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I Want to Fix Goodreads

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Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#131

Post by Zanni »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #115
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..…

Really? GoodReads reviews have devolved to complete garbage. The first few pages of reviews are always from the same people trying to be GoodReads famous. Everyone gives everything 5-star reviews because they get more likes for positive reviews. The user reviews mean nothing. I'd like to have a way to see what people actually think about books. But on GoodReads that's almost impossible to find. I'm surprised there is…

Interesting point about reviewers skewing positive for popularity. My big issue with most recommendation engines is that they're biased towards false positives rather than false negatives. The other way would lead to fewer, more focused recommendations.

In particular, I'd like to see an engine take a reviewer's dislikes into account more. If someone likes (switching to film for an accessible example) Cinderella, The Little Mermaid and Mulan, their opinion on Brave isn't going to carry much information as they're pretty indiscriminate about Disney films. But if they love Mulan, dislike Little Mermaid and hate Cinderella, their opinion on Brave is more likely to line up with my own.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#132

Post by hombre_fatal »

watwut wrote: post #87
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point... if you allow transtivity, you get discovery but your recommendations start sucking.

But my recommemdations sucks pretty much everywhere.

If all recommendation engines can do is essentially try to find the right cohort for you (which is how they all work because they can just try to go "people who liked A also tended to like B"), then you'll never like them if you have narrow tastes. Recommendation engines are blunt instruments, after all. Just think of how fundamentally unreliable "people who liked A tended to like B, so you might like B too" actually is for such a personal topic.

You'd have to wait until recommendation engines can read your mind and run your simulation against books.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#133

Post by hombre_fatal »

SECProto wrote: post #56
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.

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…

Your post only goes to point out how arbitrary rating systems are since everyone brings their own ideas into the system of what ratings mean.

What you really want is some personal bookkeeping which doesn't make sense for the 5-star system. You'd want tags or the private note textarea to scribble down your arbitrary personal rating system.

Frankly I think more ratings are just worse. You're pitching 10 or 20 different options instead of 5.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#134

Post by Volundr »

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…

Holy cow, thank you for pointing this out and, well, building it in the first place. For me at least this is immediately looking better than Goodreads, which I've always kind of used begrudgingly.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#135

Post by lstamour »

kobe_bryant wrote: post #83
esquire_900 wrote: post #38

After 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…

the problem is that when you step out of genre fiction, you cant just recommend a book with a similar plot or setting, it needs to have a similar style of writing and sensibility and thats very hard to determine. the best way is friending/following people and learning their tastes compared to yours e: if you go to a specific book and look up similar books, goodreads actually does a pretty good job https://www.goodrea…

I would think that Amazon with Look Inside The Book and Kindle eBooks has enough data to do this, if anyone can?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#136

Post by hilbertseries »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #115
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..…

Really? GoodReads reviews have devolved to complete garbage. The first few pages of reviews are always from the same people trying to be GoodReads famous. Everyone gives everything 5-star reviews because they get more likes for positive reviews. The user reviews mean nothing. I'd like to have a way to see what people actually think about books. But on GoodReads that's almost impossible to find. I'm surprised there is…

I remember metacritic used to have a books section, but they eventually dropped it.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#137

Post by freddie_mercury »

newbie578 wrote: post #72

The status quo regarding Goodreads and it's position in the industry is really interesting. There is not a single competent alternative to Goodreads, yet Goodreads just sucks! As simple as that, the UI is horrible, the UX is disgusting, the perfomance is that of toaster and still people are using it. I personally am using it for the last 5 years while continuously searching unsuccessfully for alternatives. If you thi…

> I realized that there is just no real viable business model for it to be worth it

I think this is key. It is kind of amazing that on a site all about startups and finding "product/market fit" every single thread about goodreads completely ignores any aspect of viability and expects someone else to just spend money for purely aesthetic reasons like it is a charity project.

Is goodreads perfect? Good lord no. If I owned it, would I spend money trying to improve the search or the mobile app? Hell no. Hire 5 developers at $1 million/year to...what exactly? Is a better mobile app going to translate to tens of millions of dollars of revenue somehow?

It isn't like LibraryThing or StoryGraph or BookSloth or Riffle are actually any good and they have 5+ years of development to solve all the alleged issues. Yet everyone in this thread complaining about Goodreads is still using Goodreads instead of them.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#138

Post by aasasd »

I'd like to propose a different thing to fix first: when I open that page, I can't scroll with the keyboard unless I first click in the main content area. I.e. the focus is initially somewhere else.

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#139

Post by ajwaxman »

Has anybody ever used stack ranking to power book recommendations? Instead of rating books on a scale of 1-5 star you instead rate each book relative to every other book you’ve ever read.

Some other factors that I think could be used to create a high quality book recommendation engine on top of stack ranking: number of books read (the top 5 books from someone who has read 200+ books is a stronger signal than someone who has read 10 books) and release date (give extra weight to older books to reduce recency bias).

What do you think? Am I onto something or just spewing some sat night nonsense?

Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads

#140

Post by rammy1234 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #137
newbie578 wrote: post #72

The status quo regarding Goodreads and it's position in the industry is really interesting. There is not a single competent alternative to Goodreads, yet Goodreads just sucks! As simple as that, the UI is horrible, the UX is disgusting, the perfomance is that of toaster and still people are using it. I personally am using it for the last 5 years while continuously searching unsuccessfully for alternatives. If you thi…

> I realized that there is just no real viable business model for it to be worth it I think this is key. It is kind of amazing that on a site all about startups and finding "product/market fit" every single thread about goodreads completely ignores any aspect of viability and expects someone else to just spend money for purely aesthetic reasons like it is a charity project. Is goodreads perfect? Good lord no. If I ow…

Money is where ideas thrive. I would build something based on recommendation based on users who you like. I like someone and I want to know the books they like and more and more of this. so essentially Facebook for Book recommendation. I know someone and so I know what books they read. User can choose to publicize the recommendation or to certain group of people or private.
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