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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

#191

Post by floren »

meepmorp wrote: post #160
herval wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A decade+ of acquisition as the default "exit" (and the idea that you have to be driving for an "exit" in the first place) made people straight up forget how companies normally work, apparently.

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

#192

Post by ethbr0 »

fsckboy wrote: post #153
ethbr0 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's an overly simplistic situation.

Maybe the bottler bottles for multiple companies. Maybe Coca Cola could redesign their own bottles to target specialized bottle-filling machines, and Coca Cola would have enough volume to use all of that bottler's capacity.

But the bottler won't invest in the machines, because they don't want to only bottle Coca Cola products. And absent that, the bottles never get redesigned and the efficient machines never get bought. And absent that, Coca Cola is more expensive than it could be.

Or maybe absent an integration, the product offering isn't what the market really wants, because it doesn't want to have to combine two things.

Vertical integration can breed efficiency.

It can also breed monopoly, but you need to address the iron man if you're making an argument.

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

#193

Post by JohnFen »

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?

> Would anyone ever invest in startups, in that scenario?

Because they are expecting that the startup will turn into a profitable business, maybe?

Being acquired is very far from the only way that an investor can see returns.

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

#194

Post by stevebmark »

What’s the insider report on the Goodreads technical staff? Did they all quit after the site was bought? Did they stay, and they’re just coasting? Did Amazon nix the tech team? The site has received almost no technical improvements, so there’s clearly not an effective tech team anymore. Can someone at Amazon share the the gossip?

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

#195

Post by jimmySixDOF »

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?

You skipped Audible which I would add to the list of give it just enough oxygen to stay alive but no innovation allowed strategies. You can't even connect your Audible account to your GoodReads. Audible is the app I would most like to replace that I use almost everyday.

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

#196

Post by ROTMetro »

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…

In medicine they use a pain scale with faces when they need to find out from kids how much pain they are in. Something like that might be a better system?

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

#197

Post by eichin »

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 are lots of early-investor-to-later-investor exit paths; it would just cut down on the "built-to-flip" model, which is a distraction anyway.

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

#198

Post by delecti »

hospitalJail wrote: post #71
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 th…

A simple point that address a lot of that is just that bad games usually get fewer reviews. There are still plenty of 6/10 and below games getting reviewed, but (contrary to the idiom) you can often accurately get a decent gauge of media ahead of time. People want to experience good media, and so better media tends to have a gravity of critic and audience attention. Most reviews don't go below 7 because reviewers are people who, just like the rest of us, want to enjoy good media.

A couple examples: Lord of the Rings Gollum (a recent, high-profile, but poorly received game) has 36 critic reviews on metacritic for an average of 39, Forspoken (another similarly high-profile and poorly-received game) has 7 for an average of 63, and Tears of the Kingdom has 139 for an average of 96. Someone with more free time and motivation could pull a better spread of data to really show how the two data points relate, but I'd be shocked if there weren't a strong correlation between score and review count almost across the board.

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

#199

Post by goodthrowreads »

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?

hi i worked at goodreads and this comment is giving me gell mann amnesia.

ask any engineer there, this is basically true in the sense that amazon drastically professionalized what had been a deeply fly by night company. the way software was written and product cycles were done pre acquisition was hilariously bad.

the reason goodreads still looks so ancient today is that even a decade of amazon engineers trying to salvage it haven't been able to climb out from under the mountain of tech debt the company accrued pre acquisition.

amazon should have just scrapped and rebuilt the entire thing after the acquisition. or just not bought it and finished building their competitor to it that was in progress. either would have been more successful what they did.

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

#200

Post by chipotle_coyote »

cratermoon wrote: post #141
batch12 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it's a case of one hand washing another. They publish the fluff so they can be on the list of publications that get early dibs on 'news' that will drive engagement.

Don't forget the Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. If they didn't give Amazon's side unquestioned, someone would be in trouble.

The article’s entire theme is “was this purchase a good thing” and the subhead (“raises questions about [Goodreads’] longtime owner”) strongly implies the answer is no.

I get why “well, journalists never critically report on the people who directly or indirectly sign their paycheck, dontcha know!” is such a popular take (particularly in cynical times with a skeptical crowd), but the history of news shows journalists reporting on things that could potentially piss off their owners pretty repeatedly, and the Washington Post reporting on things relating to Amazon doesn’t seem to be a serious exception.

Amusingly, I just did a DuckDuckGo search on “washington post reporting on amazon”, intending to see if there were critical takes on said reporting, and what came up instead was: a plethora of WaPo articles with headlines like “Bernie Sanders launches investigation into Amazon labor practices”, “Lawmakers: Amazon may have lied to Congress”, “Perspective: How Amazon shopping ads are disguised as real results”, “FTC sues Amazon over Prime enrollment without consent”, “Amazon’s OSHA data shows its workers injured at higher rates than rival companies”, and “Tour Amazon’s dream home, where every appliance is also a spy”.

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