101–110 of 493 posts
Besides Goodreads falling into complete disarray, it is equally painful to know that Amazon owns the .book TLD ( https://icannwiki.org/.book ) and has yet to make that available to anyone. A lot of Amazon's publishing-related acquisitions tend to stray from what they were intended to be.
I'm actually fine with that, because it lets me reliably know that site is affiliated with Amazon, so I know to avoid going there.
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…
Goodreads was the future of aggressively biased people shouting their opinions to other people with no discernable value in theirs over others. Rose tinted view.
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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.
A lot of my disillusionment with startups come from this. Being lied to repeatedly by different owners about how selling should be our goal to really start to win, only for the purchase to be the moment where we really start to lose. It breaks something precious.
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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.
> I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway. That's where my pet antitrust solution succeeds where others fail: ban all M&A. Companies only engage in mergers to consolidate market share, but their market share consolidation (i.e. monopolization) not only decreases competition, but also comes at the expense of employees and customers of the acq…
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 th…
They spend a lot of time on development, don't rush things, the trailers are honest about gameplay and what to expect.
I can understand it's not your cup of tea or arguments that their online service is shit (it is) but reviewing a video game in isolation, many of them seem to be good games objectively. Games that don't appeal to the average CoD fan sure, but that doesn't mean they are bad games.
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I wish news organizations would not give direct quotes when pure marketing nonsense was written. Just say something like "Amazon did not give us any substantive comment on the matter."
I wish people also learned some critical reading: Amazon spokesperson Ashely Vanicek said that " " Is journalistically neutral. Amazon was asked about what we wrote. Here's what they said. You decide if you believe us, or Amazon. I see nothing wrong with this, unless the headline of this story was "Goodreads' accelerated mission in delighting customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology.”
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> 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 exa…
> partially about reviews from people who haven't read the book, but object to the subject matter or something else about the book Which is a fake review in my view. Or, at least, an irrelevant review. A review is supposed to be about the particulars of that book, not about whether or not the reader thinks the subject matter is objectionable. Presumably, people who dislike the subject matter won't be reading the book…
This is not that. The big example cited is a bunch of people registering their objection to a light book being written about Soviet Ukraine while there's a war on. This is a real objection that a lot of (silly, annoying) people have. The reason the book was not published is because they thought that this objection would go viral and affect the sales of the book.
That has nothing to with fake or false. That has to do with suppressing financially threatening speech.
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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.
Ended up getting my dream job to be a programmer instead of a (real) engineer. Now I make more money than ever, as you can imagine.
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> I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway. That's where my pet antitrust solution succeeds where others fail: ban all M&A. Companies only engage in mergers to consolidate market share, but their market share consolidation (i.e. monopolization) not only decreases competition, but also comes at the expense of employees and customers of the acq…
Nothing about this would succeed. Do only monopolies perform mergers?
companies merge to concentrate market share, i.e. eliminate competition, i.e. increase prices, i.e. monopolize. Let's not ban just monopolies, let's also ban monopolize.
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I wish news organizations would not give direct quotes when pure marketing nonsense was written. Just say something like "Amazon did not give us any substantive comment on the matter."
I wish people also learned some critical reading: Amazon spokesperson Ashely Vanicek said that " " Is journalistically neutral. Amazon was asked about what we wrote. Here's what they said. You decide if you believe us, or Amazon. I see nothing wrong with this, unless the headline of this story was "Goodreads' accelerated mission in delighting customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology.”