Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I Want to Fix Goodreads

prepend.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 205 posts

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#121

Post by mekarpeles »

electriclove wrote: post #119
olah_1 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like there is a strong desire to _not_ make OpenLibrary an alternative to Goodreads. See discussions here[1] and here[2]. [1]: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/3103 [2]: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/1964

And for good reason.. many of those requests involve a much higher level of maintenance (moderating content like reviews, building a social network, etc) I like that OpenLibrary is trying to be a source of open book data. But I am a bit concerned about the quality of the data (just a feeling as I am still digging into it but there are open questions on how to handle things like multiple authors, etc)

We have a small network of librarians on a slack channel who have merged more than 10,000 duplicate works.

Librarians (which is a permission role) also have the ability to merge Authors, so data improves over time.

Furthermore, members of our community coordinate with Wikidata, VIAF, etc -- we match up identifiers and sync data (and in this way, bots are able to make meaningful changes in bulk on a rolling basis).

See: http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-bots (most of which are built using the OL client: http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-client)

e.g. https://github.com/cdrini/openlibrary-wikidata-bot

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#122

Post by mekarpeles »

electriclove wrote: post #114
mekarpeles wrote: post #43

Howdy, Mek here -- I run https://openlibrary.org over at the non-profit Internet Archive (the folks that bring you the Wayback Machine). Open Library is an free, online California Library with millions of digital books to read and borrow. It's additionally an open catalog of millions of books which you may track like goodreads. Best part? If it's not to your liking, the whole project is open source! https://github.co…

This is awesome! Is there a schema link that explains the different types (works vs edition) and how they are all related?

Many in our community are intimately familiar with and sensitive to the challenges of FRBR (e.g. serials, etc) as it pertains to maintaining a system of Works and Editions.

This is an active conversation on our slack. Send me an email and I'll be happy to invite you to join the discussion.

Honestly, a lot of our Librarian bottlenecks aren't engineering, they're documentation and organization related.

Since Aaron Swartz started Open Library ~2007, there have been scores of trailblazing Librarians (like Karen Coyle and Jessamyn West) who have nudged us in the right direction and documented their opinions.

I've done by best to organize these learnings here: https://openlibrary.org/librarians

We could really use help here if you or anyone else is interested in doing some digital archaeology and helping us better organize (so we can make good schema decisions to move forward).

Thanks for bringing this up.

Fun fact, by the way: Nearly every page on Open Library is a json API of itself if you add `.json` to the end.

e.g. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7353617M/Fantastic_Mr._Fox & https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7353617M.json

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#123

Post by mekarpeles »

electriclove wrote: post #114
mekarpeles wrote: post #43

Howdy, Mek here -- I run https://openlibrary.org over at the non-profit Internet Archive (the folks that bring you the Wayback Machine). Open Library is an free, online California Library with millions of digital books to read and borrow. It's additionally an open catalog of millions of books which you may track like goodreads. Best part? If it's not to your liking, the whole project is open source! https://github.co…

This is awesome! Is there a schema link that explains the different types (works vs edition) and how they are all related?

Also related:

https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-client/tree/m...

https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/wiki/Library-...

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#124

Post by defen »

johnfn wrote: post #46
PaulStatezny wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Infinite jest by David foster wallace and only forwards - forget the author name off the top of my head. Infinite jest is pretty popular these days. The other I have yet to hear anyone say they have read.

Liking Infinite Jest suggests an interest in American literary maximalism and / or comic novels.

Suggestions: The Sot-Weed Factor, Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Underworld, and if you’re feeling particularly masochistic The Tunnel

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#125

Post by bufferoverflow »

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…

2 interesting tracks out of a 100+, that's not a great result. I'm sure if you listen to 100 random tracks, you will like a couple.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#126

Post by rexpop »

paulcole wrote: post #80
rexpop wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i could be fired for posting. Yikes, that's rather dramatic! Especially since all you've said is "we're working to fix it. changes soon." That's a pretty harmless statement, I would think. What gives you the idea that such statements put your employment at risk?

> we know it is bad today This is the kind of thing companies love their employees to share publicly!

I think you are being sarcastic, which is unhelpful.

In fact, there's a difference between "we know it is bad," and "we've no interest, either way." How should I know which is strategic to say, publicly?

What reason does this employee have to think Amazon would retaliate against them making public statements about their own working life?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#127

Post by SamBam »

johnfn wrote: post #46
PaulStatezny wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Infinite jest by David foster wallace and only forwards - forget the author name off the top of my head. Infinite jest is pretty popular these days. The other I have yet to hear anyone say they have read.

Ok, but was Infinite Jest ever an "unknown" book? I'm pretty sure it was one of the most hyped books in the world the year it was written. And I'm pretty sure it's always been in the 4.x's on Goodreads.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#128

Post by SamBam »

macobo wrote: post #95
SECProto wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we have half stars or quarter stars? I read a lot of books, and choosing full-star 1 to 5 makes the ratings pretty useless for people who read a lot. My internal rankings are: 1 hated it/was offended/didn't finish 2 disliked it/likely didn't finish 3 finished but it was a struggle 4 finished/enjoyed/had some issues 5 finished fast/really enjoyed/may or may not have still had issues. If I look back at the 30 to 50…

Why take 60% of the rating space up by negative ratings? It seems like what you really care about is degrees of goodness. An alternative approach: 1 - I disliked it. 2 - It's OK 3 - This is good 4 - This is great 5 - This is a must-read

It's the problem with star systems, which is that we'll always have different definitions. Your 3s are living next to the other poster's 3s and mean very different things.

That said, I think the world has also suffered from ratings inflation. I tend to assume anything under a 4 means "bad" or "meh" myself.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#129

Post by noisy_boy »

For all the AI and machine learning being thrown in the pot of every dish being made, they still haven't figured out that if I just bought a flashlight, I'm not likely to get a double-pack to save $2 anytime soon.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#130

Post by SamBam »

gbtw wrote: post #4
nonbirithm wrote: post #2

How do people build recommendation engines? Like, even when you have access to the site's entire API and can write your own client for it, there's still the fact that their recommendations are generally better. It sounds like an extremely important value-add. There are many sites that I will only use the app for because that is where the recommendations are shown. But to me taking a user profile and an article and sp…

> How do people build recommendation engines? Poorly, its either shovel so much shit against a wall to see what sticks (youtube) or you sorta watched this for 10 minutes to see if you liked it but you didn't but here is more (netflix). Curated lists made by humans are still nicer.

Err, I disagree with your assessment of Youtube's recommendation engine being "poor." It is probably the most powerful recommendation engine in the world.

5 billion YT videos, comprising 1 billion hours, are watched every day, a meteoric rise ever since they improved the recommendation engine.

That recommendation engine has also been accused of contributing to the rise in polarization and conspiracy theories world-wide. So it may not be a force for good. But it's damn powerful.

Post reply on HN