Goodreads Is Broken • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#231

Post by bscphil » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 6:00 AM UTC

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).

To be fair, even if your claims about the market are true, books could still be niche. The reason is that books cost $20 and take a few hours to read, so let's conservatively say publishers are making $5/hr of reading time. YouTube is making pennies per hour of video watch time. So if it's true that the revenue of the book publishing industry is approximately equal to that of YouTube, then the average person is spending vastly more time watching YouTube than reading books. In comparison, books are still likely to be incredibly niche.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#232

Post by dmje » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 6:00 AM UTC

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…

There's https://tastedive.com/ which does this pretty well?

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#233

Post by bscphil » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 6:08 AM UTC

jwr wrote: post #14

I wonder if people posting on Medium realize that for many of us the articles are inaccessible ("Sign up for a free Medium account, and you’ll get one more story in your member preview this month"). It seems that people missed the change in Medium's business model and still think that it's a site for posting publicly accessible articles.

Yeah I thought it was pretty funny that someone on Medium of all places wrote an article called "X Site is Broken". Medium is the running with Yelp and Scribd for site people complain the most about.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#234

Post by mzs » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 6:12 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #4

That first graphic with failed title search results reminded me of a project I did working on a library catalog search using Solr. We tuned the relevancy ranking to work for exactly those sorts of searches, and put the things the OP was looking for on top (or at least under other books with exact same title). His examples look just like some of our QA searches for our relevancy ranking (in addition to standard tf/idf…

OMG memories of when the reg went from the XT to Micron catalog! Trust me, research library patrons would have revolted had you not done your job admirably as you had ;)

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#235

Post by freetonik » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 6:28 AM UTC

knolan wrote: post #46

jwr wrote: post #14

I wonder if people posting on Medium realize that for many of us the articles are inaccessible ("Sign up for a free Medium account, and you’ll get one more story in your member preview this month"). It seems that people missed the change in Medium's business model and still think that it's a site for posting publicly accessible articles.

Not to justify them or anything but as a workaround to this many many similar awful behaviours, Reader mode on Safari is a handy way to ignore all this.

It does, but if there are images in the post, Reader mode loads blurry images because medium serves blurry previews until you scroll past the position of the image. It’s quite infuriating.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#236

Post by bscphil » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 6:28 AM UTC

mottosso wrote: post #43

jwr wrote: post #14

I wonder if people posting on Medium realize that for many of us the articles are inaccessible ("Sign up for a free Medium account, and you’ll get one more story in your member preview this month"). It seems that people missed the change in Medium's business model and still think that it's a site for posting publicly accessible articles.

Without JavaScript, they load quickly and without popups or membership requirement on my end.

Images in the articles don't display for me without JS, do they work for you?

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#237

Post by bscphil » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 6:49 AM UTC

ztarven wrote: post #54

My wife and I experienced the same disappointments on goodreads, and many of the same flaws exist in other media rating/cataloging sites. We're attempting to solve this problem by creating a centralized collaborative media database that we always wished existed. Without any marketing yet, https://rate.house currently only has ~100 users, but we'd love to hear HN's input and know if we're heading in the right directio…

I think you've got a really nice design going on already, and basic features seem to work without JS, so that's nice. I also like that you haven't polluted it with ads (I'm far more likely to donate to sites that don't have ads).

Two thoughts:

1. I think I would find a 5 star rating system too constraining. My opinions in most areas have more gradations than just 0-5. 0-100 would be entirely too many. I think IMDB's 10 point scale is really the main reason why I've stuck with that for movies. On the other hand I prefer to only thumbs up / thumbs down books, so I'm really not sure you can do anything about this in a way that would make everyone happy.

2. I think there's either a bug with your weighted average or else you're ranking using something like "we're 90% confident the true rating is at least x". But this confidence level seems entirely too high for the number of users you have on your site. For example Avengers: Endgame appears on #13 on this page: https://rate.house/chart/movie despite the fact that it has a rating of only 3.64. I would probably lower the confidence required for now, and if you 10x or 100x your users you can raise it again.

3. Would be nice to know a bit more about what features it has on the home page before signing up. Can I import my ratings from other sites? Can I export my data in some usable format like CSV? Can the information database the users create for media entries be downloaded by users? (Even IMDB offers this.) Can I get recommendations from the site once I've rated enough items? Can I get music recommendations based on my movie ratings? (That would be cool.)

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#238

Post by thristian » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 6:58 AM UTC

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?

> Is there a name for this effect?

"Seinfeld" is Unfunny[1]

[1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#239

Post by ernesth » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 8:08 AM UTC

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 essentially what https://www.senscritique.com/ does in the french speaking world. You rate movies, books, comics, series, music, then it will suggest "éclaireurs" (scouts/recon) to follow, finally you will be advised to see/read/listen what they love and you do not know.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#240

Post by Izkata » Sun, Sep 08, 2019, 8:16 AM UTC

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…

https://www.anime-planet.com/ does recommendations like that on a per-show basis (if you liked [this] then you may like [this], [this], [this]...), the relationship recommended, voted, and commented on by other viewers.