Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

> It is the same thing that Oracle purchasing MySQL. What once was a promising raising technology is nowadays stagnant. (Interest over time https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...)

Connecting Oracle's purchase with the MySQL's market share is a long stretch. Even based on that diagram, the decline started earlier than the time Oracle came into play.

The quality and pace of development of MySQL/InnoDB hasn't meaningfully changed (although one may subtly observe that with v8, they radically changed the release philosophy - patch versions now can introduce new features or break old ones). There have been low and high quality features developed, but that happens with any software. In order to get an idea of how MySQL was around 10 years ago, notice how by that time, MyISAM was (unfortunately) still something.

A simple interpretation of the shift in market share is that PGSQL hasn't been ready for wide adoption (historically speaking, it's been considered for a long time the slow and cumbersome RDBMS), until, after a certain functional threshold, it entered a virtuous circle of improving and getting traction.

Of course, it's also possible that people is taking distance from MySQL "because Oracle", but that doesn't constitute a technical ground.

Amazon was pretty much forced to buy Goodreads: the original business model of Goodreads before the Amazon buyout was making money from referral links to booksellers. While links were provided to several internet booksellers besides Amazon, like Barnes & Noble, already the vast majority of internet users were hooked on Amazon and only buying through Amazon links. Consequently, Amazon was paying Goodreads a huge amount of money in referral fees each month, and it made more sense for Amazon to simply buy the site and stop that.

I agree that Amazon is nefarious and destructive, but I think any company in the same position would have bought Goodreads out.

The author complains that it is "impossible" to find books on Goodreads. Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. Don't just rely on a title. Which should be common sense (if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?") but apparently isn't.

The author complains that searching for 'holiday heart' didn't show Margarita García Robayo's book in the top hits. But searching for 'holiday heart robayo' does.

As for the rest of the piece...the belief that algorithmic recommendations are going to be easy for some shoestring budget startup run by a single person in their spare time is somehow going to do a good job simply isn't credible.

People still complain about Netflix recommendations and they've spent tens of millions of dollars, possibly over a hundred million dollars, on it and are one of the most valuable companies on the planet with one of the best engineering teams on the planet.

Why do people think algorithmic recommendations are easy? Or even desirable?

Honestly, I checked out the storygraph after reading the article, and the first thing that came to mind when I saw the site was ‘amateur hour’ that I read earlier today in some post about Apple.

I can’t really take it seriously while it still looks like some random programmer’s side project.

That said, it’s readable and mobile friendly, so that’s a win.

Why is nobody asking how a recommendation engine is supposed to work if there’s nothing to recommend? Is it possible that even computers recognize 90% of media as garbage?