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Goodreads Is Broken

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Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#201

Post by remcob »

elorant wrote: post #192
lsc wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Because we don't always like awarded books. I read "The Three Body Problem" a couple of years ago which had won a Nebula award and found it to be mediocre at best and much overhyped. Last year I read the "Neuromancer" which had won both a Nebula and a Hugo and was for me one of the worst SF books I've ever read. And then there are books which are brilliant, but have never won an award, like "The Martian".

A book like the "Neuromancer" really needs to be understood in it's time. If you read it now, it will look very clichéd. But that's because it introduced and popularized those very clichés!

A lot of really significant cultural works have become so absorbed in our common culture, and sometimes improved upon, that the original starts to look cliché and even naive. Is there a name for this effect?

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#202

Post by romack77 »

officemonkey wrote: post #177

The recommendation system is broken, however the social networking features can surmount it. For example, my Goodreads "friends" are people who like the books I like. There's no social obligation. FFS, I unfriended my sister. My high-school friend who only reads YA fiction: he was unfriended years ago. My favorite goodreads friends are a half-dozen people I've never even met, but I agree with their reviews. When they…

Agreed. This is how I use Goodreads for recommendations as well. There's the "Compare Books" tool to get a quick sense of whether someone reads what you read. And then reading a couple of their reviews is usually enough to get a sense of whether their recs will agree with you.

It's more labor intensive than a standard recommendation system, but the results are better. Since books are a large time commitment, and people are passionate about them, a lot of people are willing to put uncommon effort into finding good ones.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#203

Post by lsc »

sohkamyung wrote: post #195
lsc wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

My preference is to rely on the judgement of reviewers whose taste kind of matches mine. I'm into SF and Fantasy. In the past, I would read the reviews featured in Locus magazine by the various reviewers. Nowadays, I occasionally read Locus but also reviews from other places like tor com, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Interzone magazine.

makes sense. I've been reading Gaitskill's "little hammer" - it's a collection of essays, but... like half of them are book reviews, so now I'm pausing to read some mailer. For that matter, it is pretty common for me to read books because they are mentioned in the front matter of other books.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#204

Post by jknoepfler »

ses1984 wrote: post #198
elorant wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we don't always like awarded books. I read "The Three Body Problem" a couple of years ago which had won a Nebula award and found it to be mediocre at best and much overhyped. Last year I read the "Neuromancer" which had won both a Nebula and a Hugo and was for me one of the worst SF books I've ever read. And then there are books which are brilliant, but have never won an award, like "The Martian".

You didn't like neuromancer...?

I had a very hard time finding things to like in Neuromancer. It was a long time ago, but iirc the prose is pretty clunky, the characters are made of cardboard, and the plot has all the depth of a Ridley Scott movie. The world building was on point, but there's only so much 80's zeitgeist ("everything is awful, you'll be replaced piecemeal by machines, faceless megacorps rule over vast slums of pleasure junkies bathed in acid rain") that a person can channel with a straight face. Like I love me some weird dystopian cyberpunk universes, but I want that to be the starting point, not the ending point.

(Conversely, by way of making a positive contrast with something in a similar genre that , I really enjoyed A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick).

To be totally clear, I think Neuromancer is probably a thoroughly enjoyable read and I'd recommend it to someone looking for what it is without hesitation. It's just pretty easy to take umbrage with.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#205

Post by elorant »

lsc wrote: post #200
elorant wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we don't always like awarded books. I read "The Three Body Problem" a couple of years ago which had won a Nebula award and found it to be mediocre at best and much overhyped. Last year I read the "Neuromancer" which had won both a Nebula and a Hugo and was for me one of the worst SF books I've ever read. And then there are books which are brilliant, but have never won an award, like "The Martian".

If you don't like William Gibson... you and I have very different tastes; Neuromancer is a particularly perfect example of the sort of thing I like. There is a certain amount of calibrating for the awards group; for my taste? the nebula is... not 100%; much like how I enjoy '80s action films rather more than Ebert. like I've never read a Pulitzer for fiction book that I didn't think was incredible, while some of the…

So, name five other books which are like Neuromancer and you liked them. I'll try one or two of them, if I haven't read them already. Incidentally I've read a lot of Gibson's books and Neuromancer was the one I liked the least. Probably because it was his first and not as polished as the rest. Or perhaps because by today's standards the cyber warfare he's describing sounds ludicrous. I do like his cyberpunk atmosphere though.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#206

Post by aklemm »

crystaln wrote: post #102
aklemm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Library consumers don’t seem like the most lucrative customer base.

My instinct and experience contradicts that.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#207

Post by bredren »

CydeWeys wrote: post #154
bredren wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some onus is on Apple, the only other player that could deliver hardware and has A complete store for books. I understand it that they would not release any ink devices that fragment their product lineup beyond iPhone and iPad. However, Apple‘s lack of action in providing quality reading experiences that reduce eyestrain and effectively Compete means that everyone has to deal with Amazon’s garbage. I hate to…

I'm with you up until the last point. Reading is decidedly not niche in the US. Books (across all formats) are a huuuge market. They're roughly 2/3rds the size of the entire videogaming industry in this country, by revenue. The total annual revenue of the US book publishing industry is greater than YouTube's (but just barely).

Wow. Then how do you explain the malaise? Could it be ebooks are a fraction of that?

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#208

Post by darkerside »

remcob wrote: post #201
elorant wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we don't always like awarded books. I read "The Three Body Problem" a couple of years ago which had won a Nebula award and found it to be mediocre at best and much overhyped. Last year I read the "Neuromancer" which had won both a Nebula and a Hugo and was for me one of the worst SF books I've ever read. And then there are books which are brilliant, but have never won an award, like "The Martian".

A book like the "Neuromancer" really needs to be understood in it's time. If you read it now, it will look very clichéd. But that's because it introduced and popularized those very clichés! A lot of really significant cultural works have become so absorbed in our common culture, and sometimes improved upon, that the original starts to look cliché and even naive. Is there a name for this effect?

I recently read, and enjoyed, Dune. But I wonder how much more I would have loved it if it weren't for this effect.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#209

Post by romack77 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #197
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.

Spotify has one genious feature that I use a lot: similar artists. The problem with machine learning and recommendations is that it has a few pitfalls that lead to poor results. This is on full display on Amazon which manages to recommend stuff I've already bought from them while not being able to tell the difference between hard science fiction and fantasy. The resulting recommendation bubble seems impossible to esc…

The desire for these recommendation services not to be "too smart" really resonates with me. If we can't yet give a great set of zero-effort recommendations, why don't we pull back a step and give the user a few power tools to find their own? Maybe I'm out of step with mainstream users, but I would see that as a huge improvement.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#210

Post by mbo »

duncanawoods wrote: post #11
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 wouldn't be so defeatist! I used Goodreads manually for a bit. Adding books only takes seconds which seems inconsequential compared to how long it takes to read them. I didn't continue with it because there just wasn't any real value. I don't want a trophy shelf of read books or get automated recommendations by "people who have read similar books" because those titles are very predictable. I'd need something differ…

Perhaps something like the discussion that takes place on Letterboxd or Rateyourmusic?
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