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Goodreads Is Broken

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Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#181

Post by Marsymars »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #125
alexis_fr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Google Maps, I go “Home” every second trip. Yet, when I type “Home” (or whatever the French equivalent is), the only suggestions I get are “Home depot” and “Homeware shops”. I went as far as setting a “place” labelled “fghjk”. I still get other results, despite using “Fghjk” every second trip!!! Also visible in Youtube. There’s a French guy who explained what it was to be raped by a woman, and I often refer people…

Try Google voice search; I just say "OK Google -- navigate to home".

I don't want my phone listening for key phrases.

This was a solved problem years ago. Windows Phone let you pin nav directions to any address you wanted directly on your home screen.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#182

Post by Marsymars »

StavrosK wrote: post #104
CydeWeys wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leapin…

I'm fully aware I'm the minority, but I only read DRM-free books. What's a good ebook reader I can get these days that has good bang for buck?

For good ereaders there's Kindle and Kobo. Kobo supports DRM-free epub, but in practical terms, it doesn't matter a whole lot with Calibre to organize your library and convert to your format of choice.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#183

Post by StavrosK »

CydeWeys wrote: post #174
StavrosK wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already have a Paperwhite and it's quite good, but the plastic degraded and is now sticky, the CPU is slow and doing anything takes a while, and it doesn't have the very handy buttons earlier versions used to have. I was wondering if there was anything available nowadays that was much better, basically...

Oh, hrm, I have no idea. My Paperwhite is in a better condition than yours and it's good enough for me. I really wouldn't mind having physical next/prev page buttons, though. Having to touch or swipe the screen is kind of annoying. I feel like that's a step back in UI from previous gen devices.

Yeah, I have no idea why they removed them. The swipe combined with the high response time means I never know if it registered the swipe and always go back and forth in an effort to change pages.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#184

Post by cptnapalm »

JHer wrote: post #171
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…

Entering "1984" yields "books similar to 1984 by Michael Dean". Entering "Nineteen Eighty-Four" gives me "Book picks similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four by Matthew Dunster". When I search for "Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel", the site responds with "Book picks similar to Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali". I'm sure Dean, Dunster, and Ghali are terrific writers but what happened to George Orwell?

Memory holed. 1984 has always been by Michael Dean.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#185

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

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

Especially on Netflix now...it was lobotomized with the addition of the thumbs up thumbs down binary rating system.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#186

Post by myth_drannon »

When they had recommendations based on bookshelves it was amazing since I have a bunch of very niche topic bookshelves. Once they removed it and left only recommendations based on genres it is useless now. Kindle book recommendation based on similar books are a bit better, but that's only for kindle books

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#187

Post by cptnapalm »

philsnow wrote: post #74

> I am looking for Ronan Farrow’s ‘Catch and Kill.’ It appears, inexplicably, after two books not titled ‘Catch and Kill.’ This bothers me to no end in Google maps search results. It seems like every time I'm searching for some chain> the first two results are for stores that are hundreds of miles away and in towns that I've never visited (which Google should also know!). The one that's a couple miles away / the one…

You should see my library's search results. Trying to find People magazine (to enter a new copy) by searching for the exact title "People" means having to go half way down the second page of results. None of the previous dozens of results have "people" in the title at all.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#188

Post by disordiary »

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…

Where do you source the books and genres from? Is there a way for me to modify them as a user to make it more granular?

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#189

Post by lsc »

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…

As far as I can tell, all recommendations lists fail compared to freely-available experts.

Like, if you like literary fiction, go through the Pulitzer prize for fiction, and just read. (I'm not even half way through that list, but everything I've read on it has been really, really good.) - there's all sorts of awards for smaller niches... the nebula, the Hugo, etc...

(Actually, that's a question. What is the award for the romance genre?)

I... personally don't understand why people even try to automate making better recommendation engines when highly skilled and respected experts are already doing it for just about any niche, and releasing the results for free.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#190

Post by technofiend »

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.

They often don't expose knobs I'd really like to tweak, either. For instance if I grew up listening to original album version of something I don't want to hear the live one. But there's only an upvote/downvote choice on Google music so what exactly am I giving the thumbs down? The artist? The song? This particular version of the song? No idea.
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