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Goodreads Is Broken

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Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#141

Post by samcodes »

qrv3w wrote: post #77

> 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 think most recommendation algorithms rely too much on collaborative filtering and not enough on content based filtering.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#142

Post by jasonvorhe »

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 don't think this is actually working world wide, my Good Reads account isn't aware of anything I purchase via my Kindle, let alone share my reviews or reading status.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#144

Post by jasonvorhe »

dlphn___xyz wrote: post #10

‘medium is broken’

Please just don't click on Medium posts then. It's that simple.

Repeating the same opinions over and over isn't providing any value at all. People on HN usually read the comments to get additional insights into a certain topic or to share their opinions on the linked content.

Opening the comments of a Medium post on HN is destined to feature at least one person who a) most likely didn't read the actual post and b) feels strongly enough about Medium to share their opinion on the platform the content was published on.

I get it. You dislike Medium. Then create a blog somewhere and post about it there. Don't make HN even more annoying than it already is.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#145

Post by WalterBright »

inapis wrote: post #94
qrv3w wrote: post #77

> 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.

It'd be nice to simply tag items with keywords. Then you can search for matches with various boolean combinations of keywords.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#146

Post by kristopolous »

chewxy wrote: post #112
inapis wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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's because the recommendation systems are optimizing for the wrong things: typically dwell time. You are highly likely to dwell longer on scifi, so heres more scifi for you! 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 stick…

It's an interface problem. Users aren't able to express the fidelity needed through the current action set

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#147

Post by mixedmath »

qrv3w wrote: post #77

> 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 don't usually have an immediate positive reaction to a site, but I immediately liked yours. It's fast and simple. There is no javascript. The recommendations are reasonable.

Would you mind describing a bit of your algorithm, or is that secret info?

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#148

Post by mooreds »

kristopolous wrote: post #146
chewxy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the recommendation systems are optimizing for the wrong things: typically dwell time. You are highly likely to dwell longer on scifi, so heres more scifi for you! 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 stick…

It's an interface problem. Users aren't able to express the fidelity needed through the current action set

Right. You only have four actions on Spotify as I recall (thumbs up, thumbs down, pause and fast forward). I guess some of the other apps have the larger bucket of 'who is watching/acting' based on account.

I am not sure how many actions are needed, but I can think of a few more:

* Not now, but later is fine

* Maybe next month

* Play the opposite of this

* Something similar but new to me

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#149

Post by bjelkeman-again »

qrv3w wrote: post #77

> 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…

Pretty impressive. Tried it on my own favourites and those of my wife (very different book taste). Good work. Thanks!

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#150

Post by the_biot »

frabbit wrote: post #100

https://www.librarything.com/ is always better for finding books that I know part of the title (or sometimes even just the full title). I would like to be able to weight opinions (both positively and negatively) of individuals, and also based on criteria (e.g. "completely ignore the opinions of anyone who gave a low rating to The Good Soldier Svejk" and also "weight by 100 the opinions of anyone that rates The Silver…

Indeed a mention of librarything is missing from this article. Ironically I joined Goodreads after fleeing librarything as it was so stagnant.
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