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Goodreads Is Broken

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Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#281

Post by tripzilch »

Retric wrote: post #265
angry_octet wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to what aspects seemed cliched. What earlier works are you talking about? I thought I'd read them all...

It’s been a while but ... The focus on cyborgs a year after The Six Million Dollar Man TV show kind if shows how much a product of the times it was. But, that’s the surface. The way it portrayed both hacking and brain machine interfaces was wildly off base and basically copied from other science fiction. Virtual reality for example goes back to 1933. Main character being a druggy is fairly common in that time period,…

"Style over substance" is kind of cyberpunk's motto, and they don't deny it :)

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#282

Post by atombender »

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…

By the way, can I ask how you calculate the recommendations? Your explanation on the site is that it just uses the genre, but that cannot possibly be the whole answer?

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#283

Post by capedape »

This author and book are in almost every quote category last time I checked “ Criss Jami, Killosophy.” Often multiple times in the same category. He has some ok quotes, but rarely are they the same caliber of others, especially not in every category. Seems the quote area has been gamed too. I contacted goodreads and they didn’t seem to care.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#284

Post by parliament32 »

Like the article suggests, I've been using Goodreads strictly as a list-keeping app -- the recommendations are pretty useless. The star ratings, however, are somewhat useful if you know how to read them.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#285

Post by parliament32 »

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".

Likewise, I was pretty disappointed with The Three Body Problem after all the hype about it. Maybe it was because it was a translated work but it felt super flat for me.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#286

Post by lsc »

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…

>I would slowly acquire a recommendation network of people like me, effectively crowd sourcing the content-finding to a bunch of clones!

But I don't want recommendations from people like me. I want recommendations from people with good taste.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#287

Post by lordgrenville »

ryacko wrote: post #117
lordgrenville wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean yeah you can do it on GR with a group as well, but I'm talking about a built-in book club feature with a timetable, chat, status updates, etc. Say I'm looking to read War and Peace this winter. I find a bunch of other like-minded people, and we set a timetable, read it together, then disband.

A timetable? On reddit the thread starter mentions when the next discussion is going to take place. The timetable reduces friction, but it doesn’t provide that much additional value.

Fair point. But I looked on Reddit and couldn't find the kind of thing I'm talking about (r/bookclub chooses one book a month by vote, and r/ReadingGroup seems like an overwhelming sea of random posts). I think also the fact that it contains clubs for many different media is a bit of a handicap, since the book content gets swamped, and there's a searchability problem. (Reddit's UI isn't great at the best of times, anyway.) GR has a built-in audience of a wide range of readers, so they're better positioned to do this kind of thing.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#288

Post by roryokane »

mhb wrote: post #121

On a related note - what happened to the Netflix recommendation engine after they awarded the $1M prize for a 10% improvement to their already pretty good recommender? Did they just throw the whole thing out the window?

I can’t remember all the details, but from what I remember when I looked this up a few years ago, yes, Netflix did throw the whole thing out the window. They said that the winning algorithm would require more processing power to run, or expensive code changes or something, and so they decided their current engine was good enough.

Then Netflix switched strategies away from highly-personalized recommendations to a dumber algorithm that is more likely to recommend more popular movies, which ends up retaining subscribers better. The reasoning was that users were more likely to cancel their subscription if they had one obviously bad recommendation than if they had multiple so-so recommendations. So rather than recommending, for example, 80% great movies and 20% bad ones, Netflix wants to recommend 5% great movies and 95% okay ones.

Re: Goodreads Is Broken

#290

Post by _pmf_ »

kpozin wrote: post #289
_pmf_ wrote: post #31

Cannot confirm. Getting pretty good recommendations for Japanese crime novels, which is probably reasonably niche.

Keigo Higashino's novels, or something else?

Exactly. (Somehow, these have an extremely calming/relaxing kind of suspension.)
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