Anything is better than Amazon
Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
161–170 of 214 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
#162I was looking into this space the other day, and the number of options has been growing. By my record there is: - https://www.goodreads.com - https://thestorygraph.com - https://fable.co - https://hardcover.app - https://joinbookwyrm.com I was actually trying to determine the best free source of metadata for books. I was hoping for something like MusicBrainz. The best I could find seemed to be https://openlibrary.org…
I’ve always hoped that once we reach Goodreads scale, we’d be able to release database dumps like VNDB (https://vndb.org/d14) and Lichess (https://database.lichess.org/)
Since the metadata is contributed by volunteers in the first place, it only seems fair for it to be freely available rather than locked down.
Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
#163I wish ratings were a slider from Skip It - Good - Great - Life Changing or whatever. Sliders are great for stuff like this. Odd comment I know but sliders are instantly understandable, accessible and doable. So, great UI.
Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
#164I'm an avid reader and platforms expert who would love a reason to migrate away from goodreads. My first three impressions:
1. I want to know your business model and ownership structure. Moving is costly, give me a reason to try you as opposed to others. That reason should include a long-term incentive, above and beyond new features or better design.
2. I searched the android app store but the only thing I found was anime character-related content. You probably have the wrong name.
3. I like your features ideas! But I don't have enough information right now to motivate me to import my goodreads history, much of which is deeply personal.
Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
#165How does this differ from say StoryGraph?
I want to move on from GoodReads, but one thing that it does have is polished recommendations. I did my best to “import” a lot of my reading history into TSG and then asked for recommendations and it gave me a bunch of -extremely- similar choices, very homogenous, and narrow.
Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does one use an average Rewatchability score to determine whether one should watch a movie? If I'm trying to pick a movie, I don't care what its score for rewatching is, I care about what its score is for watching it the first time. And once I've watched a movie, I don't care about whether other people say I should watch it again, I care about whether I want to watch it again. A movie is different from buying a b…
To present an opposite viewpoint, I try to only engage with media I suspect future me will be able to revisit and pull enjoyment out of at least once. I rarely actually do so, but I've found it to be a remarkably effective quality filter. It's also a genre independent quality metric. That's not to be underplayed. Some examples of films that successfully passed it for me: Casablanca ; Portrait of a Lady on Fire ; Here…
Have you ever watched a film like Come and See, Schindlers list, Grave of the fireflies, etc…?
These movies are some of the most impactful that I have ever seen, but by no means would I rate them highly rewatchable. They are gut wrenching, and some people can only stand to watch them once, few want to rewatch them, but they are also incredible.
I also gain a lot from a rewatchable piece of content, but you might be shorting yourself by always watching things designed to tickle the dopamine receptors.
Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
#167I’m certainly not the target for this. The following is going to sound harsh, but bear with me. Two things I really dislike about this, from what I look for generally from websites and services: 1. It doesn’t have any information about pricing or the business model. “Get started for free” — does it mean there are paid plans after I sign up? Does it mean it’s on best effort and might disappear suddenly if the person r…
1. No, it just means completely free. And the website’s not going anywhere unless I die or something. I'll look into making this clearer.
2. Noted. We'll put up a proper email address. I just figured Discord would be faster.
Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
#168I don't mind a goodreads alternative, but regarding the UI from 2005, I am not sure I care. It works and people are used to it. I am not a supporter of "let's try build a new interface using shiny new technology" for the sake of new .
I care most about perf/responsiveness as I navigate the site. GR was tolerable on this metric while I still used it, StoryGraph (for understandable reasons) is abysmally slow somehow.
I have the same complaint about BoardGameGeek. If it was super snappy to go with the dated design, I wouldn't bat an eye, but it is also kind of a slog.
Both are things I use for discovery a little bit more than I use to record my thoughts about my previous experiences, so my browsing behavior is very breadth-first search and that makes the slow loads more of an acute problem for me.
Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
#169Tech Stack Backend: Elixir & Phoenix Database: PostgreSQL with Supabase (originally CockroachDB, big mistake) Auth: Supabase Frontend: Next.js UI Components: shadcn GraphQL API: Absinthe Hosting: Fly.io (Phoenix) + Vercel (Next.js) Storage: Cloudflare R2 + CDN
Does Phoenix have auth? Any reason you chose supa over phoenix? And do you store user info (reviews+stuff) in phoenix and just reference it with the supa uuids or do you store user generated info on their own in supa?
Phoenix doesn’t have built-in auth, and setting it up with Guardian (the JWT library for Elixir) took too much time. Since we were already using Supabase for Postgres, we decided to go with its auth to move faster. Supabase provides a UUID after authentication, which we then use throughout the rest of the database.
Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
#170I was looking into this space the other day, and the number of options has been growing. By my record there is: - https://www.goodreads.com - https://thestorygraph.com - https://fable.co - https://hardcover.app - https://joinbookwyrm.com I was actually trying to determine the best free source of metadata for books. I was hoping for something like MusicBrainz. The best I could find seemed to be https://openlibrary.org…
If you want the best UX for tracking and easiest/fastest Goodreads importer try https://margins.app (disclosure: I'm the designer)