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Goodreads Is Broken

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Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#211

Post by torben-friis »

umvi wrote: post #199
sohkamyung wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My preference is to rely on the judgement of reviewers whose taste kind of matches mine. I wish there were a website where I could put in all of my favorite video games, books, movies, anime, etc. And it would recommend me things based on what people with similar tastes liked. Then, I could try out the recommendation and then either like or dislike it. I would slowly acquire a recommendation network of people like…

That's FilmAffinity, for movies. It's pretty popular in the Spanish speaking world.

You vote movies, it calculates what it calls your "soulmates" (people who voted similarly) and then you get recommendations Of movies based on what those people loved, which you can filter by genre, era, etc. You can recalculate your soulmates anytime, and there are some options to tweak the algorithm.

You can also organise movies into lists (kinda like music playlists) and those are public, so if my preferences match user X and they happen to have a list titled "movies I enjoyed this past year" I can just check that.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#212

Post by romack77 »

samcodes wrote: post #141
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.

I agree. Collaborative filtering should succeed when you have sufficient of data, but we don't always have sufficient data. I think books are a tough challenge: the number of books is relatively large (vs. e.g. the number of restaurants on Yelp), the number of books people read is relatively small (vs. e.g. how many things they buy). Plus, people's tastes in them are relatively particular, and they're a big time commitment, so the bar for what counts as a "good" recommendation is high.

I think in these cases you can do better by bringing in some content-based filtering. I made an experimental book recommender using only story trope tags and I thought the results were already better than what I was getting elsewhere. It's still up at https://bookslikethis.herokuapp.com/ (but it basically only has sci-fi/fantasy titles).

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#213

Post by pugio »

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've been looking for something exactly like your site for some time. Great job, and great design!

Note: You have a typo on your About page – "Amazon Convservation Association" (extra "v").

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#214

Post by CydeWeys »

bredren wrote: post #207
CydeWeys wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

E-books are doing pretty well.

It's a flat-out monopoly. Amazon has a strangehold on the market. If you only had to compete on the hardware, then you'd see competitors. But you need to compete with the entire market ecosystem, which is very hard.

It's like the mobile phone industry, except instead of two unassailable players there's only a single one.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#215

Post by CydeWeys »

StavrosK wrote: post #183
CydeWeys wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They probably saved some trivial amount of money on manufacturing costs by removing physical switches, seeing as how they were implementing touchscreens anyway for the rest of their interface.

Smartphones initially had physical buttons that have gone by the wayside now, but at least their screens are much more responsive!

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#216

Post by Retric »

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 read Neuromancer in the early 90’s and thought it was very cliched at the time. Granted that’s ~10 years after publication, but it barrows heavily from earlier works.

I suspect people like it for the same reason they liked their first Anime, it’s an unusual style that seems very original unless you have been reading other stuff written in the same vein by say Philip K. Dick.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#217

Post by roadbeats »

GoodReads and Craigslist are similar. They serve their original functions sufficiently and that's all. Personally, I like GoodReads a lot, it's the only social site I use in fact.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#220

Post by CodeTheInternet »

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…

The Kindle ads are worse. I don't mind at all opening up my Kindle and seeing a book recommendation ... if its at LEAST in the genres I read. You would think Amazon would be on top of it.
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