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

Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 493 posts

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#71

Post by hospitalJail »

fastball wrote: post #12

Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X" ranking. Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book…

The Modern Zelda reviews are a prime example of this.

The non-industry people reviewing Zelda have 4 options, 7/10, 8/10, 9/10, 10/10.

A 7/10 means the game was bad and you had a hard time finishing it, and won't be playing again.

8/10 means the game was also bad, but you had fun for a few minutes/hours.

9/10 means the game meet minimum expectations.

10/10 means you enjoyed the game, but there were countless flaws that took away from enjoying the game.

10/10 Greatest game of all time means, the game was above average.

Now, this same system applied outside Nintendo's curve, you knock these numbers down 2.

Its incredibly hard to figure out if a Nintendo game is good, if you treat them like other companies. Even Nintendo believes this and will yank early access/ads/etc... from gaming websites if you don't comply with the Nintendo curve.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#72

Post by lkbm »

crazygringo wrote: post #6

Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…

Ten years of no improvement and gradually getting slower and slower (perhaps because my "Read" lists is now several thousand items), and it's still the number one spot.

I've tried a few other places, but my friends use Goodreads, so if I want to evaluate books based on ratings from friends whom I know have similar taste, Goodreads is the only viable option.

Goodreads is the present of book reviews, and in the past it was the future of book reviews.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#73

Post by pizza_pleb »

nextos wrote: post #31
fastball wrote: post #12

Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X" ranking. Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book…

There's also TrueSkill, by Microsoft Research, which turns Elo into a proper generative model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueSkill It'd be definitely interesting to see a book review site like this. In the meantime, for math books, I trust curated rankings by MAA: https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews

We use this at https://languageroadmap.com, but for difficulty rankings between titles in the context of language learning using media. It does seem to work pretty well and we disclaim rankings with the confidence score.

As for the grandparent comment: recency bias, as pointed out by another commenter is a thing, as is the tediousness of doing a bunch of pairwise decisions. I think a happier medium is to have everyone fill in tier charts (with variable number of tiers) and build the pairwise rankings from that.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#74

Post by pessimizer »

lkbm wrote: post #48
pessimizer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The values that include commenting on writing in general aren't small to most people. I can't imagine a larger value. edit: hopefully somebody reading the WaPo has some sort of connection to Amazon, and can really commit to making sure that people's inappropriate opinions on the quality of books, the subjects of books, or whether books should have been written at all - will be corrected promptly and repeat offenders…

Do you consider it censorship when Amazon removes fake reviews from their products? This is something most people are in favor of. You can write what you want about books elsewhere. On Amazon, product reviews and ratings should be from people who have used the product. On Goodreads, reviews should be by people who have read the book.

> Do you consider it censorship when Amazon removes fake reviews from their products? This is something most people are in favor of.

This isn't about fake reviews, this is

1) partially about reviews from people who haven't read the book, but object to the subject matter or something else about the book, and

2) about "review-bombing," a phrase that is used a lot in this article without an argument being made as to exactly what constitutes review bombing (do the people involved have to collude?), or whether it's illegitimate. It just assumes that it is.

You've said "fake reviews" in this comment when the word "fake" wasn't used in the article a single time. They depend on you doing that for them.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#75

Post by hospitalJail »

riazrizvi wrote: post #68

It's a good sign to me that the Washington Post, a Jeff Bezos company, is able to criticize a Jeff Bezos business.

This is small fries though.

I'm sure a truly critical post about Amazon's cash maker wouldn't make it past the editors.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#76

Post by [deleted] »

tivert wrote: post #47
teamspirit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that's exactly why so many startups get bought. Not to become part of the parent company's business, no, just not to become a competitor later. Would stronger (and enforced) anti trust laws be a solution? I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway.

> Would stronger (and enforced) anti trust laws be a solution? I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway. Stronger anti-trust laws would just block many of these sales in the first place (e.g. identify that Goodreads competes with Amazon's existing dominant user book-review feature, and kill the acquisition for that reason).

[deleted]

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#77

Post by JohnFen »

Lolaccount wrote: post #42
CaptainZapp wrote: post #7

> By joining Amazon, Goodreads has accelerated their mission to delight customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology. Seriously, reading the diarrhea vomited out by corporate PR shills nowadays seriously makes my teeth hurt. Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're spouting to the general public?

I've found that "delight customers" is the key phrase. Just write a script that excludes any articles which mentions that phrase for a better life. That's been a pretty reliable indicator over the last decade.

I agree. There are a handful of red flag phrases that can reliably predict whether or not you're being sold a bill of goods. "Delight customers" is one of them. As soon as a company says anything like that, I know to avoid them like they're radioactive.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#79

Post by JohnFen »

hospitalJail wrote: post #63
CalRobert wrote: post #18

I interviewed with Goodreads in 2012. If there's one thing I learned it's that when you give people weird gimmick problems ("How many Starbucks are there in Manhattan?") in an 8 hour interview that was supposed to be 2 hours, you're going to produce an awful lot of ill will when you reject people because they're "too technical". The whole thing was the most bizarre interview experience of my life.

I had a 1 hour interview go for 3 hours because they couldn't get the HR, hiring manager, and engineer at the same time. Ended up telling the sameish stories 3 times. They offered me a job, then covid happened, then they offered me it at a 10% decrease, then they canceled the contract, then they called me 6 months later. I already had a job at that point and they were begging me to leave.

> because they couldn't get the HR, hiring manager, and engineer at the same time.

I think you dodged a bullet. If a company doesn't have their act together enough to actually gather the people they need for a meeting that they themselves set up, it hints that there are deep management-level problems there.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#80

Post by ljm »

teamspirit wrote: post #22
crazygringo wrote: post #6

Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…

Unfortunately that's exactly why so many startups get bought. Not to become part of the parent company's business, no, just not to become a competitor later. Would stronger (and enforced) anti trust laws be a solution? I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway.

One version of that even got its own jargon: acquihire.

One incredible journey later and the product is already on the sunset.

Post reply on HN