361–370 of 493 posts
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Not to mention reviewers with 3k+ reviews. Who in their right mind properly read and review 3k books?
WTF. I spent 10 years in jail reading endlessly and only managed about 900 in total. And I had LITERALLY nothing else to do.
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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…
100% it's cultural. In the Netherlands, companies brag about a 7 or 8 out of ten as proof of their amazing customer service. When I lived in America, it seemed the consensus of anything under a 9 is killing puppies. Coincidentally, NPS is entirely based on this fact. 8+ is required for a "happy customer". 7 is given a little wiggle room to win them back and under 6 is a lost cause.
I also get the impression that American grades are like this:
- A is good. You made an effort.
- A [however modified with +/++]: great job!
- C is terrible. You skipped all classes or fell into a coma.
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There is an optimal number of firms in competition with each other. It could be that for a particular industry, 10 firms means everyone is losing money and unable to make new investments, while 8 firms means that there's a healthy amount of profit that can sustain R&D and growth. Sure, eventually it might all work out as firms go bankrupt or go into a new business, but you can lose decades in waiting that out. Also,…
> 10 firms means everyone is losing money and unable to make new investments, while 8 firms means that there's a healthy amount of profit that can sustain R&D and growth. don't confuse economic profit with accounting profit: the promise/goal/benefit of competitive markets is that economic profit goes to zero. (quickest way to describe the difference is, there are dry cleaners dotting the landscape in competition with…
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.
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Same reasons it's involved in medicine, housing, education, etc etc.
Medicine kills people. I never saw someone die from marriage
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/sltb.12157
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…
It's a complete farce.
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Well, for a long time, you would just get an MVP up and then collect as many users as possible by offering free accounts, and if you were somewhat aligned with something Facebook or Google was vaguely interested in, you'd get acquired for $100m. Getting $100m for two years of work is a lot more lucrative than working hard for a decade to build a self-sufficient company, so I can't really blame people for doing it.
> Getting $100m for two years of work is a lot more lucrative than working hard for a decade to build a self-sufficient company Are we discussing drug cartels? Because this reads literally like it could apply only to a highly criminal business.
We're just talking about a situation where some existing large interests have a lucrative business peddling some pretty addictive stuff, and they want to make sure nobody else encroaches on their turf. To that end, they're willing to spend a lot of money to "make the problem go away". Sometimes that means bringing the upstarts into the fold!
Not at all like drug cartels.
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Not to mention reviewers with 3k+ reviews. Who in their right mind properly read and review 3k books?
WTF. I spent 10 years in jail reading endlessly and only managed about 900 in total. And I had LITERALLY nothing else to do.
Averaging just 2 per week hits 3k books in 29 years which doesn’t sound far fetched to me. Call it ~14 hours a week reading, plenty of people spend more than that playing video games or watching Netflix etc.
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…
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.
There are two main parts of this.
Antitrust laws don't typically concern themselves with bury vs incorporate. Even if Goodreads had been incorporated into Amazon, it still would have accomplished their major goal (prevent them from partnering with another company). And keeping them alive would have been just another part of Amazon's cost of acquisition. I wonder if it would have resulted in a lower offer.
Secondly, the government doesn't take companies at their word. When, for instance, Microsoft promises that Activision Blizzard titles will remain on Playstation for at least a decade, the government gets that in an enforceable contract.