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Goodreads has no incentive to be good

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Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#21

Post by rerx »

Paul_S wrote: post #10

Goodreads is only good (eh, decent?) as a database of books you've read. All the other functionality is pointless and or broken. The recommendation system is a joke and is obviously used to promote nonsense instead of giving you personalised recommendations.

It's great for following people who read interesting books and may leave reviews that are worth reading. Of course this is an an extension of the database of books you've read, because you can compare your ratings quite easily with those of other people and find things they liked that you didn't know about yet. That's a great source of recommendations, much better than the automated systems.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#22

Post by hospitalJail »

dgb23 wrote: post #5

One of the good things about sites like Goodreads is that they are a great source for long winded rants. I'm someone who likes reading a good rant or complaint. I'm not sure why that is but I find them very entertaining.

Good point. I was so frustrated at how bad the book Atomic Habits was, (in comparison to Power of Habit).

It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have. Lots of idealistic ways to organize things. Lots of mental gymnastics to supposedly make you more productive. I did like the 'improve yourself 1% a day', but I did that with a spin bike and quickly got injured...

Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic.

Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone agreed with me because I wasted hours reading Atomic Habits. Thank you Good Reads. It was therapeutic.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#23

Post by the__alchemist »

selykg wrote: post #4

Typical plug anytime Goodreads is mentioned that Storygraph is trying to do similar and being actively developed. https://thestorygraph.com I still use Goodreads because it gives me notifications of new releases, but, aside from that Storygraph does the job well.

"Subscribe to our newsletter" was default unchecked on sign-up; love it.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#24

Post by trabant00 »

People need to stop hoping for good crowd sourced reviews and ratings. Even if the platform would have the best interests it can't be done. Two simple reasons:

1. Ratings: you can not compress information down to 1 byte without losing almost all of it. I've been a professional game reviewer in another life. I used to give ratings because I was forced to by the site format. When I retired from that I looked back at tens of games I rated. The scores made absolutely no sense any way you tried to look at them. Not compared to each other, not compared to what the game set out to achieve (one way I tried to grade them as objective as possible), nothing. It can not be done.

2. By definition half of the reviews/ratings are being given by stupider than average people. How are you supposed to draw any conclusion when half of the data is garbage?

Only one thing crowd sourced ratings are useful for: helping the platform become a gatekeeper and then squeezing the reviewed.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#25

Post by prepend »

hospitalJail wrote: post #19
Paul_S wrote: post #10

Goodreads is only good (eh, decent?) as a database of books you've read. All the other functionality is pointless and or broken. The recommendation system is a joke and is obviously used to promote nonsense instead of giving you personalised recommendations.

I'm not sure why people like it so much. My aunt-in-law is high pressuring me to use it. I have my library listing all the books I checked out. I have a pdf/epub reader that has a history of the books I read(although a new phone will probably wipe that out). For a while, I was merely writing down my books in a dedicated notebook, but I realized that it didn't really matter, if a book was important, I remembered it. I…

For me, I like it better than my own list because I was spending unnecessary time finding and organizing books. So I like having the spelling and year right and just list management of want to read, reading, read. I did it in a google sheet, but now I spend less time using it.

I also like that I can add friends and see what they read. There’s no chance that I’ll open my aunt’s book list sheet once a week to see what’s changed but I would love to see her reading in my feed along with my other friends.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#27

Post by veave »

hospitalJail wrote: post #22
dgb23 wrote: post #5

One of the good things about sites like Goodreads is that they are a great source for long winded rants. I'm someone who likes reading a good rant or complaint. I'm not sure why that is but I find them very entertaining.

Good point. I was so frustrated at how bad the book Atomic Habits was, (in comparison to Power of Habit). It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have. Lots of idealistic ways to organize things. Lots of mental gymnastics to supposedly make you more productive. I did like the 'improve yourself 1% a day', but I did that with a spin bike and quickly got…

>Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic.

Is it that good?

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#28

Post by prepend »

a_bonobo wrote: post #3

It's the same with IMDB, isn't it? Toxic subgroups and communities 1-star bombing movies that haven't even come out yet. The wikipage on review bombing doesn't even list Goodreads but has many examples from IMDB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_bomb#Films,_television_... So what could Goodreads do differently? It's true that the owners do as little as possible with the site, but that also means that overall the…

> So what could Goodreads do differently?

Add a way to see ratings only from trusted people and friends.

They do this now by bubbling up ratings from my contact. Id like an option to just show their average ratings instead of site wide.

I do not trust any moderators that I don’t know. So I’d rather have them just show ratings from friends or people I’ve noted as reviewworthy. And maybe one degree from them.

I think this applies to everything and I don’t trust Amazon reviews or App Store reviews, but do trust reviews from some people I know (after I’ve filtered out the “I love everything including AntMan3 and StarWars9 and Justice League” friends).

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#29

Post by myth_drannon »

Paul_S wrote: post #10

Goodreads is only good (eh, decent?) as a database of books you've read. All the other functionality is pointless and or broken. The recommendation system is a joke and is obviously used to promote nonsense instead of giving you personalised recommendations.

There are two recommendations systems in Goodreads. One is the official, I agree it is completely broken. The other is "Readers also enjoyed" section on each book page and this one is very good.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#30

Post by the_af »

I must be out of the loop: I never knew that Goodreads mattered at all. I don't know anybody who uses it.

I understand fake reviews in Amazon are a problem: if I'm shopping there, I do look at the reviews, especially bad reviews to see if there is anything wrong with the product. I will disregard reviews that don't make sense and only pay attention to things that matter to me, but it's possible that I'll be influenced by review bombing... I'm only human after all.

But Goodreads? Who cares either way?

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