Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

edgyquant wrote: post #359

abc_lisper wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't tell your post is sarcastic or not. Good reads is a valuable resource, especially for avid readers - without it I wouldn't have read as many good books as I did.

I really don’t think so. It’s been awhile since I was on there but there recommendations was the same thing you’d get anywhere (e.g. audible.) Maybe the reviews were better, but I think in general the trend of trying to replace discussing things with people with an automated service or social network leads to a poorer result. I read a ton and have never used a recommendation tool to find them, I just read books, go t…

[deleted]

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

#452

Post by idopmstuff » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #420

idopmstuff wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the only people who can buy businesses are individuals, you've cut the potential acquirer pool, and thus the value, by an enormous amount. > If nobody wants to continue running the independent shop, it doesn't make much difference to consumers if a chain buys it, or if it closes down and the chain just opens a new shop there. You're pointing out exactly why banning M&A would be good for big businesses. Now instead…

> You're pointing out exactly why banning M&A would be good for big businesses. Now instead of having to buy out the little guy, they just wait for it close Assuming that they close. If it continues to be successful and they can find someone else to run the business when they retire than Big Business never gets a chance to move in. If they don't, Big Business can buy their assets and try to open a new store there jus…

> If it continues to be successful and they can find someone else to run the business when they retire than Big Business never gets a chance to move in.

The way you typically do this is by selling the business to someone who wants to continue operating it.

> Either way, everyone is happy. The owners of the store still retire

Owning a business that is managed by somebody else in retirement is not the same as selling the business and retiring. If you still own the business, you are still responsible for it. If you have a great manager and just collect your checks from it, great! But what if that person quits suddenly/dies/etc.? Now you're managing the business again. If the manager of the business needs to work in it (e.g. retail store manager) and you moved away, now you've gotta get back there and start running it again.

Lots of answers in here speaking from very theoretical perspectives with a clear lack of understanding of the actual day-to-day reality of what owning a small business looks like.

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

#453

Post by tasuki » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 2:38 PM UTC

Leires wrote: post #159

CalRobert wrote: post #18

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.

I'm sorry you went through that. I had an interview recently that asked no technical questions, only logic puzzles like "princess is behind door number 1, monster is behind door number 2" scenario shit. I mentioned I'm extremely bad at these, but I have ten years of experience that I can speak to. I went ahead and did the quiz and got ghosted anyways. The silver lining is we get to watch companies like this become la…

I for one think that logic puzzles are a reasonable filter for many positions.

I used to be very good at logic puzzles and have steadily been getting worse. Yes I have wider perspective now, but my raw problem solving ability has deteriorated. I can understand if a company wants to maximize problem solving for certain roles.

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

#454

Post by tasuki » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 2:41 PM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #172

Given that the article is on the Washington post, it's worth pointing out that that is another thing that Jeff Bezos owns.

I think that shows him in a positive/neutral light rather than in a bad light.

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

#455

Post by dudul » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

ZhadruOmjar wrote: post #415

dudul wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time just refuse to dance and end the interview on the spot. I do that and it feels great to see the light dying in their eyes when they realize you're the one "dumping" them.

Feels good for 15 minutes while you burn a bridge and don't proceed at the interview. Presumably they have other candidates, they probably don't even remember you a couple of days later.

Yeah, the way I see it it's the stupid company using brain teasers like these that just burnt a bridge.

Presumably you have other interviews.

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

#456

Post by thomasahle » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

idopmstuff wrote: post #207

thomasahle wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what happens to the mom and pop hardware store that's been running for 30 years when mom and pop want to retire? They just have to shut their doors? They could sell it to another mom and pop? It's only an M&A if the shop is bought by / becomes part of another business. If nobody wants to continue running the independent shop, it doesn't make much difference to consumers if a chain buys it, or if it closes down a…

If the only people who can buy businesses are individuals, you've cut the potential acquirer pool, and thus the value, by an enormous amount. > If nobody wants to continue running the independent shop, it doesn't make much difference to consumers if a chain buys it, or if it closes down and the chain just opens a new shop there. You're pointing out exactly why banning M&A would be good for big businesses. Now instead…

> Now the mom and pop lost a bunch of money and the big company got a new location at a big savings.

Why did the big company save money this way? If it's cheaper for them to just wait for bankruptcy, why don't they just always do that?

It seems the only answer is that they are counting on continuing the popular "brand" of the independent store. But that brand is exactly tied up to this store not being part of the big chain, so continuing it would be pure deceit.

Or as ClumsyPilot says, the business wasn't going bankrupt at all. Bit chain just wanted it, and now they can't.

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

#457

Post by threecheese » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 4:24 PM UTC

garfieldnate wrote: post #215

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…

As I recall, there were arguments at the time saying that it would be good if Amazon did nothing with it. People wanted Amazon to leave the product alone and not mess with it. And I still feel that way. What would you have wanted them to do with it?

Better API support, better moderation, evolution of product features instead of their deprecation, maybe some stack improvements to what I think is an ancient php codebase. Amazon has removed some features in the last year - with little notice - that cause a lot of us to rush and download data before it was killed off. As a side gripe, the “download” they offered was completely useless on its own, and some folks (like me) had to write code to augment it with more site data - which wasn’t available in an API (see above) and had to be scraped. Almost intentionally bad, a json file filled with internal IDs and URLs that anyone with more than a handful of books would be screwed. The feature I relied on was the ability to mark certain books as “owned”, with the specific edition and cover in my personal library. As an example, I have a 2nd printing of The Two Towers with this beautiful cover art, and I could use goodreads as my online virtual library for friends/etc.

In good news though, a number of other products are starting to fill that feature gap, but because they simply don’t have the massive amount of title, edition, and cover data (which was community-sourced), it’ll be a very long time before those products will have parity with Goodreads circa 2015.

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

#458

Post by qingcharles » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 4:26 PM UTC

reactor wrote: post #361

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.

Just curious, did that (reading 900 books) make any significant impact in your life/thought process/mental model etc?

It's a great question. It's hard to retain the information from so many books and when I looked at the list of books I'd read there were many that I had absolutely no recollection of. And some of them where I just had a vague feeling of how wonderful they were to read and how sad I was that they ended, but no recollection of the plot.

I tried to read as many non-fiction books as I could, but these were almost non-existent in the jails I was housed in. The ones I got sent in about business and languages were a god-send and I find the information I gained from those to be very useful to me; especially the books on Japanese and Arabic which gave me a great grounding in those languages, although you can't easily learn pronunciation from a book!

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

#459

Post by qingcharles » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

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.

Ah, depends on the book! If it was something I really enjoyed like The Martian or The 3-Body Problem, then I would devour the thing in a day.

I remember reading this and it was so uninspiring (the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature) that it took me an entire month to finish:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(Pamuk_novel)

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

#460

Post by cratermoon » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 4:47 PM UTC

jurassicfoxy wrote: post #248

cratermoon wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's inshittification of everything continues. They also own AbeBooks, have their own cargo airline, Twitch, Audible, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Kindle, Ring, Whole Foods, IMDb, Zappos, Egghead, the late lamented DPReview, and a few others. > incredibly anti-competitive. A description of Amazon in general.

Whaaat I didn't know they owned AbeBooks. I love AbeBooks. I wonder how much of a cut they take from booksellers?

I love AbeBooks, too. I started to go there as Amazon's listings got more enshittified. Rather than fixing their product, they just bought the competition.