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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

#471

Post by PaulRobinson »

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…

I agree with much of your premise, but there is an unintended consequence: blocking a significant exit opportunity for investors.

This would potentially kill the VC industry.

You might not care, but it’s enough of a problem that a lot of entrepreneurs would side with the monopolists and stop this dead in its tracks.

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

#472

Post by tivert »

sdfghswe wrote: post #190
tivert wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database is enough to threaten their business? Didn't the GP already answer the question you asked of them? >> It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from acquiring or partnering with Goodreads, because their database of books and reviews could be used to instantly start competing with Amazon's book business. Amazon snuffed out that threat of competiti…

> Didn't the GP already answer the question you asked of them? You think that to start an Amazon competitor you need a book database?

> You think that to start an Amazon competitor you need a book database?

Obviously.

I can't conceive of a modern-day online bookseller not having a book database, and one pre-populated with human-written reviews gives you a head start in that area.

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

#473

Post by Gtex555 »

fastball wrote: post #12

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…

This reminds me of my favourite scene from the social network when movie Zuck gets the idea for facemash:

Billy Olson’s sitting here and had the idea of putting some of these next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on who’s hotter. Yea, it’s on. I’m not gonna do the farm animals but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very “Turing” feel since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The first thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures.

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

#474

Post by laurels-marts »

fastball wrote: post #12

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…

> For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish.

That's definitely not the case. 8 is neither mean nor median for titles on imdb. If a film scores anywhere above 8.0 they are already in the top 250. Most titles average between 5 and 7.

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

#475

Post by collaborative »

JohnFen wrote: post #289
collaborative wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, in the case where you'd choose to build a real business, now you'd have to meet user expectations of everything being free because that's what they get everywhere else.

This is a factor you need to take into account, but in my experience, people overstate it. It's not actually that hard to get people to pay for things online. The way you do it is the way it's always been done historically: offer a value proposition that justifies the money. And don't offer it for free at the beginning. People rightfully get very angry if you change the deal after they've come to rely on your product…

I don't know, my experience is that there is a group of people who don't mind paying for things online. I can generally group them in "people who own a mac, an iphone or an ipad"

I still am clueless as to how to generate a network effect without giving things away for free. And as you said, once it's free, it's expected to remain free

The cynical me says that some people are able to generate a network effect because of fame or because of an existing network to which they belong (i.e. being chosen at YC or published in a newspaper). For example, FB was promoted to death in all US campuses for free during the 2000s. I wonder how that happened (honest question)

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

#476

Post by Gtex555 »

fastball wrote: post #12

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…

Couldn't you do this implicitly if I rate book A an 8 and book B a 7 then I have technically said book A is better than book B, so ignore the numerical value and take the better reading. Now put the rating out of 100 as out of 5 or 10 would lead to too many ties.

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

#477

Post by cratermoon »

deanCommie wrote: post #393
cratermoon wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cops don't say "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him", they say things like "officer-involved shooting" and "The teen was also a part of the incident and was hit in the abdomen by the one shot fired from the deputy’s gun, he said."

The framing is what matters, and the WaPo story, the frame doesn't question whether or not Amazon's purchase was anti-competitive, just whether or not Amazon did a good job running it

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

#478

Post by dragonwriter »

cratermoon wrote: post #477
deanCommie wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cops don't say "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him", they say things like "officer-involved shooting" and "The teen was also a part of the incident and was hit in the abdomen by the one shot fired from the deputy’s gun, he said." The framing is what matters, and the WaPo story, the frame doesn't question whether or not Amazon's purchase was anti-competitive, just whether or not Amazon did a…

> Cops don't say "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him",

No, they say “I saw that he had a weapon”, even if the reality is that some other cop said it.

> they say things like "officer-involved shooting"

That's not what the involved cops say, that’s what the department’s public affairs office says as a lead paragraph summary to discourage engagement with the details. (The details will then be whatever story the cops involved say.)

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

#479

Post by stevebmark »

ggwareago wrote: post #210
stevebmark wrote: post #194

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…

As a non-useful aside: That's funny to me, the painful UI of Goodreads smelled like Rails to me. It's engineers trying to solve problems "the Rails way" which leads to poorly designed forms, UX, errors reported to the user, etc. It feels similar to Basecamp, which was notoriously so hard to update that they made version 3 and 4 instead of just improving the existing site.

Another victim of a Rails monolith, nice. And a victim of Ruby and Rails' horrific magic that sounds like it's very dangerous to refactor. Unlike Github, I'm guessing Amazon doesn't have core Ruby and Rails maintainers on staff to help keep the thing afloat.

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

#480

Post by moneywoes »

fastball wrote: post #12

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…

> aggregated personal Elo

Interestingly that seems reminiscient of data apps. What are your thoughts on their ranking philosophy?

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