Goodreads Is Broken • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#11

Post by duncanawoods » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

mmanfrin wrote: post #6

I 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…

I wouldn't be so defeatist! I used Goodreads manually for a bit. Adding books only takes seconds which seems inconsequential compared to how long it takes to read them.

I didn't continue with it because there just wasn't any real value. I don't want a trophy shelf of read books or get automated recommendations by "people who have read similar books" because those titles are very predictable.

I'd need something different e.g. something facillitating deep discussion and Q&A organised by chapter or something. Get authors participating and I'm there 100%.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#12

Post by slenk » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:49 PM UTC

dlphn___xyz wrote: post #10

‘medium is broken’

Agree whole-heartedly. Used to be ok as an aggregator, but now with their repeated force attempts to make you sign in, I just avoid it.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#13

Post by lejalv » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

Use librarything. That is an actual project by book lovers, for book lovers.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#14

Post by jwr » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

I wonder if people posting on Medium realize that for many of us the articles are inaccessible ("Sign up for a free Medium account, and you’ll get one more story in your member preview this month"). It seems that people missed the change in Medium's business model and still think that it's a site for posting publicly accessible articles.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#15

Post by dlphn___xyz » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

slenk wrote: post #12

dlphn___xyz wrote: post #10

‘medium is broken’

Agree whole-heartedly. Used to be ok as an aggregator, but now with their repeated force attempts to make you sign in, I just avoid it.

its not even that - the content on medium is largely spam

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#16

Post by Tharkun » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:51 PM UTC

I use Goodreads the way I use IMDB. To keep track of what I've read and what I want to read. I can't say I'm missing any features in that department. Not everything has to fancy. Search generally works well, and they have a pretty handy way of grouping books in a series -- which has led me to discover some that I'd missed.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#17

Post by TillE » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

It astounds me that after 20+ years of Amazon, nobody's come close to creating a good way to discover books. Amazon.com is particularly bad at it, but browsing the shelves of a library is still a better experience than what I can get from Goodreads.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#18

Post by karaterobot » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

monkeypizza wrote: post #3

A 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.

I'm not a Goodreads user, but this is something you can definitely do with Librarything. For any user in the system with a public collection, you can find the intersection of your books and sort by the number of members who own them (as well many other things). The interface is a little wonky, but very powerful.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#19

Post by bredren » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

The entire reading ecosystem at Amazon is stagnant. The kindle e-readers have had release after release of subpar hardware with features introduced by now-killed competitors a decade ago.

Read reviews of the brand new Oasis, a $300 product featuring a micro USB port.

Amazon does not care about readers, probably because they drive so few dollars and the market is won.

Reading does not drive prime subscriptions, and anyone with decent product management ability and influence is working on something more important.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#20

Post by lazyant » Sat, Sep 07, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

I don't know about the quality of Goodreads but I don't see a big problem with her two search examples.

In the first one she searches for "the confession" and another "the confession" title is shown, together with other way more popular titles with "confession" in their titles. I'm guessing most people want fuzzy google-like searches but sure, exact matches of more obscure books can be given more relevance or search options can be given.

The second example is even worse; she searches for "title" and complaints that a book with "title" and one with "title:subtitle" are ranked higher than her "title:some other subtitle"