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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

#391

Post by nl »

kibwen wrote: post #351
fsckboy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

FWIW, this is also the conclusion that I've come to. Mergers only make markets less competitive, and the mere existence of acquisitions creates perverse incentives that distort the startup market into utter uselessness. The experiment has failed, ban it all, and ignore the protestations of the get-rich-quick crowd. Of course, to fix the overall market you'll also need to break up all the existing megacorps in the pro…

But... mergers really do not only make markets less competitive at all!

May mergers of huge companies often have negative impact. Firstly most mergers do not involve multi-billion dollar companies at all, secondly many mergers occur when one company is is trouble, and thirdly good takeovers increase distribution of the smaller companies brand.

Good examples of successful mergers/takeovers like this include:

Halotop bought by Wells Enterprises

Geely buying Volvo

SAIC buying MG

Most acquisitions by Proctor & Gamble

Most acquisitions and mergers in the markup and beauty space.

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

#392

Post by tremorscript »

unreal37 wrote: post #126
fsckboy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

Its capitalism. Companies must die rather than become merged zombies(Soviet Style). Since this is hypothetical. Maybe the employees shall then start their own startup and get success or maybe the company was shitty anyway in the first place.

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

#393

Post by deanCommie »

cratermoon wrote: post #136
deanCommie wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people also learned some critical reading: Amazon spokesperson Ashely Vanicek said that " " Is journalistically neutral. Amazon was asked about what we wrote. Here's what they said. You decide if you believe us, or Amazon. I see nothing wrong with this, unless the headline of this story was "Goodreads' accelerated mission in delighting customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology.”

It's not "Is journalistically neutral". It's being a purveyor of propaganda. Just like when journalists quote cops using CopSpeak. It lets the interested party defined the terms of the debate. By constraining the terms, it can become literally impossible to say some things.

When journalists quote CopSpeak, and only report the cop's side of the story, that is propaganda. Unquestionably.

When the entire premise of the story is hyper-critical of Amazon, and Amazon's defense is half-hearted, vacuuous, and informationally background, you don't need advanced media literacy to think "Wow, that response from Amazon does NOT pass the bullshit sniff test, huh, I wonder what that means."

How much spoonfeeding do we expect to our readers?

This isn't "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him" ".

This isn't "99.9% of scientists think one thing. 0.1% think the opposite. But we're not going to tell you that, we'll just interview 1 scientist from each position and let you decide."

This is a super critical piece of Amazon that achieves the mandatory standards of reaching out to Amazon for comment, and the comment they got speaks for itself in contrast to the story so clearly that to editorialize on it any further insults the reader's intelligence.

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

#394

Post by sixstringtheory »

Retric wrote: post #369
qingcharles wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF. I spent 10 years in jail reading endlessly and only managed about 900 in total. And I had LITERALLY nothing else to do.

What’s your reading speed like? I can easily read 2 books a day if I’ve got nothing better 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.

It’s unimaginable to me that anyone can read two books in a day and retain any significant amount of its information. Not calling you a liar, I just literally can’t understand how.

Is this a skill you developed over time, did you learn some particular tricks, were you just born that way? How long have you been reading adult literature? Are you skimming or painting images in your mind? What kinds of books?

I have so many books I want to read but I can only get through about 10-15 per year. Some of it probably comes down to where I choose to spend my free time, but I still feel like I crawl through pages. I spend a lot of time/energy painting that mental imagery I asked about, of what is being described.

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

#396

Post by parineum »

fsckboy wrote: post #85
teamspirit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nobody wins except the monopolist, and monopolies are already bad, so why help them?

You are obviously entitled to the opinion that monopolies are bad but, fwiw, the ftc is a lot more concerned with anti-competitive behavior than it is with monopolies. Those get conflated because they frequently occur together but a lot of companies have monopolies that most people don't really have an issue with because they aren't anti-competitive.

Sometimes a monopoly is a monopoly because they are better than everyone else.

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

#398

Post by parineum »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #321
hakunin wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t work in practice due to typically severe time constraints. You cannot expect a business that has 6 days of life left to wait for such an approval process. These things never happen fast.

> You cannot expect a business that has 6 days of life left to wait for such an approval process. A homeless man that has 6 hours left to live in the cold winter often cant get shelter, because instead we are really concerned with caterting the entire fabric of society to fictiontion problems that might one day affect a mismanaged business.

Explain how that is related.

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

#400

Post by Nemo_bis »

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?

That sentence means: "By joining Amazon, GoodReads was not sued to death by Amazon for using book catalog data from Amazon".
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