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

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

#151

Post by kortilla »

fsckboy wrote: post #85
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.

> 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…

M&A should be allowed for vertical integration and efficiency improvements there. Fewer intermediaries is better for everyone (except the intermediaries).

Agree on scrutinizing M&A of competitors.

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

#152

Post by cratermoon »

tecleandor wrote: post #45
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…

Seems like this is culturally different for some things. And corporations can influence too. I have a friend who has four restaurants in Tokyo, and I've been several times there. If you keep attention to the restaurant reviews in Google Maps, Japanese people is very hard. They'd go like "The food is great, incredible service, surprising flavors, very good experience, best Spanish food I've had in a long time..." and…

The insiders say never to rent from AirBnB if the property isn't at least 4.8 stars. These days those ranking systems don't truly start from 0 or 1. The statistically significant range is much smaller. I don't personally know have the stats chops to do it, but I'm sure determining that range can be done.

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

#153

Post by fsckboy »

ethbr0 wrote: post #113
fsckboy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do only monopolies perform mergers? companies merge to concentrate market share, i.e. eliminate competition, i.e. increase prices, i.e. monopol ize . Let's not ban just monopol ies , let's also ban monopol ize .

Companies also acquire and merge to vertically integrate.

So, for example Coca Cola has saturated the drinks market, and they vertically integrate by buying bottling companies... which means their competitor Pepsi can no longer buy from that bottling company because Coke has decreased competition in that market?

Here's what they teach in business school: if you have a cloud computing business, and you have an advertising business, and your cloud business wants to advertise its services, should the cloud business get a discount on the ads, maybe the ad business has some surplus capacity you could soak up for free? Nope. The cloud business taking advantage of "free" ads from your ad business will make the health of the cloud business look better than it is. It will cover up overcapacity in the ad business, hiding the poor way it is being run. To properly assess your two businesses so you can make internal investing decisions, you need a clear picture of how those two businesses are operating in their respective markets. If a competitor is selling ads cheaper than you are, your cloud business should buy them.

So, if this is how managers and cost accountants are trained to think rationally, well guess what, that's what markets are good at.

Vertical integration is part of the monopolization problem.

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

#154

Post by herval »

kortilla wrote: post #143
unreal37 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company A is 6 days away from going out of business. They will shut their doors. All employees will lose their jobs. All customers will lose access to whatever Company A does that they find helpful. But then Company B agrees to buy them for $1 so that they continue running. Pays the employees, and continues running the service for customers. Ban it?

They can still go bankrupt and company buys the assets without employees ever losing pay. Many bankruptcies work this way.

So the rule would be that companies can only get acquired after they go bankrupt?

Would anyone ever invest in startups, in that scenario?

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

#156

Post by paganel »

scrum-treats wrote: post #121
bryan0 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this wasn’t Amazon’s only acquisition in this space. They bought Shelfari before this and also drove it into the ground.

Same thing with Book Depository, AbeBooks, and Avalon Books. And more generally Whole Foods, Alexa Internet, IMDB, Fabric.com, Woot, Zappos, Evi, Graphiq... When will consumers have protection against this degrading of the marketplace already?

I’m still very bitter about what Amazon did to Book Depository.

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

#157

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

unreal37 wrote: post #126
fsckboy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Company A is 6 days away from going out of business. They will shut their doors. All employees will lose their jobs. All customers will lose access to whatever Company A does that they find helpful. But then Company B agrees to buy them for $1 so that they continue running. Pays the employees, and continues running the service for customers. Ban it?

If a blanket ban runs into this problem, what about a "ban by default"? Basically just flip the script so it doesn't require a denial based on circumstances but instead an approval based on circumstances.

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

#158

Post by [deleted] »

kortilla wrote: post #143
unreal37 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company A is 6 days away from going out of business. They will shut their doors. All employees will lose their jobs. All customers will lose access to whatever Company A does that they find helpful. But then Company B agrees to buy them for $1 so that they continue running. Pays the employees, and continues running the service for customers. Ban it?

They can still go bankrupt and company buys the assets without employees ever losing pay. Many bankruptcies work this way.

[deleted]

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

#159

Post by Leires »

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'm sorry you went through that. I had an interview recently that asked no technical questions, only logic puzzles like "princess is behind door number 1, monster is behind door number 2" scenario shit. I mentioned I'm extremely bad at these, but I have ten years of experience that I can speak to. I went ahead and did the quiz and got ghosted anyways. The silver lining is we get to watch companies like this become landfills. Cheers.

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

#160

Post by meepmorp »

herval wrote: post #154
kortilla wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can still go bankrupt and company buys the assets without employees ever losing pay. Many bankruptcies work this way.

So the rule would be that companies can only get acquired after they go bankrupt? Would anyone ever invest in startups, in that scenario?

There's still IPOs, isn't there? Maybe it cuts down some of the stupid money going into tech, too, which wouldn't be the worst thing.

And, hey, if the business is successful, you own part of a successful business.

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