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I Want to Fix Goodreads

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Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#21

Post by johnfn »

Good lord what I wouldn’t give for a better goodreads. Never has so much useful and actionable data been squandered. For example, I could write pages about how bad the “top books” lists are. The Goodreads Choice Awards are purely and literally popularity contests, for example. Why would this be the case - you have millions of user ratings, you should be using those to surface exciting and unknown books rather than throwing people back at the same few authors they already know. The lists work exactly the same way - they discard ratings entirely and only take into account the quantity of books. It would be as if you said that the top 40 is the best music because everyone listens to it.

So you don’t think I’m all talk, a while back I got so fed up with this that I wrote my own script to scrape goodreads and find the actual best books, not just the most popular, and I found a wealth of really good and unknown books, including two books that are now my favorite books of all time. It was a side project that took me an hour. Why goodreads can’t do this is utterly beyond me.

Aaaargh!!!

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#22

Post by recuter »

anonreader123 wrote: post #18

I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for posting. we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.

How many of you are there?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#23

Post by PaulStatezny »

johnfn wrote: post #21

Good lord what I wouldn’t give for a better goodreads. Never has so much useful and actionable data been squandered. For example, I could write pages about how bad the “top books” lists are. The Goodreads Choice Awards are purely and literally popularity contests, for example. Why would this be the case - you have millions of user ratings, you should be using those to surface exciting and unknown books rather than th…

Would you share the titles and authors of those two books?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#24

Post by darkerside »

anonreader123 wrote: post #18

I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for posting. we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.

What are the most important changes that your team is prioritizing?

What are your biggest challenges with making them?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#25

Post by monksy »

Honestly, I feel that most tech goes this way when you have a monoply. Everything has a nature lifecycle, theres new life, interest, peak, and death/replacement. However, with some of these large corps (i.e. Amazon in this case), they can choose to hamper the growth and avoid competition.

A lot of our tech can/should be a lot better than what it is. Use the tech to help people collaborate/get together/share. That was the great thing about reddit in it's hayday.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#26

Post by cpsempek »

I'm skeptical of this person's ability to "know" what they don't want to read. E.g., they are recommended Shoe Dog and a King novel, which they claim they don't want to read. However, if other people have read similar books and rated them similarly to this person and have read Shoe Dog and that King novel and rated those well, then this person may like those books. It seems they are assuming they won't like them, but not for particularly strong reasons. One of my favorite authors is Haruki Murakami and I would have rated Colorless Tsukuru a 2 or 3. If that were the only Murakami novel I had read and I made the same assumptions this person made, I would have missed out on some of my favorite books.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#27

Post by manigandham »

I don't create about recommendations as much. I get those from other sources and already have enough of a backlist to last a life time.

Goodreads for me is for storing my history and ratings. Same with IMDB for movies. Both sites are terrible (and owned by Amazon), but I don't see much value in clones that don't do anything completely new.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#28

Post by taeric »

johnfn wrote: post #21

Good lord what I wouldn’t give for a better goodreads. Never has so much useful and actionable data been squandered. For example, I could write pages about how bad the “top books” lists are. The Goodreads Choice Awards are purely and literally popularity contests, for example. Why would this be the case - you have millions of user ratings, you should be using those to surface exciting and unknown books rather than th…

I'm confused. What you describe is really just another form of popularity contest, no? Unless you have a set of reviewers that you value over others. One might call them the critical reviewers. (No, I'm not trying to be subtle)

So, what books did you find? Why not make a post on your method?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#29

Post by matsemann »

giberson wrote: post #17

> My idea for an 11-star experience 1 in finding new books is that Goodreads knows me even better than I know myself and constantly recommends the perfect book. > goodreads shows me five books that I don’t want to read. I wonder if these two ideas are at odds with each other. Imagine for a moment that recommendation engines were solved problems, and definitely worked given the above statement. They know you better th…

I think you are right. Being recommended a book I've never heard about by some author I'v never heard of by some computer system, I'm probably gonna dismiss it. However, if I've seen it in a bookstore, read about it in a paper, heard a friend talk about it etc. then I might act on the recommendation.

Basically being exposed to something enough times. First time and a cursory look, most things don't look to exciting. This goes for everything. Movies, restaurants, gadgets..

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#30

Post by anonreader123 »

darkerside wrote: post #24
anonreader123 wrote: post #18

I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for posting. we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.

What are the most important changes that your team is prioritizing? What are your biggest challenges with making them?

I want to be specific but I would get fired if they saw. but we read EVERY post about us. we are being ambitious and big changes are coming.

biggest challenge is there is too much to do and we have so few staff.

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