, of course, to have high-quality version!).
    - dsr_ 5y ago
      On a well-made, new-out-of-the-box CD, a modern cheap drive should have no problems ripping at 48x with full CDparanoia checking. It is much more likely that you will be getting a loudness-war mastering problem than a bad copy of the data. That you can only fix with better source data.
      - blacklion 5y ago
        It is completely opposite to my experience, Exact Audio Copy with Secure (not Paranoid) mode, with enabled "defeat audio cache" feature grabs modern new CD on proven SATA LiteOn drive slightly faster than realtime, and slim USB attached drive could spent 3-4x time (0.25x) and fail at the end! And, yes, old Audio CD (new old stock, 10-15 years old) can be grabbed at 6-8x speed. Looks like new Audio CD pressed much worse than old ones. I don't believe in 48x exact extraction, sorry.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- eadmund 5y ago
  Streaming services can delete music from your library, but if you have the CD in your house, the only thing you need to worry about is fire and theft — and if you have remote backups, you needn't worry about that either. Plus FLAC is audibly better than streaming formats, and disk space is cheap enough these days to store an entire library in FLAC.
- dangravell 5y ago
  There are lots of people who still purchase CDs. At least four a week is my normal haul from charity shops!
londons_explore 5y ago
> rethink the entire "crowd-sourced rating" thing The real fix is to not have a single global rating for a product, but instead have 'personal ratings'. Ie. Every product rating I see is either a rating I have given, or Amazon's best prediction of the rating I would give if I had bought that product. Such predictions are inherently hard to game, since if you start artificially rating your friends products highly, then the system will show high ratings only for your friends products to you. Then they can do things like "I see you bought this product thinking it would be 4 stars, but you actually gave it 2 stars. We apologize for getting it wrong this time - have a refund of half the purchase price". That gives the AI team plenty of financial motivation to get the ratings correct.
- Closi 5y ago
  The issue with your proposed model is that it assumes Amazon is a neutral actor who are attempting to accurately predict what you would like. In reality, Amazon are incentivized to sell you more stuff, so allowing them to calculate ratings through some mysterious black box would introduce perverse incentives (i.e. Amazon is incentivized to sell more higher-margin stuff - would they be more tempted to inflate a product that is actually a '4 star' to a '5 star' to close the deal? Also how can we be sure that their black-box algorithm doesn't generally inflate Fire tablets and deflate iPads? This can happen even if the algorithm is entirely open). Secondly, would probably reduce trust in the product rating system (as it will be necessarily opaque and hard to understand compared to the existing approach of averaging the reviews). Amazon won't even fix basic review gaming - not because they can't (otherwise they would have acquired Fakespot) - but presumably because fake reviews help with sales.
  - rgavuliak 5y ago
    You say Amazon is incentivized to sell you more stuff, but this case clearly says they care more about objective ratings than about sales :)
    - Closi 5y ago
      I don't think that logically follows :) If Amazon had a ratings black box, they would not be incentivised to be fair with it. But a simple-to-understand ratings system may help sales more than an untrustworthy-black-box calculated rating (particularly considering reviews are about trust).
fmajid 5y ago
Rate-limit the ratings, not the purchases.
- gpt5 5y ago
  In this case this is about spiking the CD in the top seller charts / search results. Amazon is limiting purchases due to the increased returns from random buyers who buy it and immediately return. They could probably limit the number of returns to 4 instead of purchases, but it might be complicated legally due to their return policy (i.e. they'd need to update the return policy and inform the customer.)

swarnie 5y ago

I dont think i know anyone who's bought a cd in the last 15 years, four per week should last most people a life time.

ARandomerDude 5y ago
But you can buy more than one pair of Wolverine meat shredder claws despite the fact that you only have two hands. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N5U14FA https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N5U14FA
- swarnie 5y ago
  - jraph 5y ago
    And then allows you to lose access to your entire collection of Wolverine meat shredders the day you cancel your subscription (or the service goes out of business). Or silently and suddenly lose access to some of them because of some contract issue between the right holder of these shredders and the service provider. Or prevents you from using your shredders if you lose your internet connection. > on any device I still have a table that won't accept DRM-encumbered Wolverine meat shredders and I would rather not put anything DRM-encumbered on those which could anyway. I also have some tables that are not so widespread but accept standard stuff, but the services won't use the standards. That's why I go out of my way avoiding any subscription-based Wolverine meat shredder providers.
    - orf 5y ago
      What a waste of plastic and resources. > I also have some tables that are not so widespread but accept standard stuff, but the services won't use the standards. A chromecast audio is cheap, and so are one of the AirPlay equivalent adapters.
      - jraph 5y ago
        Well, I was more arguing against subscription-based services than for CDs. As a matter of fact, I don't really like CDs and I don't have anything reading them at home. I like my local playlist that I can play offline and randomly. CDs are per album, and I often get bored really fast when listening to the same kind of music for more than a few minutes in a row. I also don't like CDs for the physical place they take and yes, the plastic they require. I just plug in a jack and here you go. That seems far less wasteful than buying a Chromecast or an AirPlay adapter and streaming all day (from the Internet and/or to the adapter). A Chromecast. Talk about a waste of plastic and resources. Hundreds of CDs probably don't come even close.
        k12sosse 5y ago
        Chromecast with Google TV is the best streaming device I've ever used, and I've tried a whole landfill worth of alternatives.
simion314 5y ago
Maybe you want to buy someone a gift, maybe you never buy books but know someone that loves books and for their birthday you want to gift them a book series, same with CDs, even if that person does not have a CD player I think they can appreciate a CD/DVD with all artwork and stuff that comes with that.
Claude_Shannon 5y ago
I do. I buy CD of the albums I like to collect them.
caymanjim 5y ago
I buy CDs because I want to own my music, instead of renting low-quality versions from a company that can unilaterally block my access on a whim, degrades quality with watermarks, includes DRM so I can't listen where I want, and forces me to use their shitty software that only works on half my devices. CDs are often cheaper than renting the vendor-locked versions, and it only takes a couple minutes to rip a high-quality version. That said, I'll pay even more if they offer high-quality downloads on Bandcamp.
- blacklion 5y ago
  > and it only takes a couple minutes to rip a high-quality version. Which drive do you use? My specially-selected-for-the-task drive (selected 10 year ago, to be honest, and I don't know what I will do when it dies, all modern drives looks to be crap) with firmware tuned for audio grabbing takes ~1.1x to grab CD, so 45 minutes CD will be grabbed in 1h20m (because you need check pass, of course, to have high-quality version!).
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    On a well-made, new-out-of-the-box CD, a modern cheap drive should have no problems ripping at 48x with full CDparanoia checking. It is much more likely that you will be getting a loudness-war mastering problem than a bad copy of the data. That you can only fix with better source data.
    - blacklion 5y ago
      It is completely opposite to my experience, Exact Audio Copy with Secure (not Paranoid) mode, with enabled "defeat audio cache" feature grabs modern new CD on proven SATA LiteOn drive slightly faster than realtime, and slim USB attached drive could spent 3-4x time (0.25x) and fail at the end! And, yes, old Audio CD (new old stock, 10-15 years old) can be grabbed at 6-8x speed. Looks like new Audio CD pressed much worse than old ones. I don't believe in 48x exact extraction, sorry.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
eadmund 5y ago
Streaming services can delete music from your library, but if you have the CD in your house, the only thing you need to worry about is fire and theft — and if you have remote backups, you needn't worry about that either. Plus FLAC is audibly better than streaming formats, and disk space is cheap enough these days to store an entire library in FLAC.
dangravell 5y ago
There are lots of people who still purchase CDs. At least four a week is my normal haul from charity shops!

londons_explore 5y ago

> rethink the entire "crowd-sourced rating" thing The real fix is to not have a single global rating for a product, but instead have 'personal ratings'. Ie. Every product rating I see is either a rating I have given, or Amazon's best prediction of the rating I would give if I had bought that product. Such predictions are inherently hard to game, since if you start artificially rating your friends products highly, then the system will show high ratings only for your friends products to you. Then they can do things like "I see you bought this product thinking it would be 4 stars, but you actually gave it 2 stars. We apologize for getting it wrong this time - have a refund of half the purchase price". That gives the AI team plenty of financial motivation to get the ratings correct.

Closi 5y ago
The issue with your proposed model is that it assumes Amazon is a neutral actor who are attempting to accurately predict what you would like. In reality, Amazon are incentivized to sell you more stuff, so allowing them to calculate ratings through some mysterious black box would introduce perverse incentives (i.e. Amazon is incentivized to sell more higher-margin stuff - would they be more tempted to inflate a product that is actually a '4 star' to a '5 star' to close the deal? Also how can we be sure that their black-box algorithm doesn't generally inflate Fire tablets and deflate iPads? This can happen even if the algorithm is entirely open). Secondly, would probably reduce trust in the product rating system (as it will be necessarily opaque and hard to understand compared to the existing approach of averaging the reviews). Amazon won't even fix basic review gaming - not because they can't (otherwise they would have acquired Fakespot) - but presumably because fake reviews help with sales.
- rgavuliak 5y ago
  You say Amazon is incentivized to sell you more stuff, but this case clearly says they care more about objective ratings than about sales :)
  - Closi 5y ago
    I don't think that logically follows :) If Amazon had a ratings black box, they would not be incentivised to be fair with it. But a simple-to-understand ratings system may help sales more than an untrustworthy-black-box calculated rating (particularly considering reviews are about trust).

fmajid 5y ago

Rate-limit the ratings, not the purchases.

gpt5 5y ago
In this case this is about spiking the CD in the top seller charts / search results. Amazon is limiting purchases due to the increased returns from random buyers who buy it and immediately return. They could probably limit the number of returns to 4 instead of purchases, but it might be complicated legally due to their return policy (i.e. they'd need to update the return policy and inform the customer.)