Wasn't this because of rating spiking? They'd buy tons of these, then after rating went up return them to spike ratings on the charts as a form of marketing.
Is hacker news now the place SEO spammers go to get support?
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".
That said, I'll pay even more if they offer high-quality downloads on Bandcamp.
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!).
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.
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.
There isnt much reason to buy a physical disc unless you want the disc itself.
Plus FLAC is audibly better than streaming formats, and disk space is cheap enough these days to store an entire library in FLAC.
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.
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.
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).
imagine, all those years, since 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=erichocean just to be caught out in the end! that's just heartbreaking.
Interesting idea, but who the hell buys a used Audio CD due to its Amazon bestseller rank? I sure don't.
I can maybe see SEO spamming (or whatever) for something like USB chargers or HDMI cables or something. A commodity item that people simply want cheap products with good ratings, and otherwise don't care.
But not music. Literally no one buys old used Audio CDs because of the Amazon best seller rank. It's not even on the list of considerations.
I'd highly suspect support folk are saying it's an error because they have no idea what is happening so that counts as an 'error', and "it will get fixed" is a guess/hopeful assumption to fob the user off.
I'm certain it is unintended, but who knows if anyone in a position to fix it at Amazon is even aware of the issue. The front page of HN is a great way to give it some visibility…
The whole SEO spammer idea for used music CDs doesn't pass the smell test. There's only a few copies available to buy for most used CDs anyway (if you're lucky), so there's no way to pull off the scam.
The SEO spammer idea sounds good for other products (e.g. USB chargers, HDMI cables, etc.) but used Audio CDs ain't one of them. You can't even pull of the scam because there isn't enough product to do it.
Of course I hope the account would get canceled, but based on other areas these folks seem able to create reasonable numbers of accounts.
USB chargers? HDMI cables? Sure, I'd buy your SEO spammer theory that people are messing with the product rankings somehow.
But not used music CDs. You search Amazon for the used CD you already know you want, pray they have even one copy, then buy it. I don't think in 20+ years of buying CDs online, I've ever looked at a best seller rank.
But the real problem with your theory is that there aren't many copies of these things! Certainly not "thousands" as you implied. There's like…two (if you're lucky, a lot of times Amazon doesn't have any 3rd party sellers and you have to check eBay or whatever). I don't see how buying two used CDs, then returning them 30 days later to a 3rd party seller, helps anything with the best seller ranking.
However, this IS an issue in everything from book lists (which predate Amazon actually and happen outside of amazon with bulk book buys) to I thought regular music "sales" which have become easier to manipulate because total unit sales are low (given streaming etc etc).
No. It's obviously a bug.
Perhaps related to ratings (There's also chart spiking which is uniquely CDs, which would also have high Amazon returns) . A 40 limit accidently got set to 4 perhaps on Friday. I can't see a customer returning 100% of their CD's lasting long so perhaps it's a limit normally on new customers. Often the same CD has limits around 4.
Or maybe the bug is related to a different limiting mechanism. An engineer set a limit to all CDs not just the one that's in demand perhaps, which they do set for limited stock.
> Is hacker news now the place SEO spammers go to get support?
Why not?
If I want to buy a 6 disc boxed set, does that qualify me as an SEO spammer too?
wtf is wrong with you?