discogs marketplace?

Oh! Thanks for that—I saw 'search for barcodes & other identifiers' and thought it was just for items used to differentiate versions of releases. I'm relieved that it works for song titles too.

“hey check it out we made all the buttons and tables rounder and added borders and shit”

otm

when you search for a track title it brings up the album or EP it is on, but to see if it was on any compilations you have to click on the Appearances dropdown, whereas before it would show you all results at once. It's a minor quibble but it's very frustrating to use and it's the kind of thing that's indiciative of an organisation that doesn't know or hasn't investigated how its users actually use the site.

Also, it's just so prone to crashing and not loading. I have to open Discogs in incognito mode 90% of the time just to use it now.

a couple of years ago they trialled a feature where you could click on a track title and it would list all the releases that track was on, was really useful if you were looking for a specific version or mix of something. of course they pulled that feature after a few months

everything they've done since has made the site worse

lol @ "Now Hiring Senior Site Reliability Engineer" at the top. good call guys

haha yes I saw that

They need one. The app (trash) crashes regularly for me now and the mobile site (also trash, but less so, and in different ways) is extraordinarily slow/times out on me all the time now.

Maybe I’m under some illusions about a) the volume of commerce on Discogs or b) how much revenue you’d need to make a site like this profitable, but I can’t imagine they’re doing anything but making money hand over fist.

Despite numerous quibbles, I’ve found Discogs an invaluable resource for the past 10 years, in too many ways to enumerate. It seemed like an example of a site that did what it did very well and also seemed likely to stick around for a long time, providing its owners and staff with a decent living and providing users with necessary services and information.

I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes there, but this seems less and less likely to be the case. If it goes, or is sold to some revenue-maximizing conglomerate & run into the ground, I’ll be fairly bereft.

i'm not sure how many people actually work there but I don't think it's very many. they have to be raking it in.

Hosting bill could be a big one.

yea the site gets used for reference constantly, in fact I suspect like 90% of their traffic comes from people who never bought or sold anything on it

They could do a subscription model, like x$/yr to maintain your collection on there, waived if you’ve bought or sold anything in the past 12 months.

Maybe I shouldn’t be giving them any ideas.

they could, like, pay users for providing their data for them lol #jarodlanier

I don't really like that idea, feel like very few would pay and for me and I assume many others cataloguing your collection is generally what leads to actually buying/selling stuff on there. I hadn't bought a single thing off there until that one pandemic afternoon I spent actually going through everything I had on there

my feeling is that it's going to end up like imdb

Bought out by Amazon and left to twist in the wind?

pretty much

i love the marketplace aspect of it, which for me mostly works really well (though I only buy and do not sell records). still bummed over how expensive overseas shipping has become, however - for the most part i wouldn't even consider buying stuff from the us or europe now (i'm in the uk)

i mean i'm deeply invested in the database too and have contributed many, many releases. there was a time when i actually felt like it was important to pitch in that way, even if that feels naïve in hindsight

i've been buying / selling since 2014 for context

ugh, I expired all my items last week so I wouldn't have to deal with posting things in December and the associated whinging about things not turning up because the Royal Mail is so fucking shit. today I got an email from someone complaining their CD hasn't arrived yet from October. yet they left me positive feedback a week after I posted it??

yea the site gets used for reference constantly, in fact I suspect like 90% of their traffic comes from people who never bought or sold anything on it

what do we think about this

https://www.discogs.com/about/listening-and-evolving-message-from-discogs-ceo-kevin-lewandowski-2023/

will read, but looks like the guy who messaged me saying his CD didn't turn up, despite leaving positive feedback over a month ago, is a serial scam artist. he has loads of negatives saying he did the same thing he did to me.

ffs. I'm going to have to refund the cunt anyway aren't I because Paypal will side with him won't they? it was only a few quid but it's the principle, fucking scumbag. is there any way to report scam buyers on Discogs?

looks like you can contact them through this form?

https://support.discogs.com/hc/en-us/articles/16078486038413-What-Can-I-Do-If-I-Suspect-I-have-Been-Scammed-

I think I helped get one account banned by doing so a few years ago

what do we think about this

Codewise it sounds like they are gong down the micro-services route… and that’s going to open its own set of problems for them no doubt.

CEO saying “first half of 2024” means this is probably a waterfalled deadlinde and it will be more like end of 2025.

what is a micro-services route?

breaking the backend (at least) of the site up into different services, which should improve scalability and make it easier to quickly deploy fixes and enhancements. Given the amount of use discogs gets, it's the right way to go, I suspect (I know nothing about the underlying technology but I have worked on plenty of aged monoliths and they get really difficult to scale after a while). Done correctly, all of this is a good thing. Done poorly, it will mean instability and shittiness.

taken at face value (which is all I can do), this is a promising statement from the CEO.

this has to hurt

https://i.imgur.com/aUStwJz.png

Refunding works again in discogs, btw.

also, they've cleaned up the wantlist emails quite a bit, I noticed

thanks, I hate it

I've never asked for a refund but bought a bunch of records totaling 170+$ and one of them, for 15$, has a bad warp and is unplayable. It was listed as VG.

I wrote the seller mentioning that, didn't ask for a refund or anything, just that the one is unplayable and the others are fine. He apologized and said he'd check to see if he had another copy, and if not I can mail it back and get a refund.

I said I can try but to be totally honest, I don't know that it's worth 15 dollars for me to have to deal with that. Where I live putting stuff in the mail is often a huge pain in the ass.

Am I crazy to think he should just offer the refund and not expect the return? He won't be able to sell it again, it's unplayable.

I'll probably eat the 15 dollars rather than get a mailer, ship it, ask him to reimburse me for the 15 plus the postage etc. Time is money.

i would've just offered you the 15 dollars back if i was the seller and you spent that much money. so i don't think it's unreasonable. can't hurt to ask.

if I were the seller I'd probably ask for a video just to confirm and then refund.

yeah I'm gonna check and see if I have a mailer and see how I'm feeling about putting it in the mail before I tell him I'm not shipping it back. I'm fine sending proof, but I also feel like what are the odds when someone with a perfect buyer rating who placed an order for that much would try to rip you off for 15 bucks.

Interesting. If I was the seller I'd just refund you. Maybe he wants to put it under some heavy books for a while and then sell it again.

sometimes the bar eats you

Been having a difficult time with Discographies not loading in the browser or app the past few days. Eventually, they load if I keep refreshing, but sometimes I'll just have to try again later.

god, i had a horrible experience with a truly unhinged seller this week. it was my bad for not glancing at the feedback -- my brain saw 97% and must have rounded up. but i paid immediately and then waited six days with no communication at all. when i asked what was up, he started getting defensive and accused me of "talking down" to him. so i just reiterated, "can you tell me when you're going to ship?" to which he replied, "i asked if you want me to cancel the order, and you're not answering my question!" lol, what a clown. i got my money back and plan to leave negative feedback.

i'll admit that him charging 8 fucking dollars to ship a 7" made me slightly less patient than i normally would be. but even so, if a buyer paid me and i couldn't manage to ship the record in six days, i would surely say something

I have a few jazz albums that have been on my wantlist forever and I keep seeing the same two items show up under different sellers with like 1-15 seller ratings…seems like instead of showing up under new seller accounts there’s a new scam going where they’re showing up under little-used accounts. Maybe this has always been going on but it seems newer to me.

man maybe i should move to north carolina if i can get $10 for marty balin records. 90% of that new arrivals was in my dollar bin 15 years ago. some of it still is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0ucjun8yAQ

i mean there are worse places to live. its nice down there. i do sometimes feel like a dinosaur for not making level 42 records $12 or whatever but i just can't do it. i sell things for more on discogs though for sure. or at least i sell things there that i never thought would be worth selling online. but that's just time and inflation. i even have a hard time pricing madonna singles from the 80s for over 10 bucks. feels wrong! there are so many of them. but that's the marketplace for you. and they have gone up naturally in price. they aren't crazy prices.

i'm definitely selling more discogs stuff now in the store. i have also almost fully integrated all my online stock with my regular store stock. i used to separate things for some reason. i didn't want to scare people around here who tend to be thrifty. but people are really buying. i'll take down 10 or 15 records from discogs that i sold in the physical store on a busy day and 5 years ago that might have been 2 a day.

january was great. sold so many records. i just keep filling it up. must be that bidenomics.

I have no problem with people charging what they think they can get (I guess, sometimes I wish people didn't feel the need to squeeze every dime out of a record). My problem is more with these flip videos stores make of, like you said, dollar bin stuff being hyped as JUST IN! It's just so depressing, especially when it's both common stuff and you can tell it's not even in strong shape.

still waiting for the craze to die down here, used shopping is a joke

Rather than going by percentages, there should be some kind of "three strikes" rule for bad sellers on discogs who do high volume. I recently bought from a seller with 316 negative comments and 443 neutral comments. I didn't notice this because of course the feedback percentage is 98.1% positive.

I'm not a punitive person, but it seems obvious to me that anyone with literally hundreds of negative comments about everything from unreasonably slow shipping and missing / lost items to poor communication and overgrading should not be permitted to sell on this platform.