11–20 of 493 posts
This article starts off pretending to be a criticism of Amazon, and this is highlighted in the headline. After a few vague critical gestures towards Amazon in the first four paragraphs, it gets to its real point: Goodreads, a social network, has woefully inadequate censorship, which can lead to financial losses to authors and publishers. According the the WaPo, Amazon's crime with Goodreads seems to be that it hasn't…
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 should have a 2.5. If you don't rate like this then you just end up with garbage.
Just allowing a boolean rating (ala Rotten Tomatoes when aggregated) is much better, assuming you can get enough reviews for that system to actually work (probably > 30 is required for most applications).
I think "aggregated personal Elo" would be a fun way to rank things: I just give you two books that you've read and you tell me which is better. Do this loads of times and eventually you have a solid ranking of every book you've ever read. Aggregate everyone's rankings and you have a much more robust system then "please rate this book out of 5 stars".
A lot of Amazon's publishing-related acquisitions tend to stray from what they were intended to be.
> 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?
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…
This article starts off pretending to be a criticism of Amazon, and this is highlighted in the headline. After a few vague critical gestures towards Amazon in the first four paragraphs, it gets to its real point: Goodreads, a social network, has woefully inadequate censorship, which can lead to financial losses to authors and publishers. According the the WaPo, Amazon's crime with Goodreads seems to be that it hasn't…
That’s only true for extremely small values of “censorship”.
edit: hopefully somebody reading the WaPo has some sort of connection to Amazon, and can really commit to making sure that people's inappropriate opinions on the quality of books, the subjects of books, or whether books should have been written at all - will be corrected promptly and repeat offenders banned in future.
Bezos also owns the Washington Post. Make of that what you will.