Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 493 posts

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

#481

Post by reactor »

qingcharles wrote: post #458
reactor wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-exi…

Thanks for that. I can imagine, if you don't get an avenue to take the learnings from books, it may fade away. Glad that you are out.

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

#482

Post by dexterdog »

smcin wrote: post #343
dexterdog wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why founders should have a network where one creates good reads and sells to Amazon and then one of the others starts a better good reads right away. Then when founder A's handcuffs come off he goes and makes a new version of the most recent thing that sold to one of the FAANGs.

Not really because any acquisition is going to have a non-compete to prevent that obvious scenario. Goodreads' Otis Chandler in 2021 invested [0] in BookClub [1] ("building actionable learning cultures through books, for teams") . And Elizabeth Khuri [2] and Chandler both also invested in Looped [3] (a more engaged and interactive livestreaming event service for concerts, comedy and other entertainment) [0]: https://…

Which is why the founder that succeeded and got the sale is not the one building the new version. He is going off and re-doing an unrelated acquisition.

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

#484

Post by omniglottal »

mtsr wrote: post #464
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly, I read the other comment as a whataboutism. This explanation seems to help. I think one could argue that the business failure is likely to affect more people, therefore it’s a greater impact. Still, I ultimately agree with this stance (in the context of business survival, not personal); failure is an inherent risk of business.

Agreed. The number of people affected is a big difference. But I think the comparison does make clear that isn’t necessarily a principled reason not to accept a few failures as part of otherwise useful regulation.

A "few failures as part of otherwise useful regulation" sounds an awful lot like some innocent victims exists, treated as guilty. Treating the (presumed) innocent as though guilty, by regulation even, doesn't sound all that good. In fact, seems there in fact are profound and relevant principles to not accept that.

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

#485

Post by TheRealPomax »

tzs wrote: post #384
TheRealPomax wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're being fair to Pai, you have no business being on the internet.

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

#486

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

omniglottal wrote: post #484
mtsr wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The number of people affected is a big difference. But I think the comparison does make clear that isn’t necessarily a principled reason not to accept a few failures as part of otherwise useful regulation.

A "few failures as part of otherwise useful regulation" sounds an awful lot like some innocent victims exists, treated as guilty. Treating the (presumed) innocent as though guilty, by regulation even, doesn't sound all that good. In fact, seems there in fact are profound and relevant principles to not accept that.

> some innocent victims exists, treated as guilty

The context in this discussion is comparing the hypothetical of a homeless person dying due to a systemic failure to the hypothetical of a business going bankrupt (without being acquired) due to a systemic failure.

This concept of presumed innocence ought to apply to this hypothetical homeless person: why not give them shelter (analogous to allowing M&A) by default, until someone decides it’s a problem? If a society is willing to accept this personal death, they should be willing to accept a business failure.

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

#487

Post by foysauce »

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…

I don't think I'm alone in that if I'm reading something that is anywhere near a 1-star, I don't finish it. And then go on to not leave a review. This skews my ratings indeed, because not every book I start is between 3-5 stars, but almost every book I _finish_ is.

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

#488

Post by mcphage »

floren wrote: post #368
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Drug cartels? No! 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.

> Sometimes that means bringing the upstarts into the fold!

Sometimes it means asking the upstarts to say hello to your little friend.

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

#489

Post by mcphage »

hospitalJail wrote: post #203
yurishimo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devils advocate; Is it not possible that Nintendo just makes good games? They spend a lot of time on development, don't rush things, the trailers are honest about gameplay and what to expect. I can understand it's not your cup of tea or arguments that their online service is shit (it is) but reviewing a video game in isolation, many of them seem to be good games objectively. Games that don't appeal to the average CoD…

Nah, you can see it on subreddits as people discuss the game. Complaining about a few enemies, copypaste world, etc... Its not a 10/10, but it will still be reviewed like this. Imagine you got rid of the Zelda skins and Zelda name, released it on Xbox. What would it get then? Don't get me wrong, I religiously play all the zelda's and find ways to enjoy them. I am under Nintendo's spell, but I also know these are the…

> Complaining about a few enemies, copypaste world, etc.

It's important to review a game as it exists, and not a game that you imagined in your head that would be better.

> Imagine you got rid of the Zelda skins and Zelda name, released it on Xbox. What would it get then?

Well, in the case of Genshin Impact: lots and lots of money.

Seriously, though. If Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom had been released by a company other than Nintendo, people would be singing its praises to the high heavens. You'd see a lot of "Why can't Nintendo come up with this" type articles about it.

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

#490

Post by smcin »

dexterdog wrote: post #482
smcin wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really because any acquisition is going to have a non-compete to prevent that obvious scenario. Goodreads' Otis Chandler in 2021 invested [0] in BookClub [1] ("building actionable learning cultures through books, for teams") . And Elizabeth Khuri [2] and Chandler both also invested in Looped [3] (a more engaged and interactive livestreaming event service for concerts, comedy and other entertainment) [0]: https://…

Which is why the founder that succeeded and got the sale is not the one building the new version. He is going off and re-doing an unrelated acquisition.

No, I pointed out that Goodreads' Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri did not go anywhere after the 2013 acquisition. They stayed, for years. Khuri is still there; Chandler continued as Goodreads' CEO till 2019.

I was surprised neither of them left sooner than that to do anything new, in any sector.

Post reply on HN