Tell HN: Amazon.com is limiting purchases of Audio CDs to four-per-week

Because I’ve worked at a video game company for years, and gotten a good perspective on the value of speculation.

This one time our DC does network maintenance, we alert players of possible larger latencies on the coming weekend, and the playerbase is absolutely certain the latency comes from some mythical AI-based anticheat - and that we’ll announce a massive round of bans soon.

I’m not sure whose razor it should be, but essentially ”what if there is no conspiracy” should IMHO be the default mode. If you spot weird behaviour and the vendor acknowledges it as a bug, why presume it’s actually something nefarious?

If they have 1000+ accounts ordering 1 CD per customer then this won't affect them until they have more than 4 customers at once.

It's completely bizarre to me that Amazon, with all that data and ML cannot detect this and hammer down.

Then again their best recommendations to me are extremely simplistic "you bought a washing machine, maybe you want a washing machine?" attempts, so I guess not.

Or they just don't care that much because that costs money and this is just easier and cheaper.

> Someone running a r(ating)-aas business might have 1000 accounts and order 1 cd per customer per account.

These are used Audio CDs. You're lucky if Amazon has one 3rd party seller with a copy to buy. There sure as hell aren't thousands available!

OK, just let me buy lossless music from iTunes then, nope can't do that... neither can I on Amazon.

The reality of the situation is that many artists are not releasing digital versions on sites that provide lossless downloads (like bandcamp or beatport). So if you want the highest quality you can get, you're either subscribing to Tidal/Deezer/Apple Music (where you don't own the music) or you're buying a CD.

External USB optical disc players are widely available and convenient enough for ripping purposes. And people who listen to a lot of music might have a traditional CD player hooked up to a living room receiver - I know someone who even still has one with a CD changer feature.

I’ve considered it, but part of what’s nice about CD-ROMs is the convenience. I can click a button and have a fantastic archive in my mailbox the next day. For other people, it’s a method that doesn’t require any technical knowledge. Want to archive your music forever? Don’t want to learn how to properly back up digital data? Buy a CD-ROM.

> You might consider M-Discs, which are optical discs as large as 100 GB (BDXL) that you can burn yourself, and which should have the same longevity as a CD-ROM.

It's not clear to me that there's anything special about the BDR M-Discs vs. other BDR discs.

It looked like original DVD M-Discs have been discontinued, last time I checked. IIRC, those where the things that all the articles about M-Disc longevity were written about.

CD-ROMs typically don’t degrade. CD-Rs and such do.

CD-ROMs have physical pits etched into the plastic, as do mass-produced DVDs and BDs. These advantages don’t apply to discs you produce yourself, however.

It can happen, but it’s rare—not so rare that I forgo backups, but rare enough that I continue to maintain an archive of actual CD-ROMs.

The problem is that no one on Earth buys used music CDs due to the Amazon.com best seller ranks. The whole SEO spammer idea is nonsensical in this case, and I highly doubt Amazon is trying to target SEO spammers buying thousands of copies of used Audio CDs. I'm like 99.9% certain it's a mistake.

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.

Literally no one on Earth cares about the current value of the best seller rank of a used CD for some random 80s band.

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.

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

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.

I do. I buy CD of the albums I like to collect them.

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.

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.

There are lots of people who still purchase CDs. At least four a week is my normal haul from charity shops!

Criticker does the rating prediction thing really well.

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.

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.)