Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all.
But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive.
Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from acquiring or partnering with Goodreads, because their database of books and reviews could be used to instantly start competing with Amazon's book business. Amazon snuffed out that threat of competition in an instant.
Unfortunately that's exactly why so many startups get bought. Not to become part of the parent company's business, no, just not to become a competitor later. Would stronger (and enforced) anti trust laws be a solution? I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway.
I see many startups claiming, and in fact starting their existence with the very declaration or on the pretext, that “We are not like X. We are not going anywhere. We are not for sale” et cetera, I am pretty sure most of those founders would have been spending sleepless nights giddy fantasising about the moment when X acquires them.
So now any social network kind of service, which isn’t legally non-profit and open source and preferably federated, doesn’t get any cookie from me including the ones like LetterBoxd and StoryGraph.
But the problem is federated services, where you have to “choose” an instance among other frictions and all, are kinda doomed to fail. So I just use the established ones until they are unusable and keep my data regularly exported if it’s worth exporting, that is. It’s just sad.
As I recall, there were arguments at the time saying that it would be good if Amazon did nothing with it. People wanted Amazon to leave the product alone and not mess with it. And I still feel that way. What would you have wanted them to do with it?
Amazon's inshittification of everything continues. They also own AbeBooks, have their own cargo airline, Twitch, Audible, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Kindle, Ring, Whole Foods, IMDb, Zappos, Egghead, the late lamented DPReview, and a few others.
Ten years of no improvement and gradually getting slower and slower (perhaps because my "Read" lists is now several thousand items), and it's still the number one spot.
I've tried a few other places, but my friends use Goodreads, so if I want to evaluate books based on ratings from friends whom I know have similar taste, Goodreads is the only viable option.
Goodreads is the present of book reviews, and in the past it was the future of book reviews.
> It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from acquiring or partnering with Goodreads
I think there's another angle you're missing here - Amazon wanted to stop paying so much in affiliate sales. At their size, they were easily taking in tens of millions a year from all the Amazon affiliate links.
Now Amazon own it, they don't have to pay that out.
Vertical integration at its finest. They pay the authors to write the books they publish which get sold in their store that they link to from the site they own that reviews the books and pays the reviewers an affiliation bonus. No one is buying books with bad reviews. Brilliant!
The outcome we got is probably in the middle, badness-wise.
Better would be an independent Goodreads with incentives to find features that fight spam and such.
But it's hard to imagine them being able to make much money doing that, and them going under would be worse.
And honestly I'd MUCH rather have a Goodreads that Amazon does nothing with than a Goodreads that chased growth from VC money or PE or whatever to try to turn into another retail site and abandoned the "your reading history" angle.
It hasn't done nothing with it. Not nearly as much I'd like but when reading a book on my kindle, it's easy to hit the button to mark as currently reading and progress updates as you go through the book.
Full disclosure, I'm an author who has self published a few things on Amazon and setup author stuff on amazon and goodreads.
>as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything.
There are links between the two. You can buy my books on amazon (the dropdown supports other vendors) from their Goodreads pages.
But to your point about anticompetitive, I completely agree.
Why are corporations even allowed to just buy other corporations, at all?
A shitty bank bought my bank and promptly made everything about it shittier. Why is this even allowed at all? Companies buying other companies is about the most fundamentally anti-competitive thing there is.
"should never have been allowed to acquire it?"
It's very funny the way you put it. Already government has too much power and you want further they take over the economy and do pulls and pushes.
Free market means, freely allowing people to trade using persuasions — not government using its coercion.
People also often forget other side of the picture.
1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to sell their companies to Amazon or Microsoft.
2. Why don't they ask government to put people in jail who are buying products from Amazon and making Amazon big?
Recently EU also making plans to regulate the battery replacement. I covered that here briefly in my site political-ledger dot com
"should never have been allowed to acquire it?" It's very funny the way you put it. Already government has too much power and you want further they take over the economy and do pulls and pushes.
Free market means, freely allowing people to trade using persuasions — not government using its coercion. People also often forget other side of the picture.
1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to sell their companies to Amazon or Microsoft. 2. Why don't they ask government to put people in jail who are buying products from Amazon and making Amazon big?
Recently EU also making plans to regulate the battery replacement. I covered that here briefly in my site political-ledger dot com
Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X" ranking.
Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book should have a 2.5. If you don't rate like this then you just end up with garbage.
Just allowing a boolean rating (ala Rotten Tomatoes when aggregated) is much better, assuming you can get enough reviews for that system to actually work (probably > 30 is required for most applications).
I think "aggregated personal Elo" would be a fun way to rank things: I just give you two books that you've read and you tell me which is better. Do this loads of times and eventually you have a solid ranking of every book you've ever read. Aggregate everyone's rankings and you have a much more robust system then "please rate this book out of 5 stars".
Seems like this is culturally different for some things. And corporations can influence too.
I have a friend who has four restaurants in Tokyo, and I've been several times there. If you keep attention to the restaurant reviews in Google Maps, Japanese people is very hard. They'd go like "The food is great, incredible service, surprising flavors, very good experience, best Spanish food I've had in a long time..." and then they go "...but I know they can do better and have space to improve. 2/5".
In Spain we would be like "Nice beer, they gave us some tapas. 5/5"
Gig economy corporations also have made this worse. You're scared to score your driver, your server or your hotel by less than a 5/5 or somebody might get punished or fired (and maybe they didn't even had a contract in the first place).
And this becomes a snake biting its own tail. Now I rarely go to a place with a score of less than a 4/5, and I'll score relatively high because I know I could influence votes out of what people consider "worthy to visit".
I disagree that stars should be evenly distributed between 1 to 5 stars. I think it's quite possible that most books that people choose to read end up being a 3 (good with some flaws) or 4 (good but not all-time great). It's kind of like the same thing with pizza. I'd give most pizza a 3 or 4. Very few 1s and 5s to be sure. 1 doesn't have to mean bottom 20% of pizzas. It can mean "awful, couldn't finish," where very few pizzas would fall into that category. 5 doesn't need to mean "best 20% of pizzas," it can mean "telling strangers about it the next day," again where very few pizzas would fall into that category.
The Modern Zelda reviews are a prime example of this.
The non-industry people reviewing Zelda have 4 options, 7/10, 8/10, 9/10, 10/10.
A 7/10 means the game was bad and you had a hard time finishing it, and won't be playing again.
8/10 means the game was also bad, but you had fun for a few minutes/hours.
9/10 means the game meet minimum expectations.
10/10 means you enjoyed the game, but there were countless flaws that took away from enjoying the game.
10/10 Greatest game of all time means, the game was above average.
Now, this same system applied outside Nintendo's curve, you knock these numbers down 2.
Its incredibly hard to figure out if a Nintendo game is good, if you treat them like other companies. Even Nintendo believes this and will yank early access/ads/etc... from gaming websites if you don't comply with the Nintendo curve.
> the average book should have a 2.5
Disagree on this. This assumes that people read books completely at random. In reality, people read blurbs/summaries or get a recommendation and the typical book you read is likely to be better than the midpoint between the worst book you've read and the best book you've read (I'm assuming a linear scale mental model).
IIRC they initially gave you a text for each star like
1 - I hated it
2 - It was okay
3 - I liked it
4 - It was great
5 - I loved it
I thought it was helpful for framing what a score would be but I haven’t seen this in the app or anywhere for a long time. At least it avoids the problem of Amazon where a review is like “Best book I’ve ever read but the copy I received had a rip on the dust jacket - 1/5”.
Learned through experience to skip anything below a 4 or very high 3 now. Probably missing some interesting stuff but I don’t read that often anyway.
See https://www.criticker.com/explain/ -- it works sort of like what you're suggesting. You rank movies from 0-100, which is different from rating them. Your percentile ranking scores are compared to other users' rankings, and then it can suggest movies that it thinks you will rank highly.
IMO the real problem with something as subjective as books or movies is that even completely honest, well-reasoned reviews are going to be all over the map. My review of a Pride and Prejudice movie is going to be maybe 3/10, but my wife would give it 7/10, while we have the opposite reactions to something like The Hunt for Red October.
I don't care about reviews from experts or the unwashed masses. I don't even really care about reviews that much -- I'm more interesting in ratings from people who like the same kind of stuff I do.
It'd be definitely interesting to see a book review site like this. In the meantime, for math books, I trust curated rankings by MAA: https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews
> I just give you two books that you've read and you tell me which is better. Do this loads of times and eventually you have a solid ranking of every book you've ever read. Aggregate everyone's rankings and you have a much more robust system then "please rate this book out of 5 stars".
We've done exactly this with Flickchart - https://www.flickchart.com - presenting the user with two movies at a time and letting them choose what, in their opinion, is the better film. We then aggregate everyone's rankings to generate a combined chart of the best films of all-time that's always in flux and changing.
We take into account each user's total number of rankings (refinement), and the total number of movies they've ranked (breadth of knowledge). We also use time as a factor - given that something that just came out has had less time to be "an all-timer" than something that has existed in the world longer and had the time to be experienced by more people.
We created this way back in 2009 and are currently building the next-generation of it on a modern web stack. This new iteration is also more modularized so we can expand more easily from just movies to other domains (books, games, music, TV, etc.).
And in many such systems the peer pressure to give a 5 is tremendous, which further devalues the rating system. Uber drivers for example have told me that if more than a few customers give them a 4 they will be effectively fired. Restaurants, tour companies etc have asked me to please give them the maximum number of stars on Yelp, Google, Tripadvisor, etc lest there be dire consequences for them.
This is of course Goodheart's Law in action but I don't have any ideas for fixing the problem.
When you go to rate a book the system asks you if it was better or worse (maybe same) then a book of you previously read closest in rating or some hidden matchmaking rating (MMR).
I think having books having both a personal and global score would be nice as well.
I don't think it would be possible for someone to change their rating but that may be a feature.
I also don't think this solves recommendation though it may be useful as a feature.
Well rating scales don't have any absolute meaning, only that which is attributed to them either by the reviewer or the audience. On any aggregate review site the scale of the aggregate score will take on its own semantics, which is the aggregate of all the users' own semantics they use for their individual scores.
And for most people, it seems like the semantics of rating scales don't align with a normal distribution about the 50% mark, but something more like letter grades where 70% is decent/mediocre, while 50% is a failure (in the US).
IMO this makes at least as much sense as centering around 50%; if you only score 50% of the points on a test I don't think you're competent in a subject, and if your book only meets 50% of the criteria for a great book then it might be a bad book. But again, it's all arbitrary and only makes sense in the context of the particular reviewer or aggregate community.
I interviewed with Goodreads in 2012. If there's one thing I learned it's that when you give people weird gimmick problems ("How many Starbucks are there in Manhattan?") in an 8 hour interview that was supposed to be 2 hours, you're going to produce an awful lot of ill will when you reject people because they're "too technical". The whole thing was the most bizarre interview experience of my life.
80% of reviews being "got the ebook for free before release in exchange for a very honest review" or "here're my 10000 words thoughts on spoiler spoiler spoiler" and overuse of goddamn inline gifs everywhere made the review section unreadable. It's more like a social network with gamification of book reviews.
Looking at a random book: 4.36 stars, 74 ratings, 28 reviews. Release date: 18. July 2023 (in 15 days)
No comment on that required heh.
Goodreads is semi-useful to keep track of upcoming book releases, but don't bother reading the reviews, and the score is at best a vague indicator (and definitely misleading until months after the book is actually available).
This article starts off pretending to be a criticism of Amazon, and this is highlighted in the headline. After a few vague critical gestures towards Amazon in the first four paragraphs, it gets to its real point: Goodreads, a social network, has woefully inadequate censorship, which can lead to financial losses to authors and publishers.
According the the WaPo, Amazon's crime with Goodreads seems to be that it hasn't kept the site up with changes in censorship standards and technology, and just lets whoever say whatever about books.
For anime we have myanimelist.com, for (asian) dramas we have mydramalist.com; and both seems to work, for both tracking and for recommendations... but something like that for books does not exist.
Goodreads acts as the tracker for me, but a recommendations engine it absolutely sucks. It has never recommended me a book ever, I have to rely on /r/fantasy to churn out new recommendations for me.
In the age of AI and LLM and whatever bullshit, how hard is it for Amazon (owner of AWS) to see my read list (which I diligently update) and recommend me something based on the things I've read before, give more weight to my latest reads, and match the sentiments with the text of other books (which they have access too, and it's just text no audio/video bullshit)?
If Youtube can do it, if god damn Twitter can do it, why can't Amazon?
----
(we do have mybooklist.com, but it simply does not work properly, it just seems to be a simple and literal "list" aggregator, from other sources, like newspaper etc.)
> But Goodreads allows any user, not just those who’ve received advance copies, to leave ratings months before books are released. Authors who’ve become targets of review-bombing campaigns say there’s little moderation or recourse to report the harassment. Writers dealing with stalkers have pointed to the same problem.
"Problem": chicken-and-egg problem. Until it's actually published, there's little or no way for a review site to verify that you actually got it, let alone read it.
Once it's published, people look at the reviews to decide whether to buy it. So where are those reviews going to come from, for a self-published book?
Solution: the publisher gives advance review copies to readers. Yes, the system IS ripe for abuse. But if you're reading a review, it ought to be apparent whether the reviewer actually read the book, or whether they have anything interesting to say.
Besides Goodreads falling into complete disarray, it is equally painful to know that Amazon owns the .book TLD (https://icannwiki.org/.book) and has yet to make that available to anyone.
A lot of Amazon's publishing-related acquisitions tend to stray from what they were intended to be.
I think we're seeing increased scrutiny towards any social network remaining after Reddit and Twitter have been anti-consumer in their monetization practices.
Personally, I've taken a great interest in ultimate-guitar.com, which I consider the equivalent of Goodreads for guitar and other music tabs. Networks like UG and Goodreads are the juiciest targets for corporate takeovers, and both those sites were entirely started on the contributions of non-employees. It doesn't matter if they have now started to produce the content themselves, they wouldn't have had the chance to without the work put in by others already.
I encourage you, reader, to look into the social networks you use and to think about how you can archive the data submitted by the public. UG caught my attention because I refuse to allow them to steal their users' content after the fact just because they added some lines to their ToS. I don't know that that's their plan, but based on everything I've seen it seem inevitable.
I hope someone else is looking to download all of Goodreads' data to make it available to future hobbyists and grassroots websites.
i've been "using" goodreads since long before amazon bought it, and it's always just been kind of terrible. It was a clunky, not terribly nice to use site full of absolutely garbage-tier book reviews. the only redeeming quality was the authors who would leave honest reviews on each other's books.
i wish there was a site like goodreads, but good. but goodreads was not on track to be that site before amazon took it over.
As a certifiably "normie" book reader, I find Goodreads useless. Whenever I look at a book's reviews to figure out if it's worth it to buy, the reviews are filled with book enthusiasts (and often enthusiasts of that author). It makes sense, since they're probably the most likely to write a review of a book online in the first place.
I’d love to move off of Goodreads but their export function is pitiful, to the point that I’d say it’s deliberately hobbled.
All I do is mark books 1-5 stars and record the date I read it. I recently tried to export to StoryGraph and 1/3 of my books were missing finished dates.
If youre owned by Amazon and can’t put a date in a CSV I suspect malicious intent over incompetence.
I don't really understand the sentiment in the article about Amazon not doing anything with it. When Goodreads was acquired, general opinion was "oh no, I hope they don't ruin it -- don't worry, Amazon is known for acquiring working businesses and letting them be." I don't want new social functions on Goodreads; I get an email digest with activity of my friends, and I keep the friend list very, very short so I'm not overloaded with activity.
And why on Earth does the author of the article want Amazon to get more involved with detecting bad reviews? As if their track record on their main site would provide any evidence of their being good at that!
[+] [-] crazygringo|2 years ago|reply
But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive.
Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from acquiring or partnering with Goodreads, because their database of books and reviews could be used to instantly start competing with Amazon's book business. Amazon snuffed out that threat of competition in an instant.
[+] [-] teamspirit|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crossroadsguy|2 years ago|reply
So now any social network kind of service, which isn’t legally non-profit and open source and preferably federated, doesn’t get any cookie from me including the ones like LetterBoxd and StoryGraph.
But the problem is federated services, where you have to “choose” an instance among other frictions and all, are kinda doomed to fail. So I just use the established ones until they are unusable and keep my data regularly exported if it’s worth exporting, that is. It’s just sad.
[+] [-] garfieldnate|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|2 years ago|reply
> incredibly anti-competitive.
A description of Amazon in general.
[+] [-] lkbm|2 years ago|reply
I've tried a few other places, but my friends use Goodreads, so if I want to evaluate books based on ratings from friends whom I know have similar taste, Goodreads is the only viable option.
Goodreads is the present of book reviews, and in the past it was the future of book reviews.
[+] [-] weego|2 years ago|reply
Rose tinted view.
[+] [-] grecy|2 years ago|reply
I think there's another angle you're missing here - Amazon wanted to stop paying so much in affiliate sales. At their size, they were easily taking in tens of millions a year from all the Amazon affiliate links.
Now Amazon own it, they don't have to pay that out.
[+] [-] bryan0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo44x|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majormajor|2 years ago|reply
Better would be an independent Goodreads with incentives to find features that fight spam and such.
But it's hard to imagine them being able to make much money doing that, and them going under would be worse.
And honestly I'd MUCH rather have a Goodreads that Amazon does nothing with than a Goodreads that chased growth from VC money or PE or whatever to try to turn into another retail site and abandoned the "your reading history" angle.
[+] [-] matthewfcarlson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abc_lisper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] RoyGBivCap|2 years ago|reply
>as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything.
There are links between the two. You can buy my books on amazon (the dropdown supports other vendors) from their Goodreads pages.
But to your point about anticompetitive, I completely agree.
Why are corporations even allowed to just buy other corporations, at all?
A shitty bank bought my bank and promptly made everything about it shittier. Why is this even allowed at all? Companies buying other companies is about the most fundamentally anti-competitive thing there is.
[+] [-] sdfghswe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtbathula|2 years ago|reply
Free market means, freely allowing people to trade using persuasions — not government using its coercion. People also often forget other side of the picture.
1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to sell their companies to Amazon or Microsoft. 2. Why don't they ask government to put people in jail who are buying products from Amazon and making Amazon big?
Recently EU also making plans to regulate the battery replacement. I covered that here briefly in my site political-ledger dot com
[+] [-] rtbathula|2 years ago|reply
1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to sell their companies to Amazon or Microsoft. 2. Why don't they ask government to put people in jail who are buying products from Amazon and making Amazon big?
Recently EU also making plans to regulate the battery replacement. I covered that here briefly in my site political-ledger dot com
[+] [-] fastball|2 years ago|reply
Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book should have a 2.5. If you don't rate like this then you just end up with garbage.
Just allowing a boolean rating (ala Rotten Tomatoes when aggregated) is much better, assuming you can get enough reviews for that system to actually work (probably > 30 is required for most applications).
I think "aggregated personal Elo" would be a fun way to rank things: I just give you two books that you've read and you tell me which is better. Do this loads of times and eventually you have a solid ranking of every book you've ever read. Aggregate everyone's rankings and you have a much more robust system then "please rate this book out of 5 stars".
[+] [-] tecleandor|2 years ago|reply
I have a friend who has four restaurants in Tokyo, and I've been several times there. If you keep attention to the restaurant reviews in Google Maps, Japanese people is very hard. They'd go like "The food is great, incredible service, surprising flavors, very good experience, best Spanish food I've had in a long time..." and then they go "...but I know they can do better and have space to improve. 2/5".
In Spain we would be like "Nice beer, they gave us some tapas. 5/5"
Gig economy corporations also have made this worse. You're scared to score your driver, your server or your hotel by less than a 5/5 or somebody might get punished or fired (and maybe they didn't even had a contract in the first place).
And this becomes a snake biting its own tail. Now I rarely go to a place with a score of less than a 4/5, and I'll score relatively high because I know I could influence votes out of what people consider "worthy to visit".
[+] [-] fourmajor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hospitalJail|2 years ago|reply
The non-industry people reviewing Zelda have 4 options, 7/10, 8/10, 9/10, 10/10.
A 7/10 means the game was bad and you had a hard time finishing it, and won't be playing again.
8/10 means the game was also bad, but you had fun for a few minutes/hours.
9/10 means the game meet minimum expectations.
10/10 means you enjoyed the game, but there were countless flaws that took away from enjoying the game.
10/10 Greatest game of all time means, the game was above average.
Now, this same system applied outside Nintendo's curve, you knock these numbers down 2.
Its incredibly hard to figure out if a Nintendo game is good, if you treat them like other companies. Even Nintendo believes this and will yank early access/ads/etc... from gaming websites if you don't comply with the Nintendo curve.
[+] [-] ohlookcake|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thebigspacefuck|2 years ago|reply
1 - I hated it
2 - It was okay
3 - I liked it
4 - It was great
5 - I loved it
I thought it was helpful for framing what a score would be but I haven’t seen this in the app or anywhere for a long time. At least it avoids the problem of Amazon where a review is like “Best book I’ve ever read but the copy I received had a rip on the dust jacket - 1/5”.
Learned through experience to skip anything below a 4 or very high 3 now. Probably missing some interesting stuff but I don’t read that often anyway.
[+] [-] bstpierre|2 years ago|reply
IMO the real problem with something as subjective as books or movies is that even completely honest, well-reasoned reviews are going to be all over the map. My review of a Pride and Prejudice movie is going to be maybe 3/10, but my wife would give it 7/10, while we have the opposite reactions to something like The Hunt for Red October.
I don't care about reviews from experts or the unwashed masses. I don't even really care about reviews that much -- I'm more interesting in ratings from people who like the same kind of stuff I do.
[+] [-] nextos|2 years ago|reply
It'd be definitely interesting to see a book review site like this. In the meantime, for math books, I trust curated rankings by MAA: https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews
[+] [-] Zampa|2 years ago|reply
We've done exactly this with Flickchart - https://www.flickchart.com - presenting the user with two movies at a time and letting them choose what, in their opinion, is the better film. We then aggregate everyone's rankings to generate a combined chart of the best films of all-time that's always in flux and changing.
We take into account each user's total number of rankings (refinement), and the total number of movies they've ranked (breadth of knowledge). We also use time as a factor - given that something that just came out has had less time to be "an all-timer" than something that has existed in the world longer and had the time to be experienced by more people.
We created this way back in 2009 and are currently building the next-generation of it on a modern web stack. This new iteration is also more modularized so we can expand more easily from just movies to other domains (books, games, music, TV, etc.).
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|2 years ago|reply
This is of course Goodheart's Law in action but I don't have any ideas for fixing the problem.
[+] [-] aleksiy123|2 years ago|reply
When you go to rate a book the system asks you if it was better or worse (maybe same) then a book of you previously read closest in rating or some hidden matchmaking rating (MMR).
I think having books having both a personal and global score would be nice as well.
I don't think it would be possible for someone to change their rating but that may be a feature.
I also don't think this solves recommendation though it may be useful as a feature.
[+] [-] mahoho|2 years ago|reply
And for most people, it seems like the semantics of rating scales don't align with a normal distribution about the 50% mark, but something more like letter grades where 70% is decent/mediocre, while 50% is a failure (in the US).
IMO this makes at least as much sense as centering around 50%; if you only score 50% of the points on a test I don't think you're competent in a subject, and if your book only meets 50% of the criteria for a great book then it might be a bad book. But again, it's all arbitrary and only makes sense in the context of the particular reviewer or aggregate community.
[+] [-] CalRobert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopa42365|2 years ago|reply
Looking at a random book: 4.36 stars, 74 ratings, 28 reviews. Release date: 18. July 2023 (in 15 days)
No comment on that required heh.
Goodreads is semi-useful to keep track of upcoming book releases, but don't bother reading the reviews, and the score is at best a vague indicator (and definitely misleading until months after the book is actually available).
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
According the the WaPo, Amazon's crime with Goodreads seems to be that it hasn't kept the site up with changes in censorship standards and technology, and just lets whoever say whatever about books.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryzvonusef|2 years ago|reply
Goodreads acts as the tracker for me, but a recommendations engine it absolutely sucks. It has never recommended me a book ever, I have to rely on /r/fantasy to churn out new recommendations for me.
In the age of AI and LLM and whatever bullshit, how hard is it for Amazon (owner of AWS) to see my read list (which I diligently update) and recommend me something based on the things I've read before, give more weight to my latest reads, and match the sentiments with the text of other books (which they have access too, and it's just text no audio/video bullshit)?
If Youtube can do it, if god damn Twitter can do it, why can't Amazon?
----
(we do have mybooklist.com, but it simply does not work properly, it just seems to be a simple and literal "list" aggregator, from other sources, like newspaper etc.)
[+] [-] ZacnyLos|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
"Problem": chicken-and-egg problem. Until it's actually published, there's little or no way for a review site to verify that you actually got it, let alone read it.
Once it's published, people look at the reviews to decide whether to buy it. So where are those reviews going to come from, for a self-published book?
Solution: the publisher gives advance review copies to readers. Yes, the system IS ripe for abuse. But if you're reading a review, it ought to be apparent whether the reviewer actually read the book, or whether they have anything interesting to say.
And Goodreads should remove the bad ones.
[+] [-] arvidkahl|2 years ago|reply
A lot of Amazon's publishing-related acquisitions tend to stray from what they were intended to be.
[+] [-] BowBun|2 years ago|reply
Personally, I've taken a great interest in ultimate-guitar.com, which I consider the equivalent of Goodreads for guitar and other music tabs. Networks like UG and Goodreads are the juiciest targets for corporate takeovers, and both those sites were entirely started on the contributions of non-employees. It doesn't matter if they have now started to produce the content themselves, they wouldn't have had the chance to without the work put in by others already.
I encourage you, reader, to look into the social networks you use and to think about how you can archive the data submitted by the public. UG caught my attention because I refuse to allow them to steal their users' content after the fact just because they added some lines to their ToS. I don't know that that's their plan, but based on everything I've seen it seem inevitable.
I hope someone else is looking to download all of Goodreads' data to make it available to future hobbyists and grassroots websites.
[+] [-] manuelmoreale|2 years ago|reply
Not affiliated, just a happy user of the site.
[+] [-] mcpackieh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|2 years ago|reply
i wish there was a site like goodreads, but good. but goodreads was not on track to be that site before amazon took it over.
[+] [-] phillipcarter|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] habosa|2 years ago|reply
All I do is mark books 1-5 stars and record the date I read it. I recently tried to export to StoryGraph and 1/3 of my books were missing finished dates.
If youre owned by Amazon and can’t put a date in a CSV I suspect malicious intent over incompetence.
[+] [-] garfieldnate|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidibe|2 years ago|reply
I think Goodreads is fine, I do glance at it before any book I read to see what kind of reviews it has.
The Amazon site I used all the time that sucks now is IMDb.