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Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

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Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#161

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

michaelmrose wrote: post #158
siegecraft wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have specific examples as I am not a regular reader of lit, but I can comment on "it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from reddit." The anonymity, lack of up/downvotes, non-hierarchial layout, lack of moderation, and heavy focus on images creates a very different experience from reddit. Some say this leads to better and more organic discussions (I agree for the most part), but I think they're only go…

I opened many threads and see zero examples of discussion that couldn't have happened here on or Reddit. The only things I see which couldn't be posted here are offensive and worthless. Can you post a single example?

You see many examples of comments, I'm sure, that look like they could happen anywhere.

And you continue to believe that, right up until you see a comment just like them, that gets someone banned from reddit. And then you're irate, and you wonder why you were banned. But you can't even get much explanation, because having been banned from reddit, they've taken the one way you might use to demand the explanation.

But even that's not the full picture. Sometimes there are people whose "contrariness" is a bit higher than other people's. And they refuse to participate in places where they aren't allowed to say whatever they want, even if pretty much all the time they'd never say anything that would get them banned. Are those people more interesting than others? Who knows, you'll never find their stuff on reddit.

I think in the legal world, you call this over-moderation a "chilling effect". You don't have to censor everyone, it turns out, if you can scare or bully them into self-censoring.

Eventually, I think, everyone sees what we're talking about. It's just by the time it's so overt that even you can't deny it anymore, there won't be much anyone can do about it.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#162

Post by bamfly »

ecshafer wrote: post #59

Goodreads 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…

> The average reader there doesn't really have good taste in books.

Massive problem everywhere. Sometimes I'll read some well-reviewed book-club sort of book, and it's usually somewhere between middling, and really bad. I once encountered one of those from a major publisher and aside from not being very good to begin with, it didn't even seem to have had a test-read done before it went to print—there were multiple parts, and one egregious chapter, where it looked like the author had done a major re-organizing edit then never gone back to iron out the wrinkles, such that the text would contradict itself line-to-line, like two or three versions of a scene describing different action, sequence of events, and circumstances re: things like which characters were present, had been hastily mashed up then never fully reconciled. This was plainly not a some intentionally-ambiguous literary device, but an oversight that left the reader unable to know what was supposed to have occurred. You'd never know what a mediocre story and technical mess it was from reading online reviews, though, unless you dug deep into the one- and two-star stuff (and found a reviewer of that sort who hadn't DNF'd it after the first couple chapters), plus other people I know who read it didn't even notice—one did, and we both got to stop feeling like we were taking crazy pills when we compared notes. WTF.

All I can figure is a lot of people just skim everything, so are used to filling in lots of narrative gaps in their head or accepting the gist or outcomes of bits that don't make much sense to them and moving on, which would also explain why the quality of the story, characters, and writing aren't something they really notice, if it's all coming through to them rather impressionistically anyway and they're painting the rest of the picture any way they like. I dunno.

TL;DR I find book recommendations nearly useless unless I've got a good sense of how a reviewer's quality-o-meter is calibrated. Star ratings from a broad, general audience are entirely useless.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#163

Post by pseg134 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #158
siegecraft wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have specific examples as I am not a regular reader of lit, but I can comment on "it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from reddit." The anonymity, lack of up/downvotes, non-hierarchial layout, lack of moderation, and heavy focus on images creates a very different experience from reddit. Some say this leads to better and more organic discussions (I agree for the most part), but I think they're only go…

I opened many threads and see zero examples of discussion that couldn't have happened here on or Reddit. The only things I see which couldn't be posted here are offensive and worthless. Can you post a single example?

They’re easy to miss when you are trying not to see them.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#164

Post by riezebos »

deanc wrote: post #96
teeray wrote: post #3

It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).

Consumers want centralisation. All of this stuff is too complicated right now for end-users. In an ideal world, my data would live on the instance but as soon as its mutated a local copy is sync'd through the browser/app. That way it's my data, and if the instance goes down, I can choose to sync it somewhere else. Ideally this would be packaged up in one application, so for different kinds of "sites" the mechanism fo…

Consumers often also don't want to be dependent on local data. I would propose a feature to link (& sync) user accounts across multiple servers, that way no one needs to depend on a single server. Power users can set up their own server and use that as a local copy of all their data.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#165

Post by tech_ken »

huggingmouth wrote: post #116
geoffdunbar wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IDK, I enjoy the occasional spicy conversation but the intermittent, casual slurs are a big turnoff for me

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#166

Post by rg111 »

https443 wrote: post #23
eshnil wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

Wow, I just realized Open Library covers like 80% of Goodreads as well: read/to-read lists, ratings, yearly reading goals. Seems like https://openlibrary.org itself would be a fine Goodreads alternative if you don't want to set up your own Bookwyrm instance.

I have been using the Open Library app for almost a year now. I am very satisfied with it.

After GR removed the ability to add books manually by users and added stringent rules for them to be added to consideration by "librarians", I stopped using GR.

I read a lot of obscure books that often don't have ISBN or an webpage (!). I can't track them or add them! It was so unfair.

So, I moved to OpenLibrary and have been using it ever since.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#167

Post by malfist »

pseg134 wrote: post #163
michaelmrose wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I opened many threads and see zero examples of discussion that couldn't have happened here on or Reddit. The only things I see which couldn't be posted here are offensive and worthless. Can you post a single example?

They’re easy to miss when you are trying not to see them.

Feel free to provide an example of what we're missing

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#168

Post by tiltowait »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #109
raybb wrote: post #105

Earlier 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.

r/books is a disappointingly bad sub. I subbed there for a while, but it was filled with the same recommendations over and over (which is the problem with any recommendation subs).

The kicker for me, though (and the reason I unsubbed) was when the mods barred any posts complaining about the casting of Roland in the Dark Tower adaptation that was made several years ago, on the grounds that the only reason for anyone to disagree with casting Idris Elba was racism. People pointing out that changing Roland's race fundamentally changes his relationship with Susannah (and possibly even has implications for Susannah's relationship with Eddie) had their posts removed.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#169

Post by [deleted] »

biftek wrote: post #78
teeray wrote: post #3

It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).

This is the inherent flaw of decentralized networks. You either appeal to people who really care about decentralization (an extremely small group) or you're not really decentralized.

[deleted]

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#170

Post by cyrialize »

raybb wrote: post #107
cyrialize wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 to StoryGraph. I'm a big fan. I had the pleasure of seeing the CEO of StoryGraph, Nadia Odunayo, at a Ruby conference a year or so ago. She was a keynote speaker and she was absolutely wonderful. Nadia gave a presentation on encountering a Ruby bug, but presented it as a mystery story with chapters and narrative storytelling. Definitely one of the best, entertaining presentations I've seen in a long time.

Is this the talk you're referring to? RubyConf 2022: Keynote: The Case Of The Vanished Variable - A Ruby Mystery Story by Nadia Odunayo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5eVFVHKuDE

Yes! That was the exact one.
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