Goodreads is only good (eh, decent?) as a database of books you've read. All the other functionality is pointless and or broken. The recommendation system is a joke and is obviously used to promote nonsense instead of giving you personalised recommendations.
They have further hamstrung it recently by having it that non-moderators (or some euphemism for someone with such rights) can no longer add new books. I regularly read weird stuff not in their system and adding this extra barrier is disastrous.
I still use it...well, can I say I still use it if the last time I tried to add a book I couldn't? ... I just checked back - that was a month ago, and I even made a forum post about the book that it be added, but nope, book's not there...it seems nobody has even looked at the post. Sad times at goodreads. What a weird site. It's still charming in many ways.
Yes that is the most painful thing on the entire platform. And supposedly the only reason it exists is because Amazon the owner doesn't want to deal with copyright issues of the photographs of the book covers. Antiquarian bookshops might have a lot of books that never have been categorised in this manner and to read mostly niche stuff and essentially being told nope you can't keep track of this read the 2023 best seller instead, kills culture.
At least they integrated more automation so that many titles from Amazon's catalogs appear on Goodreads quite soon without manual work. So a lot of the recent stuff in the main languages at least often doesn't need to be added manually anymore.
It's crazy how much Goodreads relies on unpaid "librarian" contributions to keep their data in check. One problem with allowing the general population to add titles to the database is that the chance of getting malformed entries that will require manual fix ups (from these volunteers) later on is pretty high.
> I just checked back - that was a month ago, and I even made a forum post about the book that it be added, but nope, book's not there...it seems nobody has even looked at the post.
Volunteer librarians + zero dev support means that, if you really want to see the addition, you should bump your post daily or so until by chance it catches the eye of somebody...
For me, it's more of a database to keep track of books I want to read in the future. I can't read everything immediately after reading a recommendation or seeing it mentioned somewhere. Mostly I use goodreads to organize this list. It ends up getting into the "read" list after, but that part isn't as important. And when I am approaching an empty stack of books to read, I go on there and try to pop from the top of the stack on my "want to read" high priority list.
Also yeah, the recommendation system is pretty bad. I can't believe they can't do better with all the ratings data they have. I get recommendations externally, but track them in goodreads.
I do that for a lot of things. Paper has no downtime, is robust, etc...
When it comes to longer term basic information, bitmaps and text are where it's at!
I can always convert my paper to a bitmap, and often from that to text if I want to. And authoring simple text basically works on every computer going back to the Apple //e I started on, which sits on my workbench to this day. (it's there to play various games people still write for it!)
That can be solved with better tiering and categories.
I like low budget horror. I like how rookie filmmakers are capable of bringing brand new ideas out of the aether without even realizing it. I like it when a cheap actor has a single moment of greatness for no discernable reason.
I'm not stupid enough to think that any of them stack up with The Greats but I still like the films and personally rate them highly. Most film nerds would probably not appreciate my toplist, but it's not my fault everyone sorts by All.
What I've found as a better metric of 'good' (at least for fiction) is the number of ratings, especially combined with star rating.
If something has a high number of ratings it's popular enough that it's probably decent (at least if you're into that genre).
Like a 4.38 rating w/ 2.7 million ratings (The Fellowship of the Ring) is a better bet compared to a 4.98 star with 150 ratings (random new book by unknown author).
Also, Goodreads doesn't have a 10 point system like IMDB, right? I believe all the ratings are 0 to 5.
I only use it to see if/where a book belongs to/in a series. No other aggregate-type website seems to provide this information in any usable fashion.
Used to use it for book release notifications too, but that broke some years ago for me and I've yet to receive a response to my support request from like 4 years ago.
It's great for following people who read interesting books and may leave reviews that are worth reading. Of course this is an an extension of the database of books you've read, because you can compare your ratings quite easily with those of other people and find things they liked that you didn't know about yet. That's a great source of recommendations, much better than the automated systems.
I'm not sure why people like it so much. My aunt-in-law is high pressuring me to use it.
I have my library listing all the books I checked out. I have a pdf/epub reader that has a history of the books I read(although a new phone will probably wipe that out).
For a while, I was merely writing down my books in a dedicated notebook, but I realized that it didn't really matter, if a book was important, I remembered it. If it was bad, I forgot about it. I could have typed these into google sheets so it was sharable. I wonder if that is an acceptable option.
It's social media for book readers. I user it to primarily see what my friends read and what they think about those books and about the books I read. It's not just place to keep note of books you read.
This is exactly why my wife, our friends and I use Goodreads as well. It's fun to see what everyone is reading, and to comment on a book or ask what they thought about a book they just finished. We also enjoy comparing our year-in-review infographic that Goodreads creates each year.
Couldn’t agree more. There seems to be some confusion in this thread about the product’s value preposition - it’s a social network, not an archiving system. Using GoodReads alone strikes me like using Facebook alone, there’s just not much value there without other users.
Wow. I didn't know there was a word for this. This is why I only use ebooks now because physical books would just pile up.
10 years in jail got my reading list down considerably though. Managed to read over 800 books, though the one book that I really, really wanted to read[*] I only obtained just before my release and never finished: In Search of Lost Time by Proust.
[*] Based on a comment by a character in Murakami's 1Q84 that the only time you will have enough spare time to read Proust is if you end up in prison.
I never understood that concept. What is wrong with having your own library? I have about 200 books on my shelves I haven't read and any time I want to I can find something interesting. It's s luxury but not anything I'm embarrassed about. Makes more sense than keeping the books I've already read on my bookshelves.
Nothing wrong with it as long as you have the space; anything else is more of a logistics challenge. I like owning books, sure they take up a lot of space and it's not likely I'll read or re-read them any time soon, but I think it's important to have it.
But also, more and more, having the physical space and safety to own a 'static' collection like books is becoming a luxury and a privilege.
I am into my first thousand books. If I have a queue of 10-20 already purchased (garage, deals, new, offers) and someone recommends a book somewhere such as HN, I add it.
I don't think tracking books you want to read is Tsundoku.
I use a Google Sheet for the neighborhood book club list. It is handy for reference--did we read X, and if so, who picked it? The group has been going for something like 18 years, after which even the very good and the very bad can be forgotten.
For me, I like it better than my own list because I was spending unnecessary time finding and organizing books. So I like having the spelling and year right and just list management of want to read, reading, read. I did it in a google sheet, but now I spend less time using it.
I also like that I can add friends and see what they read. There’s no chance that I’ll open my aunt’s book list sheet once a week to see what’s changed but I would love to see her reading in my feed along with my other friends.
I found it often did what social media is partly designed to do—-make one insecure about whatever the focus is. You’re either not reading the right books, not analyzing and commenting enough on books you read for enjoyment, or not reading enough regardless of your actual place on those subjective spectrums. All their to make you feed the social media machine with your free labor in the form of analysis/reviews or whatever.
I like Zotero, which is developed for academic reference management, so it can work with longform articles, blog posts, as well. It has zero recommendation features and very limited group support, which I see as a feature.
Zotero is great for keeping an inventory of your books. Super easy to add books just by entering the ISBN and sometimes tweaking the fetched entry a little.
I always export the books we have to a spreadsheet file for reference on my smartphone when we're going to a second-hand book fair.
There are two recommendations systems in Goodreads. One is the official, I agree it is completely broken. The other is "Readers also enjoyed" section on each book page and this one is very good.
It doesn't seem so good and I can't imagine it's using anything sophisticated to make recommendations. What would be great is if it copied Netflix's Cinematch of yore and did SVD on a giant matrix of what you're liked/disliked and what others who have read the same books have liked/disliked.
The new UI "upgrades" make it much harder to use as a database of books you've read.
I accidentally marked the wrong edition of a book as read the other day and it took me like 20 minutes to figure out how to switch the entry to the correct version.
Like a series list might only have one version of the book listed and it'll show the book as unread for you which can be really confusing when you've read 1000+ books and you're checking if you completed something or where you dropped it.
They are valuable the reasons you mention. I'm an avid reader, and sometimes people will ask me a question about a recommendation or what I've read, and I have a complete brain lapse (to the extent it's as if you'd wonder if I read at all). Having a list helps that anxiety. I don't really use the other features, and only settled on Goodreads after the Shelfari "merge".
I do the same with logging film watches on IMDb, which is actually useful because I can visualize exact watch behavior by the timestamps, and using exports I can also query my film history for personal recommendations (select documentaries that are horror tagged I've watched from the last 10 years).
Similarly to Letterboxd, I use it primarily for maintaining my read and to-read lists. It's a pretty decent tool for that purpose.
Unlike Letterboxd, though, sometimes its reviews can be valuable, as long as you avoid big, popular books. Or you think gif extravaganzas are an acceptable means of literary criticism.
With Goodreads it's strange because the ratings and reviews are pretty central in the UI. Lots of web sites have or have had parts that were completely trash but were easy to ignore. For example, for years it seemed like most of the YouTube comments on any video were something like "die, <slur>" for no discernible reason, regardless of the video content or the demographics of the channel, but it didn't matter because it was so easy to not see that part of the page and just think of YouTube as a site that didn't have (useful) comments. With Goodreads the reviews and ratings seem so central and hard to ignore, it's weird that they can get away with putting garbage front and center, even if they have other core functionality that is useful.
> Goodreads is only good (eh, decent?) as a database of books you've read. All the other functionality is pointless and or broken.
Why would you need a service to keep track on what you read? I have a text file with a list of book and some notes about every book. Works perfectly for me.
My memory doesn't "iterate" very well. Ask me all the places I visited last year, and I'll fail to recall some of the big ones. But if you say the name of the place, of course I know I was there.
Same with books. I've had plenty of times where I'd start reading a book and then a chapter in recall it. It's just nice to have a list.
> Why would you need a list at all?
> If it's worth remembering, you'll remember you've read it, and if you want to refresh your memory what better than to reread?
If it’s not worth remembering, you won’t remember if you read it or not — so you could waste time rereading a forgettable book until you realize. ;)
Having a couple notes about the things that stood out to me at the time is a great way to remind myself how I felt about books I’ve long since stopped thinking about.
Oh I'm sure I can't recall a bunch of (details of) books I've read.
On the flip side, I have a firm belief that every book worth reading changes you at least a little, so even if I don't remember it consciously, it has had an impact on me.
I did try writing notes at some point, and stopped after the first attempt. That was several years ago and I never read those notes :)
Yeah, I've read the same book multiple times before, years apart, without realizing it. Only when I went back to Goodreads later to mark it as read did I realize that... well, I had already read it.
On the flip side, I can enjoy a book more than once. This is a definite plus.
I don't keep a list of books that I read for exactly this reason. But the drawback is that I have a few nordic detective stories on my bookshelf and I don't remember which of them I read already.
I'm learning now that this is even something that people keep track of.
This next section isn't meant to be shitty: but what's the purpose of even keeping track of that? I've read hundreds, maybe thousands of books over my life and don't have a list of them anywhere, nor can I see a use for that.
To keep track of authors and series I follow, over many years.
To collect quick notes. Both for myself and ready for recommendations to others.
To avoid trying again authors I dismissed ages ago (but whose book covers and blurbs still tempt me.)
To keep several lists/queues to things to read (theme-based lists most of them).
A few years ago I added date marks for when I read or re-read each item.
I general these lists have made my reading more systematic and I can now always, but always instantly pick something that I wanted to read AND is on the shelf at the library.
personally, having a list of books helps me keep up the reading habit.
usually I have months of reading, followed by months of not touching a book.
having a list in notion reminds me to continue.
in addition having a list of books I want to read (ghost library in japanese?) reminds of the things I don't know yet or haven't read which in turn helps keeping the reading habits.
You may also simply have much better memory of author names and works titles than I or others have. I often can't quote a name on the spot even when I vividly remember the book (or movie, or track). Or be much earlier in your reading career.
For me these lists (which I regret starting far too late in my own reading career) now cover about 9000 items.
For me the prompt to starting the process was noticing that I was again and again giving a chance to really terrible authors. That had to stop. And it did.
I have lists of books I want to read. And books I'm "reading", which actually means have them on hand and ready to go and or actually reading them.
As a natural feature of clearing out those lists when I finish a book, you create a book read list. I don't have much use for this but it is interesting to review the stats on say author nationality.
Same reasons to use a service instead of text file for anything else: ease of use (e.g. you can connect your Kindle to automatically add a book to the list on completion), metrics, challenges, etc.
I mean it's convenient to have quick links to extra resources and the like, but... those are a single search query away anyway, so a text file is fine.
I really should start a notes file or spreadsheet to log my collections of things; I'm at a risk to accidentally buy doubles of e.g. video games now with all the cross platform releases and promotions. Play them though? Nah, I got a backlog and I prefer my 10 year old comfort games.
For myself, it’s much less about keeping track of what _I_ read, and much more more about seeing what my friends read. Perhaps it’s trite or mundane, but there are people from high school I haven’t seen in years whose reviews I look forward to because it brings me joy to read their voice again.
I’ve always seen GoodReads as more of a social network than just a list of what one’s read because you’re right, the latter is well replaced by a document.
Good point. I was so frustrated at how bad the book Atomic Habits was, (in comparison to Power of Habit).
It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have. Lots of idealistic ways to organize things. Lots of mental gymnastics to supposedly make you more productive. I did like the 'improve yourself 1% a day', but I did that with a spin bike and quickly got injured...
Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic.
Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone agreed with me because I wasted hours reading Atomic Habits. Thank you Good Reads. It was therapeutic.
> I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic.
Not sure if you're serious or sarcastic, but I completely agree. Productivity hacking culture needs to die a painful death. Life is about so much more than just maximizing output...
Anyway, getting off all drugs has been great, mostly due to the hedonic treadmill/tolerance.
Similar with video games. Games are fun today, but if I play them for a few weeks, they become work.
I get way more excitement out of achieving a new 3D print design or finishing a coding feature. Not to mention, reading non-fiction is pretty great, mind blowing stuff if you find the right book, as previously mentioned.
I somewhat blame Disney, I get all excited for some hedonism, and they release a crappy starwars episode. I'm more disappointed than if I worked all night.
Life is about identifying your values and finding ways to work towards those values. If he does that with productive evenings instead of watching TV, I am sure that gives him purpose and makes him happy.
> It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have.
That hits the nail on the head. I cannot comprehend how this book is so popular. It literally covered in dozens of cute little platitudes like "take little steps". It does not contain a single paragraph of original thought. It's just so... naively simplistic, so _obivous_.
I haven't read Power of Habit (maybe I should if its that different), but I have read Atomic Habits and I found it useful. Admittedly I didn't get past the 3rd chapter, I felt like at that point I knew what they were getting at and didn't need much more. Maybe I missed out on a lot, but what I got from those 3 chapters was enough (basically just the idea of doing something every day, even if its the literal bare minimum).
>Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic.
No, god no! That book horrible just like the its Atomic cousin. I tried both and these are such sheer waste of time and can be a good tool to humiliate your own intellect.
"Tiny Habits" by Dr. BJ Fogg, a research associate at Stanford, is my preferred book (though my view is more boring: I think "Atomic Habits," "The Power of Habit," and "Tiny Habits" are all worth a glance-through).
From my personal experience, I remembered the most from this book years later, in contrast to the other two. Specifically, I still use the idea of "prompts" for behaviour change. I remembered how it's typically not a good idea to use time as a prompt to do something (e.g. this is not effective: "At 8 pm every day, I will go outside for a jog"), but instead to use a prompt that's easy to notice (e.g. this is more effective: "After dinner every day, I will go outside for a jog").
I also really appreciated the idea of avoiding personally blaming yourself or others for unwanted behaviour, and looking at systems change first. I still remember the author's anecdote about solving a conflict with a roommate who complained about the bathroom floor being wet too often: instead of focusing on guilting the person, the systematic change was simply to put a bathroom towel on the floor to make it easier to dry the floor. Similarly, I've been able to keep my own bathroom cleaner by putting cleaning tools in easier reach.
Lastly, I appreciated the appendix that contains book summary charts, mnemonics (e.g. a habit can be thought of as "ABC": an anchor/prompt, a behaviour, and a celebration), and suggested habits (especially positive habits that help with tending to interpersonal relationships).
I still remember all of this years later, so in my personal experience, this book had the greatest impact on me.
~~~
For "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg, it's a bit harder to skim as it lacks the graphs and summaries from "Tiny Habits." However, the ideas are mostly the same. For example, this book focuses on triggering behaviour with "cues,” which are equivalent to "prompts" in "Tiny Habits.”
The idea of “keystone habits” also stood out as more emphasized to me in this book, where certain habits can have the most impact in contrast to others.
I suspect this book was popular because you might feel smarter from reading it, as it explores case studies about corporations and US military training, but it’s a bit harder to skim to refresh, due to lacking the graphs and summaries of the other two books.
~~~
For "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, I respect the book for what it is. It's engaging for most people to read, popular, and it makes the ideas easy to understand for lots of people. I prefer "Tiny Habits" more, but I respect “Atomic Habits” for making the ideas accessible to a larger audience.
I actually found it fairly similar to Tiny Habits: it also has diagrams, and it also has mnemonics (e.g. a habit as a Cue-Craving-Response-Reward). The author also talks about making positive habits easier to do in simple ways, similar to the “Tiny Habits” author.
I believe the biggest difference between the two was that "Atomic Habits" focused more on motivating behaviour change by focusing on a want to change your identity (e.g. by reminding yourself that a person you would want to become would practice different habits). This might be a source of criticism about the book, as the advice is less practical in contrast to the other ideas, though it has some plausibility (e.g. in my personal experience, reminders that one is a professional have been effective at changing behaviour).
Upon a skim now, I do remember having the feeling that the ideas of “Atomic Habits” were similar to those of “Tiny Habits,” but I preferred the “Tiny Habits” appendix more, and I also had a personal preference for the writing style of the book by Fogg.
~~~
To summarize this whole comment, I believe all three are worth at least a skim, though I like “Tiny Habits” the most for the writing style and provided graphs and mnemonics. But you can’t go wrong if you’re interested in habit change with any of them, as they overlap a lot and roughly cover the same ideas for behaviour change.
The pain goes away after 3 days. It becomes automatic.
But I also should clarify that this is specifically the basal ganglia that is being affected, and the basal ganglia works in a rigid way. A 'habit' isnt sticking after 50 days, you might be replacing it occasionally with something else, which is essentially breaking the habit. From the book, I can imagine a bunch of ways why this is going wrong.
Maybe you are doing something that scratches the itch that would otherwise drive the habit.
Maybe you are not doing the cue-routine-reward cycle when you do your new habit.
I feel like I'm doing a real disservice to the book because I'm summarizing ~300 pages, I'm about to hop off HN and don't want to go into further detail, and I don't even know what habit you were working on.
Don't let my terrible comment dissuade you. I also don't recommend summaries of this book, they missed too much.
People need to stop hoping for good crowd sourced reviews and ratings. Even if the platform would have the best interests it can't be done. Two simple reasons:
1. Ratings: you can not compress information down to 1 byte without losing almost all of it. I've been a professional game reviewer in another life. I used to give ratings because I was forced to by the site format. When I retired from that I looked back at tens of games I rated. The scores made absolutely no sense any way you tried to look at them. Not compared to each other, not compared to what the game set out to achieve (one way I tried to grade them as objective as possible), nothing. It can not be done.
2. By definition half of the reviews/ratings are being given by stupider than average people. How are you supposed to draw any conclusion when half of the data is garbage?
Only one thing crowd sourced ratings are useful for: helping the platform become a gatekeeper and then squeezing the reviewed.
Here's a free idea for you budding entrepreneurs: allow the user of a review site to apply their own custom weights to reviewers. If you discover a reviewer with good taste, weight their reviews more highly. And also be able to incorporate their weightings of other reviewers into your own -- if A thinks highly of B, then that raises your default weighting of B.
This is a decent idea, but not sure how it could work. I'm no mathematician, but it seems like you're dealing with an extremely large set of infinite fractions, that might take some time to compute.
For example, if I leave a 5 star review and there is one other review, 1 star, it would be 3 stars if we had the same weight.
But if someone votes me 76% "taste score", and THEY have 50% weight, and I voted THEM 37% "taste score", then both of our votes affect each other. And this would happen for an cycle of reviewers reviewing other reviewers.
Unless you meant only personal settings, in which case I think it would only work for niche audiences. There's a good chance that there's zero overlap between sets of reviewers on many products on Amazon except perhaps people who are chronically online, reviewing products. IMO those people's reviews are not as helpful as a person who leaves an occasional review, because in the latter case, the product stood out for some reason.
> Few people read reviews whether it is Amazon, Yelp, or anywhere else.
I do. IMHO, star ratings are close to pointless. They are deeply flawed even without spam, advertising, or moral outrage votes. And especially for goods that depend on a subjective reception - such as books. First, grading patterns are various. Many use either 1 or 5. For others, 4 is already a failing grade. Second, I don't care what the average reception is. I might be (and usually: I am) looking for something different from the other reader.
A review offers much more. An advantage (or disadvantage) is something I deeply care about, don't care at all, or I would use the same point, but in the opposite way. And well, other times, the review points that the person has no idea what they are talking about - e.g. it is clear that these are based on hype (or: guilty-by-association) rather than the book's quality.
When there are ratings with 1-5 stars, I filter to only read the 3 star and 2 star reviews. The 5 star and 1 star reviews are meaningless, the 4 star reviews are a minor gripe, 2 star reviews often contain valid criticism (though sometimes it's just "I hated it but there's this one thing I liked"), and 3 star reviews offer a nuanced point of view.
I don't always read reviews from Amazon, specially if it is of good enough brand that I know of, but I definitely read book reviews and not just decide on star rating. There are so many variables that definitely can't be captured in a rating. I guess majority of people does that. Most popular books are generally rated very low in Amazon or Goodreads. I don't think star rating matter as much as a single reviewer that person care about, although I could be wrong.
I have tried all of these - yes, all of these. None of them are as good as GoodReads, not even close. And that is with the understanding that GoodReads itself is really bad.
I build this app over a decade ago. https://thegreatestbooks.org which I aggregate all the "lists" and use a weighted algorithm to create a single list of the best books. I've been working on a new version with genres, and a much smarter algorithm, which I am getting close to finishing.
Bookwyrm is a great alternative I’ve been using. It’s built on activitypub so you can follow accounts from Mastodon or kbin or whatever, and can even spin up your own server if you want.
Second this. Storygraph is great and has a ton potential. It just needs a bit more development put into it to match Goodreads minus the bad parts. I wish had the "plus" subscription tier set at $10/yr not $49/yr. I'd definitely donate that much, but $49 is a lot in majority of the world.
Weird signup captcha, it requires you to open devtools and remove `onpaste="return false;"` from their email field (either that or enter your email manually, typos and all)
Everything I've seen tends to be pretty good. But it's probably more due to it being smaller, at least as far as I can tell. My guess is that the people on Storygraph actually _want_ a better Goodreads and so there's less likelihood of moderation being something that needs constant utilization. It'll be interesting to see if it gets worse as it grows.
I will say that I don't tend to read many reviews of books these days. I just don't find reviews of anything (including outside of books) to be worthwhile anymore. Take books as the example here, most online book platforms give you a free preview chapter or two. If a book is interesting to me I'll give the preview a read before I purchase (digital or physical). If it's not catching my attention I just move on. There are more books that I want to read than I will ever remotely be able to read before I die (thanks Four Thousand Weeks...) so I really just don't hesitate to drop something that really isn't banging in my head that I have to read it. Same goes for video games, I'll go watch one of those let's plays on YouTube and if it looks interesting after 20 minutes of game play I'll purchase. Reviews are just so easily gamed anymore and finding the good out there is super hard.
That's all to say, I don't read many reviews on Storygraph.
I've found Goodreads incredibly useful for discovering books and keeping track of them. Def need to read between the lines with reviews, esp. if there is a polarizing topic like mentioned in the article (glorifying Russia with ongoing Ukraine conflict). I recently read a book about Francisco de Orellana's exploration of the Amazon River in the 16th century - many reviews upset that the author wasn't using every other word to call the Spanish evil conquering colonists.
Amazon is slowly choking the life out of it, right on cue.
I used to interact with it quite a bit, now I rarely use it anymore. After this year's reading challenge is over, I'll probably just stop using it all together.
This seems focused on their review system which is fine of them to focus on. They sell books (through Amazon/Kindle) so I don't expect their own reviews to be great.
Unrelated to the reviews the app is slow and crashes often. They use dark-ish patterns to remove support for logging in with Google and completely removed it from the mobile app so I deleted the mobile app (which can't be used offline anyway) and only use the site on my phone.
All that said, I still like it more than other ones I've tried and the social element is nice too. I enjoy seeing what Internet friends are reading and I've found some good books from it. For that I wish more folks would use it. You can find my Goodreads in my HN profile.
Meanwhile, Librarything continues quietly being awesome, with deep tools for cataloging and a genuinely quirky vibe that feels like it's from a better era of the web.
It's the same with IMDB, isn't it? Toxic subgroups and communities 1-star bombing movies that haven't even come out yet. The wikipage on review bombing doesn't even list Goodreads but has many examples from IMDB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_bomb#Films,_television_...
So what could Goodreads do differently? It's true that the owners do as little as possible with the site, but that also means that overall the scoring system has very little impact. Would you trust it?
Add a way to see ratings only from trusted people and friends.
They do this now by bubbling up ratings from my contact. Id like an option to just show their average ratings instead of site wide.
I do not trust any moderators that I don’t know. So I’d rather have them just show ratings from friends or people I’ve noted as reviewworthy. And maybe one degree from them.
I think this applies to everything and I don’t trust Amazon reviews or App Store reviews, but do trust reviews from some people I know (after I’ve filtered out the “I love everything including AntMan3 and StarWars9 and Justice League” friends).
Require reviews to show a substantial understanding of what the book was about? That means moderation which is always dangerous but probably better than the alternative.
If this worked I would like it, but I think it’s impossible to automate and validate. So I only imagine an implementation being worse than nothing as mods tried to arbitrarily approve items.
I think this would make people who like specific books be willing to spend time moderating and they would reject negative reviews so everything would be 5 stars.
8,000+ authors have shared five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood. We make it easy to find the books they recommend through a book you already love, an author you adore, or a Wikipedia topic that interests you.
Yes, of course. Accuracy doesn’t make money, engagement does. This is the problem with the current state of the internet. People forgot that engagement was just the path to accuracy but is much harder to measure. So people realized that they can increase engagement to make money.
Accurate information does create a better society for everyone, in this society and in any. It's like physics - cultural karma.
Angry engaged people fed bullshit do create a worse society for everyone, every time. Karma. Equal reaction.
That one of these options has been weaponized for profit and control is independent of those facts.
It's no secret that if we don't change how society operates, we're going to make life on this planet unbearable very quickly; and this is part of the reason why.|
Poverty, hunger, and inequality are rampant in America; as are the drug issues and mental health problems that go with them. This is part of the reason why.
Our money is spent subsidizing war and oil. This is part of the reason why.
I'm using Goodreads to manage the books that I read and plan to read.
I sometimes looks at the reviews of the books, but never look at the star rating because of how uninformative it is. For most of the books that I care about their rating is somewhere between 3.0 and 4.5 and I can't for the life of me see any correlation between the my enjoyment of the book and its rating. I always assumed that this is just a consequence of taste in books being so different for different people. Averaging these personal preferences just doesn't produce a good signal.
Which brings me to the question: does anybody actual care about ratings on Goodreads?
Every single time a Goodreads post comes up it's always negative and the comments are full of supposedly better alternatives. Except those alternatives are never better. I've tried most of them and they very often are ghost towns or don't even have the book I'm reading, let alone recommend anything useful. LibraryThing comes the closest, but its UI is equally bad if not worse than Goodreads. Goodreads is good enough for me. I follow and am followed by enough people that writing reviews is worth it.
I'm building a DreamJob site for CTOs and developers who want to become CTOs, and started a podcast, but yes if I could clone myself, the best time is today.
4chan /lit/ is a highly highly underrated online 'book club'. It's almost nothing like the other boards and filled with students in literature majors. Some of my favorite books ever were recommended from there, and the 'natural flow' nature of 4chan makes it more entertaining and less mob like.
> "I really thought long about this, and I haven't slept in two days due to ongoing harassments of 4chan," cookiengineer claimed in a post to the Tenacity GitHub Issues page some 13 hours ago. "As the first people were literally arriving at my place of living, where they knocked on my doors and windows to scare us, I am hereby officially stepping down as a maintainer of this project.
There is no "group" - 4chan is not a monolith, and many of boards have members that do not mix at all. /tg/ - the traditional games board (TTRPGS and the like) - might as well be an entirely different website than, say, /pol/ or /g/. 4chan in general is also extremely tame as compared to 10 or 15 years ago.
/lit/ is the only place I can still find a book discussion that's more than surface read. But it's hard to recommend for "normal" people because, you know, chan culture.
Four-book author here (will post links if requested). I used GoodReads for years, but kept running into problems with the author tools. Finally stopped when they claimed my latest book - published this year - belonged to another author!
Considering a full-on transfer over to another platform. Thanks for all the recommendations here.
Has a good cross-media site ever been done, for books, games, shows, movies, and music in one place? Or is there anyone else who has that vision?
I could see myself spending a lot of time on a site where I could maintain one profile/habit for all of them. Each of those alone I enjoy, but I've never been able to make it a regular thing to go to a site for just one of them. I love movies but I'm not so much of a cinephile to put a lot of time into letterboxd, and so on.
Pretty much every day, one of those is important to me. But each of them alone has gaps in my life where I may not care about them much for a few weeks to a few months at a time.
For context, I am an _extremely_ happy user (and paying subscriber) of Rate Your Music . I find the genre classifications, album descriptors, user reviews and ratings incredibly useful and they have greatly enhanced my music discovery process, and my understanding of the music I come across.
IMO, the thing Goodreads has that nobody else is automatic updates from a Kindle. When I finish a book on my Kindle, Goodreads automatically tracks it. It doesn't seem possible for Story Graph or Bookwyrm or Librarything or any of these others to do that, which means I have to manually curate my list of books I've read and want to read.
Right now, my process is this: 1) buy a book, 2) read it, 3) my friends can see that I read it and left a star rating.
I think this makes a pretty hard barrier to entry in this market, because I read 99.9% of the time on my Kindle, and I'm lazy. :)
I must be out of the loop: I never knew that Goodreads mattered at all. I don't know anybody who uses it.
I understand fake reviews in Amazon are a problem: if I'm shopping there, I do look at the reviews, especially bad reviews to see if there is anything wrong with the product. I will disregard reviews that don't make sense and only pay attention to things that matter to me, but it's possible that I'll be influenced by review bombing... I'm only human after all.
> I must be out of the loop: I never knew that Goodreads mattered at all. I don't know anybody who uses it.
You're out of the loop.
Goodreads and Facebook groups are used heavily in the author and reading/fan communities. Heck, my wife is a Goodreads librarian and often helps out authors with issues (which are, unfortunately, incredibly common since Goodreads support is largely non-existent and yet another reason why the platform is horrible, probably due to to it being an effective monopoly in this space). My bet is, of the many people she knows in the community (both authors and readers), every single one is active on Goodreads.
Interesting. However, I don't pick books based on review sites. I like reading reviews of books I've already read, a kind of "conversation" with another person across the globe. But as purchasing decisions? Nope.
(Same with movies, by the way. I don't remember ever avoiding a movie because it had bad reviews, who cares?).
What gave it away? The fact that Amazon bought it, retired the API, and put a "Buy on Amazon" button on every book?
Also majority of reviews are fake. Go look at any new Ryan Holiday book months before it is released. Obviously these authors and their publishing teams know how to game the system so more people end up buying the book.
GoodReads has an incentive to sell books. It has no incentive to sell good books. All the good books have < 200 reviews and hardly anyone even knows of them.
I find that grilling out with friends and family is good. Books are really good, lots of interesting stuff to learn on the non-fiction side (and I honestly think the new AI stuff is making it even easier to learn things!), still more interesting fiction that I haven't read yet than I could ever read in a lifetime, not to mention re-reading books I already love. Similar thing with movies and tv; just finished the new season of The Bear and rewatching the first season now and it's great. Video games are pretty great; playing the new Zelda game with my daughter right now. Really enjoying museums and zoos and parks and pools and these trampoline places (which didn't exist when I was a kid) with my kids. Hiking and skiing trips and road trips are still great (though harder since I had kids). Meeting new people who live in different places and have different experiences is great.
There's lots of great stuff! But yeah, none of it is really on the internet. Touch some grass!
Oh yeah, 100%! Most of my enjoyment these days is offline. Been going to different bars in the city and playing bar games with people for the last 6 months and it's a lot of fun. More expensive than hanging out on web forums, but also way more fulfilling.
I have to disagree with YouTube. Yes, theres a lot of garbage on there, but I've managed to curate a collection of subscriptions that make _extremely_ high quality videos. Even the reccomendation system thats so often criticised here has regularly served me new channels that are right up my ally. I get more value from YT than most other sites on the net (with the exception of HN, obviously)
I've found that when websites start their decline what happens is that the barrier to getting good results from them goes up. It can still happen! It just takes more and more work, like a computer that is a bit underpowered and a bit overly bloated.
I have my well curated youtube subscriptions.. but there is less content every day. Twitch died for me a while ago. Reddit was pretty fine for at least consuming stuff until this latest debacle (it stopped being a good place for discussion long ago).
Lemmy seems promising. I have yet to have luck with mastodon. As the older apps die off slowly, new ones will appear.
I’ve come around on shorts. Many of my favorite creators take weeks or even months to create a single video, vsauce comes to mind. Shorts allow them to create shorter form content that’s still interesting more frequently, without affecting their algorithmic ranking for main videos.
I also think it works as a marketing tool. At this point, YT knows what I want and shorts act as a sort of teaser for new channels. 60 seconds of their most interesting content to see if I want to subscribe or not. It’s less commitment than watching a full (often 20 min +) video.
I'm not old but it's fairly obvious that most internet companies have refocused from an exceptionnaly long growth centered phase towards extracting value from their user base in the last few years. As a consequence things have gotten measurably worse for said users.
We should be seeing competitors emerging right now but sadly years of lax competition laws enforcement and extreme concentration of wealth amongst said companies make that unlikely in the short term.
Google maps is basically the only app as I see it which is still amazing. Besides the whole tracking your entire location thing, but you can mitigate that.
i hate how they worked ads into directions. i know some people find it easy to hear "turn left at the mcdonald's" but i've been fine at estimating distance and don't need to hear the name of a chain.
You know it's funny that I never noticed this, I always turn off the voice directions since I found them annoying.
But yeah that's an annoying experience if you use voice directions, and in some instances I could see it as really degrading the directions app, since "taking a left at the intersection" may be more clear than "turn left at the kfc"
I think the blunt answer is that it's irresponsible to outsource your social life to for-profit companies.
It's easy, and it's addictive, and it's not all bad. But it's irresponsible.
They will change your social activities in ways that you may or may not be ok with. They will treat you like a good to be sold in the most efficient way possible.
Basically - These companies treat the social lives of people as though they are cattle, herded around so they see the right ads and sold off or butchered when it's profitable. They care about the cattle only in the sense that they are a means to an end, and that end is profit.
There's a place for that kind of efficiency. Human relationships are not that place.
My biggest complaint about Twitter is that the spam has gotten worse in the last year or so. I get 2-3 spam DMs a day, and probably once every week or two I go through and report all of them but it's never-ending.
IMO the people who left Twitter (and haven't come back) were worse than anyone who's on it now. There hasn't been any meaningful change in discourse - for better or worse - that I've noticed.
This is overly cynical. And what's the hate for tiktok?
Google search is worse, twitter is becoming worse, but not unusable. I learn so much educational stuff from youtube/tiktok and connect with musicians on instagram, etc. These platforms can be useful if you want them to be.
letterboxd is also alright for finding movies to watch and critique of them. OTOH you need to play whack a mole against the meme accounts and their 4 words long super popular "reviews".
This is the cost of the infinite growth model. You can't just keep things good because you have to change something and a lot (the majority?) of that change turns out to be for the worse.
I feel like this is overly cynical. Facebook is still the best social network for certain age groups. Instagram (and Facebook) engagement is dropping but it's (they're) still one of the best mediums for getting the word out about events (for me anyway). Reddit is fine as long as old-reddit still works, though with losing API access the mobile story is about to suck.
Facebook is still a good social network so long as you limit it to friend you personally know only. Block marketplace and all groups. Use it to keep up on those distant friends and family that you are not ready to leave out of your life completely even though you don't get together often (that is they live far away from you so you can't visit in person often)
Agreed. I do not engage with groups all that much and the snippets/suggestions it shows me for some are just downright nauseating. On that note it has been useful for figuring out which of my friends are secretly assholes and which of them just like to shitpost.
> Facebook is still the best social network for certain age groups
It's a great place to hang out for 65+ retirees posting crackpot conspiracy theories, that was the main reason I left.
While I'm yelling at clouds, Facebook was better when it was more profile and people focused instead of turning the newsfeed into a twitter copy and optimizing for engagement bait content.
> Facebook was better when it was more profile and people focused instead of turning the newsfeed into a twitter copy and optimizing for engagement bait content.
Which is why I tell everyone to block every single group. If someone shares something (that is it isn't a photo they personally took, or a thought they personally wrote) hit the "block all from [whatever group it was shared from]" button. Leave all groups and market place. I did that almost a year ago and Facebook became a useful place again!
I have been complaining about this for years and years as someone who builds these types of platforms. It's the same for thousands of niches across google. The top result is camped by some SEO garbage. For instance, I run a kpop platform right now (kpopping.com) my competitors are making 10x what I make just copying my pages and putting them up on a wordpress.
I'm so sick of it. Google can't be destroyed soon enough for me.
Up until recently if you accidentally touched (NOT click/press) the star rating while scrolling through Goodreads a modal would slide up covering 3/4th of the screen asking ( more like holding at gunpoint) you to rate the book.
I don't understand how can a PM/web developer actually be this hostile. They absolutely knew it was a dark pattern and now have gone back to normal.
What upsets me most is how much of a treasure trove of data that amazon/goodreads are sitting on and yet their recommendations are still pitiful. A basic collaborative-filtering algorithm would be better than "OH WE THINK YOU WILL LIKE THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT IS IN THE SAME GENRE AS A BOOK YOU BOUGHT A YEAR AGO!".
I'll humbly plug https://abooklike.foo just in case people want better book recommendations. You can input books u like and it'll find others you may like. I can explain more about its mechanics if useful. Been working on it for around 6 years now as a side project. Anyway, just posting in case someone's scanning through the thread and happens to see : )
It's not working for me. I have two books of my own, and still, I never go there.
AFAIK Amazon acquisition didn't ruin Zappos. IMDb is more garbage than it was before, but I still use it. But Goodreads: nope, it was too close to what they already did on book selling, so they killed it. Slowly.
As someone who used Zappos a lot before Amazon acquisition, IMO the quality and selection decreased after Amazon takeover. Today, given the authentication issues across all Amazon services, I just don't go to Zappos anymore because I don't trust the products. Because Amazon. Additionally the UI is dated. Such a bummer.
Biased,.. but I've been building a site that does this for a few years now and reckon it's not bad. It's more of a passion project. Lets you type in books you like and then will find the most intersecting set of other books. https://abooklike.foo // dataset is over a year old, be warned.
Goodreads is so bad, but there’s no good book review site alternative (although many good book trackers). I’ve been wishing for a Letterboxd like alternative with good UI and features
