Goodreads has no incentive to be good • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#101

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:19 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #72

I anything actually good anymore? - Goodreads: Broken recommendation system, meh UI, review wars - Google Search: Pointless - Reddit: Overtly user-hostile, poor UX, tiktokified - YouTube: Mainstream, ad-riddled, tiktokified - Yelp: Cluttered-UI, favors jerks, hostile to businesses - Gmail: Oh yeah we're gonna delete your emails if you don't log in after a while - Netflix: Shrinking catalogue, worse quality shows - In…

personally would not add wikipedia, amazon or gmail. still useful for me.

youtube ok-ish. but worse every day.

goodreads useful for reading quotes.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#102

Post by rcastellotti » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

no, but it seems it has incentive to be reads, further investigation may be required

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#103

Post by stolenmerch » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

Every single time a Goodreads post comes up it's always negative and the comments are full of supposedly better alternatives. Except those alternatives are never better. I've tried most of them and they very often are ghost towns or don't even have the book I'm reading, let alone recommend anything useful. LibraryThing comes the closest, but its UI is equally bad if not worse than Goodreads. Goodreads is good enough for me. I follow and am followed by enough people that writing reviews is worth it.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#104

Post by SxC97 » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #72

I anything actually good anymore? - Goodreads: Broken recommendation system, meh UI, review wars - Google Search: Pointless - Reddit: Overtly user-hostile, poor UX, tiktokified - YouTube: Mainstream, ad-riddled, tiktokified - Yelp: Cluttered-UI, favors jerks, hostile to businesses - Gmail: Oh yeah we're gonna delete your emails if you don't log in after a while - Netflix: Shrinking catalogue, worse quality shows - In…

I have to disagree with YouTube. Yes, theres a lot of garbage on there, but I've managed to curate a collection of subscriptions that make _extremely_ high quality videos. Even the reccomendation system thats so often criticised here has regularly served me new channels that are right up my ally. I get more value from YT than most other sites on the net (with the exception of HN, obviously)

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#105

Post by wtf242 » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

I build this app over a decade ago. https://thegreatestbooks.org which I aggregate all the "lists" and use a weighted algorithm to create a single list of the best books. I've been working on a new version with genres, and a much smarter algorithm, which I am getting close to finishing.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#106

Post by padolsey » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

What upsets me most is how much of a treasure trove of data that amazon/goodreads are sitting on and yet their recommendations are still pitiful. A basic collaborative-filtering algorithm would be better than "OH WE THINK YOU WILL LIKE THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT IS IN THE SAME GENRE AS A BOOK YOU BOUGHT A YEAR AGO!".

I'll humbly plug https://abooklike.foo just in case people want better book recommendations. You can input books u like and it'll find others you may like. I can explain more about its mechanics if useful. Been working on it for around 6 years now as a side project. Anyway, just posting in case someone's scanning through the thread and happens to see : )

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#107

Post by KingOfCoders » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #32

KingOfCoders wrote: post #18

Whenever I read about Goodreads I had a website called MustReadBooks in the 1990s which was rather successful - should have kept developing it :-)

The second best time to develop MustReadBooks is today.

I'm building a DreamJob site for CTOs and developers who want to become CTOs, and started a podcast, but yes if I could clone myself, the best time is today.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#108

Post by eterevsky » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:27 PM UTC

I'm using Goodreads to manage the books that I read and plan to read.

I sometimes looks at the reviews of the books, but never look at the star rating because of how uninformative it is. For most of the books that I care about their rating is somewhere between 3.0 and 4.5 and I can't for the life of me see any correlation between the my enjoyment of the book and its rating. I always assumed that this is just a consequence of taste in books being so different for different people. Averaging these personal preferences just doesn't produce a good signal.

Which brings me to the question: does anybody actual care about ratings on Goodreads?

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#109

Post by padolsey » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:29 PM UTC

DeathArrow wrote: post #62

Is there a good a website with a good reading recommendation system based on what you and others have read?

Biased,.. but I've been building a site that does this for a few years now and reckon it's not bad. It's more of a passion project. Lets you type in books you like and then will find the most intersecting set of other books. https://abooklike.foo // dataset is over a year old, be warned.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#110

Post by thenerdhead » Fri, Jun 30, 2023, 2:29 PM UTC

What gave it away? The fact that Amazon bought it, retired the API, and put a "Buy on Amazon" button on every book?

Also majority of reviews are fake. Go look at any new Ryan Holiday book months before it is released. Obviously these authors and their publishing teams know how to game the system so more people end up buying the book.

GoodReads has an incentive to sell books. It has no incentive to sell good books. All the good books have < 200 reviews and hardly anyone even knows of them.