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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

#261

Post by rtbathula »

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…

"should never have been allowed to acquire it?" It's very funny the way you put it. Already government has too much power and you want further they take over the economy and do pulls and pushes. Free market means, freely allowing people to trade using persuasions — not government using its coercion. People also often forget other side of the picture.

1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to sell their companies to Amazon or Microsoft. 2. Why don't they ask government to put people in jail who are buying products from Amazon and making Amazon big?

Recently EU also making plans to regulate the battery replacement. I covered that here briefly in my site political-ledger dot com

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

#262

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #257
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?

This example sounds nice on paper , but has anything even remotely similar ever happened, within living memory? I have my doubts. So while possible in theory , if it's impossible to happen in practice, it's not a valid counterargument to a practical proposal.

[deleted]

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

#264

Post by f-securus »

rtbathula wrote: post #253
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…

"should never have been allowed to acquire it?" It's very funny the way you put it. Already government has too much power and you want further they take over the economy and do pulls and pushes. Free market means, freely allowing people to trade using persuasions — not government using its coercion. People also often forget other side of the picture. 1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to sell th…

Free market capitalism only works when there is competition. Big companies buying out the competition to limit consumer choices and effectively stall innovation is exactly the things the government should be protecting against to keep the ‘free market’ thriving.

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

#265

Post by adalacelove »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #257
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?

This example sounds nice on paper , but has anything even remotely similar ever happened, within living memory? I have my doubts. So while possible in theory , if it's impossible to happen in practice, it's not a valid counterargument to a practical proposal.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/santander-buys-struggling-...

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

#267

Post by nemo44x »

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…

Vertical integration at its finest. They pay the authors to write the books they publish which get sold in their store that they link to from the site they own that reviews the books and pays the reviewers an affiliation bonus. No one is buying books with bad reviews. Brilliant!

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

#268

Post by TeMPOraL »

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?

You've actually made a good argument for the M&A ban.

Consider: if it is as you're implying, that investors expect their returns to be realized mainly through acquisition, and if it's indeed common that startup acquisitions are done to kill a potential competitor, then... all the investors are doing is extorting large corporations. If you include IPO in the picture, they're also alternatively robbing the public.

If it's just rich getting richer by pulling money out of megacorps and large populations, then this is... literally the opposite of useful, valuable contribution to the society.

The way I see it, the above isn't 100% true, but it seems true in majority of cases, which makes me inclined to support the "M&A ban" idea.

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

#269

Post by CSMastermind »

ohlookcake wrote: post #224
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 average book should have a 2.5 Disagree on this. This assumes that people read books completely at random. In reality, people read blurbs/summaries or get a recommendation and the typical book you read is likely to be better than the midpoint between the worst book you've read and the best book you've read (I'm assuming a linear scale mental model).

> This assumes that people read books completely at random.

I'm not sure it implies that. I think that if:

1. Book quality follows a normal distribution.

and

2. People are capable of accurately assessing the quality of books relative to other books.

then you'd end up with an average rating of 2.5.

It doesn't matter if people are disproportionately reading the better books and rating them highly because an increasing number of reviews on a book would only give you more confidence in its rating, not change the rating of the book relative to other books.

To illustrate this we can imagine a world with only 100 books in it and only 100 people in it.

Let's assume that a single person from that group reads all 100 books and per the two assumptions above correctly rates them on a normal distribution.

Then the other 99 people read only a single book which the first person recommends as a 5. And per the two assumptions above they all also rate it as a 5.

Now there are 99 books with only 1 rating normally distributed between 1 and 5 and there is 1 book with 100 ratings - all 5s.

Does this change the average rating of books on the platform?

Nope the average rating is still 2.5. In fact the one book could have a million ratings or a billion 5 star ratings and the average rating of books on the platform would still be a 2.5.

What we see on sites like goodreads is that either book quality doesn't follow a normal distribution and/or people are not capable of accurately assessing the quality of books relative to other books.

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

#270

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

rtbathula wrote: post #253
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…

"should never have been allowed to acquire it?" It's very funny the way you put it. Already government has too much power and you want further they take over the economy and do pulls and pushes. Free market means, freely allowing people to trade using persuasions — not government using its coercion. People also often forget other side of the picture. 1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to sell th…

The free market elected a government with an FTC, so...
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