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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

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reasons it's involved in medicine, housing, education, etc etc.

Medicine kills people. I never saw someone die from marriage

I'm sure lots of people have committed suicide because they were stuck in bad marriages (esp. before divorce was legalized).

Lots of women get murdered by their husbands (and sometimes the reverse).

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

#382
post #379
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict. You must have the thinnest skin to imaginable to actually think this. And the irony of this palatable considering how…

Dehumanising is Dehumanising, nothing to do with my skin, I'm not Russian or Ukrainian.

> Dehumanising is Dehumanising, nothing to do with my skin, I'm not Russian or Ukrainian.

Regardless of what your background is saying someone making light of fascists invaders is dehumanising requires you to have a super thin skin.

If they didn’t want to be called orcs maybe they should stop acting like them.

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

#383
post #382
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dehumanising is Dehumanising, nothing to do with my skin, I'm not Russian or Ukrainian.

> Dehumanising is Dehumanising, nothing to do with my skin, I'm not Russian or Ukrainian. Regardless of what your background is saying someone making light of fascists invaders is dehumanising requires you to have a super thin skin. If they didn’t want to be called orcs maybe they should stop acting like them.

You really believe that's how it works? that russians can just choose not to be involved. Like the east Ukrainians can just choose to be autonomous?

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is correct. The acquisition was anti-competitive, and Lina Khan's FTC would probably challenge it.

Why? The FTC has shown time and again it has no interest in enforcing the rules, whether that's under Pai, Khan, or going back every administration since the Microsoft anti-competition days.

To be fair to Pai, he was Chair of the FCC not the FTC. He didn't have much say in FTC rule enforcement.

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

#385

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.

It’s exactly why many startups are conceived of in the first place.

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

#386

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?

Nothing salacious. People left over time. Maybe higher turnover than other Amazon orgs because change is harder there. >The site has received almost no technical improvements, Not true. Theyre under the surface or not webfacing. (Like Kindle integration) The biggest technical issue with Goodreads is this: the site was originally built as a giant pile of Rails spaghetti with views mixed with business logic and such an…

^ I can vouch for this. Worked at Goodreads from about 2013 to 2017 ish. I’m sure my name haunts git blame now.

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

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You read 90 a year. I’ve read 75 a year while going to school or working full time. So it’s possible to read more, and for more than 10 years. (However I might lose my mind if I did that. Even at 75 I started to feel like I was wasting my life with over consumptions.)

I've read 56 books this year--keeping track of them is pretty much all I use GoodReads for--and it's feeling like too much. Not many of them stand out in my memory. I've seen people on GoodReads reading 200+ a year, which sounds insane to me.

I’ve pulled back to like 25 a year and another 10 I start and don’t finish and I’m happy at this balance.

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

#388
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except in reality, the cloud business would “buy” ads from the ad business, and now you have an “expense” despite the fact that the money never went anywhere. Shuffle here, shuffle there, viola! Tax evasion.

They "buy" the ads only on internal accounting. There's no tax deduction for that. For you to actually recognize an expense, you would also have to recognize the gain.

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

#389
post #356

The case in point highlights that this is not a problem specific to online media, it's just made it more obvious. There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict. I like…

There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. An excellent analogy, as applies to the current Russian state having dragged its population into a senseless, expansionist war against its southern neighbor (and erstwhile "brother" nation). And its skill at turning ordinary citizens into instruments of genocide.

Really, so the russians are referring to Ukrainians as some dehumanising term as orc?

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

#390

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…

I very often go to places that are 3/5. I was burned too often bad 4 or 5 places. The more important favtor is number of reviews and what exactly recent reviews say.

About skewed ratings:

0) there is no objective point of reference, every rating is about the reviewer more than the place.

1) google knows about it. they have weighed rating of some sort so 2/5 rating is not going to kill.

2) people in some cultures can give low rating without explaining what they didn't like. either it is complicated to explain what it is or it may be misinterpreted or not publicly acceptable.

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