I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for posting. we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.
Many thanks.
I Want to Fix Goodreads
161–170 of 205 posts
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can we have half stars or quarter stars? I read a lot of books, and choosing full-star 1 to 5 makes the ratings pretty useless for people who read a lot. My internal rankings are: 1 hated it/was offended/didn't finish 2 disliked it/likely didn't finish 3 finished but it was a struggle 4 finished/enjoyed/had some issues 5 finished fast/really enjoyed/may or may not have still had issues. If I look back at the 30 to 50…
Your post only goes to point out how arbitrary rating systems are since everyone brings their own ideas into the system of what ratings mean. What you really want is some personal bookkeeping which doesn't make sense for the 5-star system. You'd want tags or the private note textarea to scribble down your arbitrary personal rating system. Frankly I think more ratings are just worse. You're pitching 10 or 20 different…
Yep, I could do with a simple thumbs up/down rating system as I usually only rate books either 1 star if I don't like them or 5 stars if I do like them. The multiple stars rating system is pretty pointless to me.
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why take 60% of the rating space up by negative ratings? It seems like what you really care about is degrees of goodness. An alternative approach: 1 - I disliked it. 2 - It's OK 3 - This is good 4 - This is great 5 - This is a must-read
It's the problem with star systems, which is that we'll always have different definitions. Your 3s are living next to the other poster's 3s and mean very different things. That said, I think the world has also suffered from ratings inflation. I tend to assume anything under a 4 means "bad" or "meh" myself.
The best rating system I have ever seen is the "best of two" system that pixoto.com uses to rate photos.
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#164[deleted]
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#165Nice write up and great Jeff Bezos story!
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you recommend books based on ML or do you hand pick books you want to promote because you think they should be promoted or have been paid to promote them?
only ML. no promo -- nothing sneaky -- we hate sneaky
Thanks. I checked out recommendations just now and indeed they make sense. I swear at some point in the past when I last tried it had very suspicious results, hence my question.
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting point about reviewers skewing positive for popularity. My big issue with most recommendation engines is that they're biased towards false positives rather than false negatives. The other way would lead to fewer, more focused recommendations. In particular, I'd like to see an engine take a reviewer's dislikes into account more. If someone likes (switching to film for an accessible example) Cinderella, The…
The "smile or die" mentality propagated by sites like FB, where you only have likes but no dislikes, is throwing half the information away. I think it stems from a misguided desire to avoid adversity.
Or possibly, it stems from becoming "super reviewers", and then being paid to review works for compensation?
Or the thought that such things, if not happening, may happen? Just like on Amazon and other sites?
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#168Good lord what I wouldn’t give for a better goodreads. Never has so much useful and actionable data been squandered. For example, I could write pages about how bad the “top books” lists are. The Goodreads Choice Awards are purely and literally popularity contests, for example. Why would this be the case - you have millions of user ratings, you should be using those to surface exciting and unknown books rather than th…
How did you define the actual "best books" ? I usually pick a group (Goodreads users in country x), scrape the books of all its users, and sort them by frequency: https://github.com/harjoc/goodreads-group-books
Thinking on johnfn's response, and yours, these are all simple SQL queries. You could easily delineate to others what each query does, and let people choose from a list.
EG "best average" "most reviewed" "users in country + frequency" and such.
This doesn't even need to hit performance, as these queries could all run on a secondary SQL server, be cached in redis/whatever once an hour, or even day.
After all, this sort of list output doesn't need to be second by second changing.
So simple to implement, non-performance impacting, which makes it even more curious as to 'why not'. Likely, a UI/UX person thinks it will 'confuse' people.
(I know that may not be the case, but it seems to kill more sites, and more flexible functionality, than anything...)
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#169I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for posting. we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.
Thanks for sharing that, looking forward to the changes.
genuinely curious, why would you get fired?
Re: I Want to Fix Goodreads
#170You should check out: https://beta.thestorygraph.com/
It's still in beta but I've tried it and like it a lot. One thing that it's missing that is holding me back from a full jump over to it is an android app. The mobile site looks good, but I think an app would substantially improve usability.