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…
If you can’t bootstrap engagement with the Kindle integrations, maybe you could bootstrap community/engagement by integrating with public library catalogs and checkout records? Patrons could opt in to sharing their activity automatically and the library website could have update options as part of the checkout management process. Might be a nice little niche entrance into a customer base there.
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.
For me, the window containing that message has a "close" icon at the top right, and then I can read the article. If you don't have a similar close icon I'd be interested in seeing a screenshot of what you can see. I have no love for Medium, but so far I've been able to read everything, so I'd be interested to see how my experience differs from yours.
I get
"Read smarter, not harder.
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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.
Without JavaScript, they load quickly and without popups or membership requirement on my end.
That 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…
I build search engines for a living. While I appreciate the hacker spirit of your project with Solr, I also see this as a huge problem that leads to bad search experiences. Tuning boosts in Solr is not even close to a reasonable way to solve problems like this. Arguably not even for an underfunded library, but certainly not for a high web traffic consumer website. For one, you need disciplined acceptance criteria in…
But it works? If you measure your tuning based on which rank an item is when a user clicks you might get feedback that would obviously help find more examples or create some kind of self-learning system, but if you only care about say, boosting common best sellers periodically, well, isn’t that good for (almost) everyone? ;-) My suggestion for GoodReads would be to rank exact title matches higher than partial or reordered titles, but that would just be a start. Of course, evaluate what’s working and what isn’t, and maybe do test cases where you see if lower rankings have improved. But any attempt at a fix is likely better than doing nothing, as you’re likely to spend energy fixing popular books folks want to find...
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.
After the backlash from the hard paywall they switched to the soft one- you can dismiss that popup by clicking the X in the top right corner of it.
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.
Not to justify them or anything but as a workaround to this many many similar awful behaviours, Reader mode on Safari is a handy way to ignore all this.
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…
> 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 Not in Germany though
I believe you're talking about Kindle apps, while the parent comment is talking about Kindle, the e-reader.
If not, I'm clueless because I have purchased mine from German Amazon and it does all of those things.
It's a shame https://telegra.ph doesnt have the ability to save/send yourself an edit link. Being able to only edit your story on the computer you made it on is a big turnoff.
Sounds like what that site really needs is the same thing that almost every other major site has -- accounts.
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…
> 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 Not in Germany though
...at least not if you want the lights in your apartment to work at the same time.
Yes - 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 usel…
I'm not impressed. Philip K. Dick next to Stanisław Lem. The two lived in the same period, and there's a funny anecdote about them (Philip believed Stanisław was invented by communists to trick him, because no single person could be so resourceful. Consequently, Philip K. Dick refused to communicate with Stanisław Lem). But their literature is very different. Dick's stories are typically short and easy to digest, wit…
The proximity is not based on similar style or content, but based on how many people like author B if they like author A.