AS far as tracking is concerned, Goodreads works fine for me. I am not sure why should I use it.
Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
111–120 of 198 posts
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#112Goodreads is a pretty bad site overall. Its good for tracking which books you've read I guess, but I don't think its better than a google doc sheet. The average reader there doesn't really have good taste in books. You are honestly better off just using a google doc to track your books, and use /lit/ for discussions and recommendations, since /lit/ has much higher quality reviews, and discussions than good reads. May…
I'm probably being dumb here, but what do you mean by /lit/? I can't figure out how to turn that into an Internet thing (website? social? what is it!), and searching for /lit/ is predictable not helpful. Always looking for a good source of book discussions and recommendations!
4chan I believe
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#113Goodreads is a pretty bad site overall. Its good for tracking which books you've read I guess, but I don't think its better than a google doc sheet. The average reader there doesn't really have good taste in books. You are honestly better off just using a google doc to track your books, and use /lit/ for discussions and recommendations, since /lit/ has much higher quality reviews, and discussions than good reads. May…
I'm probably being dumb here, but what do you mean by /lit/? I can't figure out how to turn that into an Internet thing (website? social? what is it!), and searching for /lit/ is predictable not helpful. Always looking for a good source of book discussions and recommendations!
/lit/ is the 4chan board. If you aren’t actually familiar with 4chan past rumors, it has decently good and varied tastes.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get it. But how big of a demand is there for that? Does the average Wednesday night neighborhood book club care? I am not denying that there is value there for someone, but most people don’t care. People that read books at a level of enthusiasm to join a network about reading don’t think about that stuff. Federation is a feature but it really isn’t an above the fold concern for the vast majority of the potential au…
I'm with you here. I'll be bullish on federation when I understand what non-ideological problems it solves. I totally share the ideology! (And I get the sense that you do too.) But that's not enough. It needs to be useful to be durable.
Federation is what keeps SMTP in place as the default electronic communications channel. Alternatives come and go but SMTP abides, there to cover your posterior when that fancy instant shout channel app flips over and goes the way of the dodo.
While many of the current proponents of federation are wont to explain the concept in line with their own ideologies - usually in the form of references to anti-Capitalism, Anarchism or some form of Marxism, often mixed in with a heavy dose of MDS when it comes to proposing alternatives to Twitter - this does not make the concept of federation ideological. It just makes it a widely applicable concept which has shown its usefulness for a very long time.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#115AS far as tracking is concerned, Goodreads works fine for me. I am not sure why should I use it.
One good reason might be more data ownership than tracking. Centralized platforms seem to at some point realize how valuable their user’s contributions to the site are, and change the deal eventually to e.g. lock things behind a paywall when they grow bold and/or can get away with it. Reddit and Twitter are two high-profile examples of this, but there are numerous examples from the past as well for things like nutrition tracking and cd cataloging. A federated model might better reflect the idea of community ownership, and prevent site owners from betraying the community and cashing out on their contributions.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#116Goodreads is a pretty bad site overall. Its good for tracking which books you've read I guess, but I don't think its better than a google doc sheet. The average reader there doesn't really have good taste in books. You are honestly better off just using a google doc to track your books, and use /lit/ for discussions and recommendations, since /lit/ has much higher quality reviews, and discussions than good reads. May…
I'm probably being dumb here, but what do you mean by /lit/? I can't figure out how to turn that into an Internet thing (website? social? what is it!), and searching for /lit/ is predictable not helpful. Always looking for a good source of book discussions and recommendations!
4channel, a place where surprisingly good discussions are often held. I use it as s complement to hn, especially for topics that upset hn downvoters.
For people who want to have an honest discussion with a fun dose of rudeness and name-calling, it's great.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume OP is talking about the 4chan message board. Here's Reddit thread talking about said board https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/6ghfe5/have_you_guys...
The reddit discussion for /lit/ is hilarious. It's sad how even reading books has become some political thing. God forbid I like an HP Lovecraft story because it's creepy. Some of the comments have this "I like how honest and unrestricted /lit/ is, but why can't we have that without all the Nazism and patriarchy" vibe that's just so incredible, I sort of stare at them in amazement.
Thats why I don’t use Reddit and would never take any opinion on something from there seriously.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.
This is a good start but it's still plagued by the artificial scarcity of digital copies by limiting "checkouts".
Copyright law is a plague on contemporary free society. I'm a composer, I work on contemporary Western classical music, and finding written music published since 1923 is a full-time job in itself. It's relatively easy (still not easy) to find extremely famous composers (e.g. Philip Glass, Gyorg Ligeti, Jennifer Higdon etc), but if you're trying to find someone lesser known, or god forbid someone unknown published by some random European music publishing house, good fucking luck. They literally won't make the publication available to you if they decide. Some works are only available for performance (i.e. if you're allowed to play this music, they "rent" the sheet to you) and no option to study the written work for other authors. It's excruciatingly difficult and holds the entire field back multiple, multiple decades. People write about ideas that were already explored and in circulation almost 4 decades ago because it's likely impossible to read their works.
Let me not even begin to talk to you about finding papers (analyses of other artists' works, musicology etc) if you're not affiliated with a university. You need a fortune to keep up with the field, or be arrrg (and it's not easy to find musicology papers in SciHub compared to other fields).
In this aspect we're significantly worse than how things were back in 1800s, 1900s or early 2000s.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume OP is talking about the 4chan message board. Here's Reddit thread talking about said board https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/6ghfe5/have_you_guys...
The reddit discussion for /lit/ is hilarious. It's sad how even reading books has become some political thing. God forbid I like an HP Lovecraft story because it's creepy. Some of the comments have this "I like how honest and unrestricted /lit/ is, but why can't we have that without all the Nazism and patriarchy" vibe that's just so incredible, I sort of stare at them in amazement.
It really just shows how Reddit often “doesn’t get it”. If you don’t want that stuff then just don’t look at it. But Reddit also due to the voting system just kind of tends towards this lowest common denominator malaise of mediocrity. /r/books, /r/literature or even something like /r/fantasy just tends towards talking about a few popular easily digestible books or meta topics.
Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume OP is talking about the 4chan message board. Here's Reddit thread talking about said board https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/6ghfe5/have_you_guys...
The reddit discussion for /lit/ is hilarious. It's sad how even reading books has become some political thing. God forbid I like an HP Lovecraft story because it's creepy. Some of the comments have this "I like how honest and unrestricted /lit/ is, but why can't we have that without all the Nazism and patriarchy" vibe that's just so incredible, I sort of stare at them in amazement.
I use /lit/. It definitely does have Nazism and patriarchy plastered over it. If you dig around, there are great posts there. But it is a valid complaint.
I'm wondering, do you take more issue with the Redditors saying they don't like the far-right stuff on /lit/ than you do with the actual far-right stuff on /lit/? Or are you commenting on the political nature of the entire (/lit/ + Reddit) system?