Is the recommendation engine bad on average or bad for you?
I Want to Fix Goodreads
31–40 of 205 posts
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#32One thing I'd add about the UX is that the search bar is buried below the fold on the homepage of the desktop version. Everywhere else, even on mobile, it's at the very top. It makes it a little more difficult to just jump to their site and start searching.
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#33Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#34My problem with Goodreads isn't the recommendations engine. The recommendations are fine. I'm actually skeptical that any ML recommendation engine is going to recommend better books than my friends will. The only thing I expect from a recommendation engine is discovery , by which I mean finding new things that neither I nor my friends have read that look interesting. Whether they're good is another story altogether..…
My most hated part of Goodreads is that if you type something in search and try to click the middle mouse button to open the resulting, highlighted book in the new window... it just copies the page you're already on. It's a site for discovering books, why do I have to open the landing page 5 times if I want to open 5 books? It's so counterintuitive to me.
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#35Good 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…
How did you define the actual "best books" ? I usually pick a group (Goodreads users in country x), scrape the books of all its users, and sort them by frequency: https://github.com/harjoc/goodreads-group-books
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#36I'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…
Huh, I get recommended Murakami a lot but really didn't enjoy Colorless - maybe I'll try a different one.
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#37My problem with Goodreads isn't the recommendations engine. The recommendations are fine. I'm actually skeptical that any ML recommendation engine is going to recommend better books than my friends will. The only thing I expect from a recommendation engine is discovery , by which I mean finding new things that neither I nor my friends have read that look interesting. Whether they're good is another story altogether..…
Discovery engines are pretty easy if you just use clustering unless you allow transitivity (book in two clusters can be used to suggest a book in either cluster)
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#38After reading and heavily agreeing with this post, I came to the conclusion that either goodreads is not really trying, or -more likely- the data is just not good enough to make decent recommendations. There are so many biases in the review data that are impossible to fix in any kind of sparse matrix recommendation algorithm. For those who want to try anyway, it might be worth downloading an existing dataset (1) (104 million reviews) and try, before worrying about scraping and api limits.
The only solution (in my experience) is to get some other way of quantifying content, like Spotify does by manually labelling tracks. After some ddg I found storygraph (2), which does this. Its search engine is quite impressive, might be worth trying.
[1] https://sites.google.com/eng.ucsd.edu/ucsdbookgraph/home [2] https://beta.thestorygraph.com
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#39I 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.
Good luck.
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#40I 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.
Do you recommend books based on ML or do you hand pick books you want to promote because you think they should be promoted or have been paid to promote them?