201–205 of 205 posts
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.
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 t…
It's a lot harder than people give it credit it for as well, I imagine. "why don't they get a recommendation engine already" ... that's the secret sauce of companies like Amazon and Netflix who have a financial interest in every successful recommendation. Goodreads doesn't have a profit model in place afaik to support honing the engine to that degree
Good 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…
Can you share this script?
https://github.com/johnfn/GoodReadsScraper
Particularly, load bigdata.js into nodejs and then run a command sort of like this to parse out the results, filtering out young adult/romance/religion stuff/comics:
bigdata.filter(f => f.ratings > 5000 && !f.genres.includes('Young Adult') && !f.genres.includes('Religion') && !f.genres.includes('Romance') && !f.genres.includes('Sequential Art')).map(f => f.title)
'A Song of Ice and Fire',
'Collected Fictions', (by Borges)
'The Name of the Wind',
'Infinite Jest',
'The Complete Works',
'The Way of Kings',
'The Wise Man\'s Fear',
'Ficciones',
'A Storm of Swords: Blood and Gold',
'The Complete Stories',
'Labyrinths',
'Don\'t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!',
'The Hiding Place',
Good 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…
Please share the results of your script !! :)
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..…
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.