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Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

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Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#11

Post by padolsey »

k1e wrote: post #7
padolsey wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. These books will likely challenge you if you tend to read quite narrowly. Briefly, for each book entered we find the rarest but highest rated intersections and provide those to you. The query can be summarised as: which highly rated books are least read (and enjoyed) by pe…

Thank you for this service. What database are you using when looking for intersections?

It's a large graph database that I've prepared myself over two years, as a kind of part-time hobby. It's largely an automated scrape of metadata available on wikipedia, goodreads, ISBNdb etc.

Intersections are sourced from public ratings and reviews across the web. E.g. these books are all liked by one person so are can be made to intersect in the db - https://radicalreads.com/noname-favorite-books/

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#12

Post by padolsey »

jsmith99 wrote: post #3
padolsey wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I made a tool that allows you to discover what books you are least likely to have come across or enjoyed, but are nonetheless highly rated. These books will likely challenge you if you tend to read quite narrowly. Briefly, for each book entered we find the rarest but highest rated intersections and provide those to you. The query can be summarised as: which highly rated books are least read (and enjoyed) by pe…

Loved it, but I felt a large proportion of the 'bubble breakers for software engineers' are actually referenced quite often on hacker news. Not 'Taking charge of your fertility' though.

Yeh -- I do agree, though I suppose that shows that the HN demographic is broader than the stereotype of software. The fertility one's quite fun.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#13

Post by padolsey »

Bootvis wrote: post #6

I really like this idea but I think it would be nice to the recommendations to a specific language. After adding - The Brothers Karamazov - Infinite Jest - Asterix the Gaul I get a bunch recommendations for Spanish books (which I can't read).

Ah yes I'm working on a fix for this right now : )

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#14

Post by kamharrah »

Love the idea! My one suggestion would be to add the ability to filter out children's books from the results. After I added Hitchhiker's Guide, Children of Time, and the Iliad, the majority of my recommendations were children's books. Or, maybe the tool is telling me something...

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#15

Post by Neputys »

This is quite fun actually! Tried different philosopher combinations. Get Alcoholics Anonymous recommendations for quite a few until I add Schopenhauer. And if you are a Rand, Rowling reading techie, apparently, you should read more Eddo-Lodge, Baldwin and Chomsky... Brightened my day, thnx.

P.S. Are you sure this thing isn't pushing people from one echo chamber to another?

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#16

Post by veddox »

padolsey wrote: post #11
k1e wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this service. What database are you using when looking for intersections?

It's a large graph database that I've prepared myself over two years, as a kind of part-time hobby. It's largely an automated scrape of metadata available on wikipedia, goodreads, ISBNdb etc. Intersections are sourced from public ratings and reviews across the web. E.g. these books are all liked by one person so are can be made to intersect in the db - https://radicalreads.com/noname-favorite-books/

Fantastic effort, thank you very much!

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#17

Post by codq »

diggan wrote: post #9

Slightly unrelated but a little bit related. Been looking for a similar tool but for music. I love Spotify's recommendations for the most part, but sometimes I want to dive out of my music bubble and explore new genres or new anything really. Basically what I'm looking for is a tool that can give me recommendations of the music that is the opposite of what I usually listen to, or something like that. Anyone know of a…

That's good! I'd love to see something like that.

Would also like something similar but for _knowledge_. Take a look at my knowledge graph and interests, and fill in the gaps.

In the meantime, I always recommend The Quietus [0] for music recommendations—always 'out there', but always quality.

[0] https://thequietus.com/

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#18

Post by padolsey »

kamharrah wrote: post #14

Love the idea! My one suggestion would be to add the ability to filter out children's books from the results. After I added Hitchhiker's Guide, Children of Time, and the Iliad, the majority of my recommendations were children's books. Or, maybe the tool is telling me something...

Agreed I would like to somehow do that. At the moment it's a bit tricky as some books we might classify as for children are more broadly enjoyed (e.g. The Little Prince). One way, I suppose, would be to use a dozen very explicitly children's books as "anchors" and assume other books that intersect a lot with those anchors must therefore be children's books as well. Then I can create a filter. Shall investigate :)

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#19

Post by Kye »

I tried three authors:

Mary E. Lowd

Kyell Gold / Tim Susman

Rukis Croax

Does this database not have books from small/independent publishers?

edit: One of Kyell Gold's books pops up when I type his name in search after I clicked one of the examples. Still nothing on the others.

Re: Show HN: An anti-book recommendation tool, to help you escape your echo chamber

#20

Post by sol_invictus »

Put some of my own favourite books (maths, business and Japanese fiction) onto the engine and got recommended african-american and feminist literature (and a cookbook.)

Then I sampled three of these recommendations and put them into the engine (Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou and Carol Anderson) and again got recommended feminist, african-american and anti-capitalist literature.

One does not simply escape the leftist bubble it seems.

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