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Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

craigmod.com

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Re: Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

#21

Post by protocolture »

tolerance wrote: post #16
protocolture wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesnt really make sense. If you are on twitter you are in the "community" but applying this methodology to twitter is unlikely to be a good recommendation engine for the twitter community either.

What do you mean? "Communities" on social media platforms vary, common behavioral traits that the platform may engender not withstanding. The platform Craig Mod built looks like the equivalent of getting book recommendations exclusively from your mutual follows on Twitter.

Look at it this way.

I know of a small regional community that I have occasional involvement in and maintain an interest in their socials.

A person who started an Escape Room in that community recently posted about how much money he has lost supporting that business.

I explained to him that Escape Rooms are a niche but intense interest and that you need a large population size to support them.

He was appealing to the wider community, of 9000 people, to come in and support his business, but realistically, there's maybe 40-50 people in that community who will actually engage with an escape room. Probably less, the community skews very old.

A "Community" is not a monolith. The only thing you can guarantee the community has in common is whatever forged them together. For a physical community its geography. For an online community its whatever brought them together.

Unless "Craig Mod" built his community around a specific set of shared reading interests, theres no way in hell that its a good general book recommendation engine for the participants.

Goodreads/Kindle/Amazon have shot their categories to hell and are barely more effective than a keyword author search, but for all its failings thats still going to have better book discovery than a random blob of people on a random twitter clone.

Re: Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

#22

Post by keane »

protocolture wrote: post #18
tolerance wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? "Communities" on social media platforms vary, common behavioral traits that the platform may engender not withstanding. The platform Craig Mod built looks like the equivalent of getting book recommendations exclusively from your mutual follows on Twitter.

Exactly my point. A random sampling of books that a random group thinks are good isnt a good recommendation engine.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756432 and https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t... and https://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ – it doesn't exactly mean good but it also doesn't mean nothing

Re: Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

#23

Post by protocolture »

keane wrote: post #22
protocolture wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my point. A random sampling of books that a random group thinks are good isnt a good recommendation engine.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41756432 and https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t... and https://ramiro.org/vis/hn-most-linked-books/ – it doesn't exactly mean good but it also doesn't mean nothing

Atlas Shrugged being in the top 10 of hacker recommended says more than I ever could

Re: Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

#24

Post by iamanllm »

protocolture wrote: post #11

Doesnt seem to overlap with good reads at all? I find goodreads sucks at book recommendations, but excluding the books that some random twitter replacement didnt read doesnt seem like its going to make it good at book recommendations either. Goodreads however remains fun for keeping me accountable with my reading goals, and nothing else has replaced that. DCC - Yeah this isnt great. Yeah the litrpg genre was infested…

dungeon crawler carl is a great series. never read a litrpg in my life and i probably won't again but DCC is really fun. and calling it amenable to LLM is pretty reductive in a stupid way as the book absolutely could not be written by LLM

Re: Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

#25

Post by nicbou »

tolerance wrote: post #6

This link is more informative. https://craigmod.com/roden/102/#the-good-place Craig Mod is an interesting example of someone who makes a living online through "ethical" content production.

He is also a damn good writer, and it’s fine if he makes money with it. I loved his free posts so much that I bought his book, and it was also excellent.

This website can be incredibly hostile to creatives having an income, at times.

Re: Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

#26

Post by protocolture »

iamanllm wrote: post #24
protocolture wrote: post #11

Doesnt seem to overlap with good reads at all? I find goodreads sucks at book recommendations, but excluding the books that some random twitter replacement didnt read doesnt seem like its going to make it good at book recommendations either. Goodreads however remains fun for keeping me accountable with my reading goals, and nothing else has replaced that. DCC - Yeah this isnt great. Yeah the litrpg genre was infested…

dungeon crawler carl is a great series. never read a litrpg in my life and i probably won't again but DCC is really fun. and calling it amenable to LLM is pretty reductive in a stupid way as the book absolutely could not be written by LLM

I personally didnt suggest DCC was written by an LLM but you only need to see its imitators to see the cheap slop targeting the area.

I mean the first LLMs targeted at authors were built as rpg simulators. NovelAI was founded by the AI Dungeon guys splitting off and doing their own thing. If I looked I am betting I could find community training modules to closely mimic DCC's style and they would be well supported.

Re: Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

#28

Post by wahnfrieden »

protocolture wrote: post #18
tolerance wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? "Communities" on social media platforms vary, common behavioral traits that the platform may engender not withstanding. The platform Craig Mod built looks like the equivalent of getting book recommendations exclusively from your mutual follows on Twitter.

Exactly my point. A random sampling of books that a random group thinks are good isnt a good recommendation engine.

It’s good if you are part of that community which was built around specific shared interests including specific works of writing. He’s an author of books.

It’s like making the point that a cookout you saw while driving past a private event venue on the other side of town is not a good solution for everybody else wanting a restaurant to eat at - so what?

Re: Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

#29

Post by protocolture »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #28
protocolture wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly my point. A random sampling of books that a random group thinks are good isnt a good recommendation engine.

It’s good if you are part of that community which was built around specific shared interests including specific works of writing. He’s an author of books. It’s like making the point that a cookout you saw while driving past a private event venue on the other side of town is not a good solution for everybody else wanting a restaurant to eat at - so what?

>It’s like making the point that a cookout you saw while driving past a private event venue on the other side of town is not a good solution for everybody else wanting a restaurant to eat at - so what?

Context here is that this is being explicitly marketed as a goodreads replacement.

One of the features of goodreads is... a recommendation engine.

Once analysed you can see that this website does not contain a recommendation engine, but its just a static list of books people on the guys twitter replacement liked.

Your analogy is flawed, this is like getting food recommendations based on complaints posted to the community notice board.

The only way this is a goodreads replacement is if your entire understanding of goodreads comes from the name.

Goodreads is flawed but the fix isnt to deliver it without any features.

Re: Craig Mod built his own Good Reads

#30

Post by wahnfrieden »

protocolture wrote: post #29
wahnfrieden wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s good if you are part of that community which was built around specific shared interests including specific works of writing. He’s an author of books. It’s like making the point that a cookout you saw while driving past a private event venue on the other side of town is not a good solution for everybody else wanting a restaurant to eat at - so what?

>It’s like making the point that a cookout you saw while driving past a private event venue on the other side of town is not a good solution for everybody else wanting a restaurant to eat at - so what? Context here is that this is being explicitly marketed as a goodreads replacement. One of the features of goodreads is... a recommendation engine. Once analysed you can see that this website does not contain a recommen…

No, it’s marketed in the post as being explicitly for the paid community to replace their book sharing that happens on the private Twitter-like message board they have for the community.

The Goodreads reference is also valid as many (like myself) use it primarily for its friend feeds. I’ve never looked at its recommendation engine. It’s just one feature, as you say.

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