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Goodreads Is Broken

onezero.medium.com

51–60 of 292 posts

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#51
post #14

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.

To those replying with "dismiss the popup", that does not seem to be an option for everyone. For example, this is what I see: https://imgur.com/a/04W0om0

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#52
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medium is awful and should be boycotted.

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.

I'm not entirely sure about this, but isn't the edit ability of Telegraph based on what I believe is a cookie, it seems to be called "tph_uuid" and you can see it if you press F12 in Firefox, go to "Network", reload the page, find the single POST and you can see it in the request headers.

Meaning, as long as you don't clear your cache you should be fine, and if you do, maybe you can back it up somewhere.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#53
post #19

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 an…

At this point, Amazon is treating Kindle like Texas Instruments is treating their graphing calculators. Both have entrenched monopolies and have no need whatsoever to improve their product, which being able to sell them at ridiculous margin. It's laughable how much a new Kindle costs the consumer vs how much it actually costs to manufacture. If this were a non-monopolistic market then many competitors would be leaping into the fray with superior products at a fraction of the cost, but because Amazon isn't forced to grant them access to the Kindle store, it's not even possible to compete.

This is a clear example of an area where consumers are suffering from a monopolistic grip over the market.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#54
My wife and I experienced the same disappointments on goodreads, and many of the same flaws exist in other media rating/cataloging sites. We're attempting to solve this problem by creating a centralized collaborative media database that we always wished existed. Without any marketing yet, https://rate.house currently only has ~100 users, but we'd love to hear HN's input and know if we're heading in the right direction.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#55
post #8
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…

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

> This seems like a fun side project idea honestly - can I ask what’s most broken and which great features are missing?

It's basically just the momentum it has, alongside with crowdfunded book directory (you don't have to enter the metadata manually in like 99.999% of the cases). I'm not gonna say "don't bother", but I've personally used three Goodreads alternatives over the years and nobody mentioned a single one of them yet. I've settled on BookDigits[0], which is what Goodreads should be if you ask me.

> Yes, Amazon could shut it down but eh, might be worth the risk

Technically API isn't the only way users could extract their data from Goodreads. There's also export/import tool that exports data in CSV, and there's also RSS feed that you could ask for.

If there's one good thing I can say about Goodreads, it's that it's not a walled garden.

[0] https://bookdigits.com/

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#56
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medium is awful and should be boycotted.

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.

You can use @telegraph on Telegram to save/edit on your account.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#57
post #51
post #14

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.

To those replying with "dismiss the popup", that does not seem to be an option for everyone. For example, this is what I see: https://imgur.com/a/04W0om0

For me it helped when I cleared all the site data. But quite annoying nonetheless.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#58
Goodreads has possibly the worst search algorithm in existence today. Typing a character or two will sometimes show the book I am looking for right on top, and then typing a few more reduces the relevance of the results and hides it. I don't get it.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#59
post #14

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.

Even as a member this article is paywalled. Nowadays regardless of the authors intention of keeping the article available or not, the default is paywalled and many people miss it.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 depends to which Amazon Store your Kindle is linked. I've got the Kindle Oasis 1 and mine still doesn't have Goodreads enabled because it's linked to amazon.de

Really annoying.

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