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I Want to Fix Goodreads

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Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#101

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #96
watwut wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is so easy, why most of them sucks?

Because it's only actually easy of you remove the irremovable thing that makes it hard. This is one of those tropes that honestly really hurts the credibility of ML in the eyes of non-practitioners. Practitioners get really excited about some 75% solution, and talk about how this thing which is bad everywhere is really easy. The average listener doesn't realize how hard that last 25% (why would they? They were just t…

To be honest, 90% of the code takes 90% of the time and the remaining 10% takes an extra 90% of the time.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#102

Post by little_hills »

Jemaclus wrote: post #10

My 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..…

> It's unfathomable to me how something that has such a monopoly on the domain can have such terrible performance.

You’ve answered your own question there, the keyword being ‘monopoly’.

If there is no competition pushing them to improve performance or site design, it’ll inevitably fall by the wayside until they get around to it or more accurately until somebody can convince a manager/business that they should spend time working on it, which, without using ‘look how much better the competition is’ that’s gonna be a hard sell.

I’m looking at this with broad strokes though, but as a best guess I’d say that’s pretty close.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#103

Post by saralily »

Everyone's talking about recommendations. I don't use GoodReads recommendations at all. It's a social network with a focus on books where people will actually read and discuss books and book reviews. It's also a good way of chronicling what books you read. I wish they'd focus more on that part.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#106

Post by sohkamyung »

saralily wrote: post #103

Everyone's talking about recommendations. I don't use GoodReads recommendations at all. It's a social network with a focus on books where people will actually read and discuss books and book reviews. It's also a good way of chronicling what books you read. I wish they'd focus more on that part.

I use Goodreads to post my reviews of books I've read.

But I'm looking for a way to post reviews for individual short stories found online or in fiction magazines, anthologies, etc. The reviews should automagically pop up whenever the story appears in any other place. But I haven't found any sites that does this.

For example, I read and review Story X in anthology Y. If the story appears or appeared online at Z, printed in magazine F, etc, my review for it also appears if I look it up there.

Looking for recommendations for sites that do this.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#107

Post by greggh »

buttscicles wrote: post #53
50 wrote: post #19

Haven't used it myself since it's in beta but I have been keeping my eyes on this for a while: https://beta.readng.co/ , https://twitter.com/readngco

Hi, I'm building this! Thanks for sharing. It's pretty basic right at the moment and we've a lot left to build (largely a reading list only, we've got more in the works) – but here's my profile as a preview, since our marketing site & messaging needs a bit of work: https://beta.readng.co/user/joe

One of the things I always wished was built into goodreads was a good system for running a book club. They have groups, and those are close. But it just seems like they took Facebook groups and tried to make it work for a book club. It doesn't feel right to me.

Is that something thats on your roadmap?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#108

Post by heavyset_go »

simias wrote: post #100
watwut wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But my recommemdations sucks pretty much everywhere.

Spotify pretty reliably finds me one or two interesting tracks in my discover weekly. That still leaves dozens of tracks I don't particularly care for (although I generally don't actively dislike them) but I still think it's a decent result. I guess the obvious problem is that for books the equation is different. If you get recommended 20 books and after reading them you only ended up really liking 3 of them, then yo…

I've found that Last.fm's recommendations are infinitely better than Spotify's. I feel like Spotify's recommendations have too much influence from their partners and sponsors.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#109

Post by jimmySixDOF »

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.

Please find someone there who can explain why it's not possible to link GoodReads with my Audible history. They are both Amazon properties!
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