Goodreads Is Broken
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Goodreads Is Broken
1–10 of 292 posts
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#2I mainly use goodreads as a sanity check on Amazon reviews.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#3A feature I want on goodreads is "for me and a friend, show me the rarest book we have read in common". It would be great to find connections between people that would be hard to discover otherwise.
Same thing for groups - it's fun to try to find the "rarest common denominator" in the books, movies, or places visited domain.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#4That first graphic with failed title search results reminded me of a project I did working on a library catalog search using Solr.
We tuned the relevancy ranking to work for exactly those sorts of searches, and put the things the OP was looking for on top (or at least under other books with exact same title). His examples look just like some of our QA searches for our relevancy ranking (in addition to standard tf/idf: boost adjacent words matching higher than non-adjacent or out of order; boost match of complete title higher than partial title; boost match before the subtitle colon more than after; boost title matches more than author more than other fields; etc).
And this was ~5 years ago, and this was an underfunded university library IT department where the development team consisted basically of me, just using stock Solr for relevancy ranking (the tuning came in how we constructed and boosted our indexed fields). No fancy machine learning, just configuring fields and boosts deterministically.
So, this could be done, if they cared about the site at all.
[In fact, hey, i can give you actual examples from that project. Turns out there are a lot of books called "the confession" -- we didn't do anything fancy to try to guess which one more readers would be looking for.
https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?q=the+confession
https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sear...
(hope I don't "slashdot effect" my former employer...)]
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#5They haven't built any new features for years. I just keep waiting for any meaningful privacy controls, I want to keep track of what I've read and what I thought about the book without everyone seeing that. Seeing a cover just doesn't do it any more if it's your 50th space Sci-Fi.
Keeping track if I've read the entire series or not is another feature I really miss for books that trakt.tv provides for shows.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#6I read quite a bit and generally like Goodreads for what it is, but I agree that it's essentially not grown at all in 12 years. There are parts that are broken, there are features that are lacking, and it frustrates me to no end.
Many, many times I've thought of how I'd build a competitor, but it is pointless because Goodread's moat is too big: the integrations with the kindle go a very long way towards cultivating engagement (when you start a book, kindle will update your profile by default, it'll add your rating, mark the book as finished, all through the normal ux of the kindle).
There is no way, in my opinion, to overcome the handicap of needing users to manually update what is automatically updated by the kindle. And I can't see 'linking' accounts working because there'd be no incentive for Amazon not to block access from a competitor. And, frankly, the kindle is the only platform that matters, it likely has 95%+ of the ereader market.
Goodreads is bad because it is a monopoly, and that, frankly, sucks.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#7Yes - Goodreads is pretty awful when it could be so much better. The searching is awful, the comment UI is grim and the suggested books lists are poor. The most useful tool I've found for finding new authors is this: https://www.literature-map.com/
I only use it for keeping track of what I've read and to look up negative reviews to see whether a book is likely to be one I won't like.
The scoring system is almost useless, as certain categories of books just get endless 5 star reviews from fans.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#8I read quite a bit and generally like Goodreads for what it is, but I agree that it's essentially not grown at all in 12 years. There are parts that are broken, there are features that are lacking, and it frustrates me to no end. Many, many times I've thought of how I'd build a competitor, but it is pointless because Goodread's moat is too big: the integrations with the kindle go a very long way towards cultivating e…
This seems like a fun side project idea honestly - can I ask what’s most broken and which great features are missing?
I took a quick look and there is a official Goodreads API that you can use to pull titles from people’s accounts (once they authorize your app). Yes, Amazon could shut it down but eh, might be worth the risk
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#9I read quite a bit and generally like Goodreads for what it is, but I agree that it's essentially not grown at all in 12 years. There are parts that are broken, there are features that are lacking, and it frustrates me to no end. Many, many times I've thought of how I'd build a competitor, but it is pointless because Goodread's moat is too big: the integrations with the kindle go a very long way towards cultivating e…
>> Goodreads is bad because it is a monopoly, and that, frankly, sucks.
I'd be more disappointed if I had to go to five different sites to see what different segments of my friends were reading. Sort of like...messaging...where I have to use WhatsApp, SMS, FB Messenger, Slack, and GChat because different friends/family are adamant on one particular silo.
I know monopolies are not good, but there are some benefits in scale, especially for a site like this where i'm not paying and i'm not forced into buying bundles/packages I dont want.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#10‘medium is broken’