301–310 of 493 posts
Potentially good alternative is https://literal.club/ Not affiliated, just a happy user of the site.
Do you know of any good forums or discussion places about books overall, or is literal good for it?
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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.
Well, the owners win. That's usually who they're referring to when they say "our", "us", etc.
Old programmers are discriminated against because they point out when you're taking managerial shortcuts or, as in this case, outright lying.
Potentially good alternative is https://literal.club/ Not affiliated, just a happy user of the site.
Storygraph is pretty good, the UI is a little wonky but I prefer it to Goodreads largely because it isn't Amazon. I use it mostly for tracking reading, not so much for recommendations, but I have gotten some good recs from it.
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…
I played around with a tool for sorting through my personal photos based on that idea.
It gets interesting when you start thinking of how to optimally choose pairs to compare, to maximise signal and minimize redundant comparisons. This becomes more important as the size of the set of objects you are comparing becomes large.
OMG... Did not know Amazon was the owner of Goodreads. There is practically no way you can buy a book online outside the Amazon ecosystem.
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No, that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no problem if a company with 2% of the market merges with another company with 2% -- it tends to lower prices by removing inefficiencies. It's only a problem when prices rise or innovation stops when there are only ~2 competitors left, or when the a single player has 40%+ market share. Also a large proportion of mergers have nothing to do with market share…
Vertical consolidation is also monopolistic, it reduces competition by removing a buyer and a seller from a healthy marketplace. what is actually good for consumers is fierce competition spoiling the sleep of capitalists.
If you're buying a supplier for 5% of the marketplace it's perfectly fine.
If you're buying a supplier for 65% of the market then that's a problem.
I think we're seeing increased scrutiny towards any social network remaining after Reddit and Twitter have been anti-consumer in their monetization practices. Personally, I've taken a great interest in ultimate-guitar.com, which I consider the equivalent of Goodreads for guitar and other music tabs. Networks like UG and Goodreads are the juiciest targets for corporate takeovers, and both those sites were entirely sta…
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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…
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> 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…
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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…