151–160 of 205 posts
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.
The most important feature of goodreads for me is: https://www.goodreads.com/new_releases/2020/9 This shows you new releases of authors whose books you have read. The recommendations basically crapped out on me after a few hundred books. It seems there are a few cliques (graph) of recommendations that are pretty independent and if you have read these cliques in a genre recommendations just suck. But plz give me some…
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.
The way this is phrased is odd and makes me question the company culture. There is nothing in the content of your post that could be deemed as fireable by any reasonable person so I am left to conclude the work environment is a hostile one.
Generally, it's not that you can't post, you just can't post an an employee.
The companies generally don't want something like:
"I am a Goodreads employee."
"we know it is bad today."
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 have you guys been doing for the last 10 years?
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…
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?
I downvoted you but I feel bad for not explaining why. One of my memories: Being pulled into a side office and grilled for a half hour for posting a similarly harmless statement to HN. So your comment triggered mild PTSD. It's not your place as an individual employee to post about your employer. You work in a team setting. If the team decides it's appropriate to post to HN, then that's fine. But you alone do not get…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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-wi…
However, if YouTube was as good at recommending books as it was recommending videos, I would never use its book recommendation algorithm. You necessarily have to get almost every book recommendation “correct” for it to be seen as actually useful by the user.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…