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

Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 161 posts

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#141

Post by jsbisviewtiful »

lancesells wrote: post #76
habosa wrote: post #64

If anyone at Goodreads or Amazon cares about the platform at all they have a funny way of showing it. It’s been stagnant and shoddy for years. Goodreads really has only one thing going for it: a pristine data set of books, authors, cover images, etc. There are so many other reading apps with a better UX but they are frustrating to use because the data is spotty or low quality.

I would argue they have the users, which is probably more important than pristine data.

I recently moved over to StoryGraph. There are a few much better competitors at this point.

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#142

Post by zaphirplane »

Xiol32 wrote: post #131
Dalewyn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too like their transparency, but for the opposite reason: I find review bombings are the only time reviews are actually useful. Reviews are a dime a dozen, positive or negative; they normally aren't useful for judging whether a product is worth buying. Review bombings on the other hand only happen when something happened to trigger the internet's sweaty wrath, and that is very useful as a unit of measure. Any parti…

Valuable if you want to find people bedwedding over LGBT representation or empowered women, sure.

Most of the top 10 sci-fi fantasy novels have a female mc

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#143

Post by greenhexagon »

piperswe wrote: post #138
Dalewyn wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great way to weed out woke nonsense, yes. It's also great to weed out draconian DRMs and EULAs, stealthy price hikes immediately prior to a sale, shitty developer behaviour in general, and other such factors I would not want to spend my money on. Reviews by themselves don't tell me anything important, especially in times of peace. Review bombings on the other hand tell me there is or was a problem I might want…

"woke nonsense" would you mind qualifying that? I'm not familiar with what "woke" actually means

"Woke" started as a term used by young American social progressives as a reference to becoming aware of things which they had previously been unaware. Sort of a "Neo waking up from being in the Matrix" type of waking from a dream, delusion or false reality.

This could cover almost any social, economic or political issue. Generally though it was used around issues related to race, gender or sexuality. People would sometimes use the phrase "Stay Woke" as a shorthand for something like "Stay aware of racial or gender disparities and work to counter them".

The term was subsequently used in a derisive, pejorative or mocking manner by people who perceived the first group (the "woke" people) to be factually incorrect or excessive in their demands.

People using a phrase like "woke nonsense" are expressing disdain for inserting race/gender/sexuality issues where they don't belong or being frustrated by too-extreme measures being advocated to address such issues.

There's my attempt at writing a very neutral etymology of the usage of the term.

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#144

Post by hutattedonmyarm »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #132
elektor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have given up on Goodreads and relocated to StoryGraph ( https://thestorygraph.com/ )

Thanks for the pointer. I've been checking this out, and it looks pretty good. I can't find any way on the site to ask questions, either of the developers or of the community. What I'm trying to figure out is the semantics of their reading preferences exclusions. The actual question asks about "types of content that you never want to read about", and that "about" confuses me. Suppose that I choose "racism" there. Doe…

> I can't find any way on the site to ask questions, either of the developers or of the community.

I can see a "contact us" button both on mobile (in the hamburger menu, top right) and on desktop (bottom right corner).

Right now it seems to be a bit too sensitive and hides books a bit too eagerly, but the team is aware of that. That's about the extend of info I have though

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#145

Post by zozbot234 »

habosa wrote: post #64

If anyone at Goodreads or Amazon cares about the platform at all they have a funny way of showing it. It’s been stagnant and shoddy for years. Goodreads really has only one thing going for it: a pristine data set of books, authors, cover images, etc. There are so many other reading apps with a better UX but they are frustrating to use because the data is spotty or low quality.

OpenLibrary offers that kind of dataset as a public service, on a non-profit basis. (Note: this has zilch to do with the whole controversy over them lending in-copyright books. The book metadata is an entirely separate thing and quite legal.)

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#146

Post by Syzygies »

fireflash38 wrote: post #104
Syzygies wrote: post #66

Chess and tennis rating systems work reasonably well. Academic grading does not. Academics will never change; the humanities will never go along. While sites like Netflix use all the AI they can muster to tune and individualize their recommendation systems, the review systems we know best rely on straight democratic votes that can be gamed. Or worse, they rig the votes for profit. The AI objective function should be…

> Chess and tennis rating systems work reasonably well. I don't quite see how that applies? Those are straight up/down/tie. And not subjective at all, like book quality.

Sorry, I was thinking abstractly.

I was opening up the question of how different models for aggregating reviews would be naturally immune to review bombing, using Chess and Tennis ranking systems as inspiration. There's nothing about that style of aggregation that locks one into a particular kind of base signal.

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#149

Post by habosa »

lancesells wrote: post #76
habosa wrote: post #64

If anyone at Goodreads or Amazon cares about the platform at all they have a funny way of showing it. It’s been stagnant and shoddy for years. Goodreads really has only one thing going for it: a pristine data set of books, authors, cover images, etc. There are so many other reading apps with a better UX but they are frustrating to use because the data is spotty or low quality.

I would argue they have the users, which is probably more important than pristine data.

Obviously there are important network effects but the behavior of some Goodreads users is often a negative at this point (as the article talks about).

Re: Goodreads asks users to help combat 'review bombing'

#150

Post by Ruthalas »

KittenInABox wrote: post #79
habosa wrote: post #64

If anyone at Goodreads or Amazon cares about the platform at all they have a funny way of showing it. It’s been stagnant and shoddy for years. Goodreads really has only one thing going for it: a pristine data set of books, authors, cover images, etc. There are so many other reading apps with a better UX but they are frustrating to use because the data is spotty or low quality.

There's no motivation for amazon to improve Goodreads. Why would they? The audience isn't going anywhere.

I am currently migrating to a Bookwyrm instance (a federated equivalent). It's not too bad, and can ingest your Goodreads export.
Post reply on HN