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Goodreads Is Broken

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Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#221

Post by GavriloPrincep »

lsc wrote: post #189
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 fo…

Well, the Booker Prize is kinda hit and miss. In film, the Oscars are generally 'miss', (though the aged Academy members taking their grandkids to the mall multiplex is hardly what I would call "highly skilled and respected experts", then months later voting, under duress, maybe for a film they've seen)

> I... personally don't understand why people even try to automate making better recommendation engines

It's because

* our detailed like-history contains a lot of specific information about our tastes

* highly rated books, highly reviewed books, in our favourite genres can be very poor

* (many) others' book histories, if they overlap partially with ours, contain associated information that can be utilized.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#222

Post by rsaarelm »

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…

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549

Recommendations seem good for what I checked. One bit of weirdness though, searching for Gödel, Escher, Bach [1] gets me a book by "Agnes F. Vandome", that on googling is some sort of fake book of compiled wikipedia articles, and I need to click on the alternatives to find Hofstadter's book. So it looks like the search system can be successfully spammed with fake titles for reasonably notable books.

[1]: https://nowwhatdoiread.com/?q=gödel%2C+escher%2C+bach

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#225

Post by gordon_freeman »

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…

your site is useful and has good recommendations. Thanks for the link. I tried looking at books with "Writing" category and some of the recommendations like "On Writing by Stephen King" are really good and what I would expect. Though I feel that you should work on your priority of order when showing recommended books. For example: when I search for books similar to "The Handmaid's Tale", I don't expect to see "Cat's eye" as a top recommendation. Something to improve upon further.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#226

Post by perl4ever »

elorant wrote: post #205
lsc wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 atmospher…

I've never actually read Neuromancer, but Alexander Jablokov wrote some novels similar to what I imagine Neuromancer is like. For example, Nimbus and A Deeper Sea. Near future written in the early 90s.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#227

Post by perl4ever »

hinkley wrote: post #193
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.

Why for the love of god and your own mothers would they suggest movies to me that are similar to a movie I watched 5 minutes of and never finished? If I can't make it through 5 minutes of a movie I sure as fuck don't want to watch another movie that's just like it. Read the room already.

I've found it odd that Spotify keeps playing me the same tracks even if I forward past them every single time they start because I can't stand it.

I don't think that can be stupidity, it must be malice...

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#228

Post by Flow »

qrv3w wrote: post #130
atombender wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for making this! I tried a bunch of searches and the recommendations are surprisingly good. A couple of points. All my searches selected an (in my opinion) less prominent result as the top hit and I had to click the "see other results". The searches I remember doing were "Blood Meridian" (should show Cormac McCarthy as top hit and "Waiting for the Barbarians" (J. M. Coetzee). Secondly, I'm not sure if it's sen…

Thanks! I appreciate your points.

> I find the current font a bit illegible

It takes a lot of effort to read it. I'd say that for me it's 80% unreadable. Please, at least make a button on the site to select another font if a user feels like I do.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#229

Post by akbarnama »

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…

Thanks! I got some exciting suggestions when I tried for "The Unknown Errors of Our Lives"; especially "Though I Get Home".

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#230

Post by bscphil »

ztarven wrote: post #113
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.

I absolutely agree, algorithms are terrible for recommendations. On the media database[0] my wife and I are building we're experimenting with community upvotes for suggestions. Our userbase is small so the results are inconclusive right now but hopefully time will tell if this method works. [0] https://rate.house

The only good one I've ever seen was in the music business: Rdio, specifically. (Now sadly dead.) I don't know what they were doing, but their recommendations were consistently excellent at pushing me towards new artists and even new genres that I didn't expect but would up enjoying.

Back when I used to use it (about a decade ago), Pandora was good at shuffling, but their library was so small I would get the same songs over and over.

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