111–120 of 292 posts
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Very cool. Two criticisms though; the font is obnoxious, and you could use an autocomplete.
the font is actually perfect and fits the theme of the site well, while still being easily readable. what makes it obnoxious, other than it not being some variation on fira mono or whatever?
> The recommendations suck, the lists suck — it’s like, 100 lists telling me to read The Handmaid’s Tale and Harry Potter. I had the same experience with GR and also Amazon.com which constantly peddles the vampire romance books when I am looking for recommendations for horror/fantasy. Both Amazon and GR strategy make sense because best-selling books sell the best, so they should recommend them to increase profits. Ho…
I face this problem with Netflix, Spotify and Youtube too. These algorithmic recommendations just need one improper dataset to throw everything out of the window. For weeks, my spotify is overloaded with instrumental songs. Youtube keeps on repeating the same stuff. Netflix believes that the only thing I watch is science fiction. I'm dying for human curation.
Older recommendation systems use background and foreground timeframes to build frames of references, hence repeats.
The question to ask then is: what is the correct thing to optimize for? Dwell time is usually chosen for advertising and stickiness (you are more likely to stick with a service that plays what you like). Optimizing for novelty is difficult because the set of unknown things is much larger than the set of known things. Plus, it is risky from a business point of view.
> The recommendations suck, the lists suck — it’s like, 100 lists telling me to read The Handmaid’s Tale and Harry Potter. I had the same experience with GR and also Amazon.com which constantly peddles the vampire romance books when I am looking for recommendations for horror/fantasy. Both Amazon and GR strategy make sense because best-selling books sell the best, so they should recommend them to increase profits. Ho…
I face this problem with Netflix, Spotify and Youtube too. These algorithmic recommendations just need one improper dataset to throw everything out of the window. For weeks, my spotify is overloaded with instrumental songs. Youtube keeps on repeating the same stuff. Netflix believes that the only thing I watch is science fiction. I'm dying for human curation.
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…
This whole post was a wild ride. But out of curiosity, have you considered walking up to Atlassian and saying “pay me $1MM a year and I’ll solve this problem for you”?
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> 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…
All your points are true - but I think using the API to essentially just create a “better front end” for Goodreads would be the the new idea here because of that momentum. You wouldn’t need to add your books or friends on this new app, you would just login with Goodreads and it would all be there. It could also two way sync so even if your friends want to keep using goodreads, any ratings you put on this new app woul…
> The recommendations suck, the lists suck — it’s like, 100 lists telling me to read The Handmaid’s Tale and Harry Potter. I had the same experience with GR and also Amazon.com which constantly peddles the vampire romance books when I am looking for recommendations for horror/fantasy. Both Amazon and GR strategy make sense because best-selling books sell the best, so they should recommend them to increase profits. Ho…
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Ephemeral clubs happens on reddit, in many subreddits, involving many types of media.
I mean yeah you can do it on GR with a group as well, but I'm talking about a built-in book club feature with a timetable, chat, status updates, etc. Say I'm looking to read War and Peace this winter. I find a bunch of other like-minded people, and we set a timetable, read it together, then disband.
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…
>> 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…
"one protocol to suit them all" would be a lot harder with books though
- Is there a female majority in goodreads users/commenters?
- Is book/novel reading now a predominantly female activity?
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.
Got to your Friends page (https://www.goodreads.com/friend), click on "Compare books" in front on the friend with which you want to compare. You will see the list of books you have in common sorted by inverse popularity.