Cannot confirm. Getting pretty good recommendations for Japanese crime novels, which is probably reasonably niche.
Goodreads Is Broken
31–40 of 292 posts
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#32A feature I want on goodreads is "for me and a friend, show me the rarest book we have read in common". It would be great to find connections between people that would be hard to discover otherwise. Same thing for groups - it's fun to try to find the "rarest common denominator" in the books, movies, or places visited domain.
Amazon has something somewhat related long ago called "Someone like you" that would show you books purchased by people who had similar previous reading purchases. It was odd to see someone had purchased the same combination of OpenGL books, cookbooks, and sociopolitical books as me. The recommendations that resulted were pretty good but I suspect privacy concerns ended it.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#33I wonder if people posting on Medium realize that for many of us the articles are inaccessible ("Sign up for a free Medium account, and you’ll get one more story in your member preview this month"). It seems that people missed the change in Medium's business model and still think that it's a site for posting publicly accessible articles.
Medium is awful and should be boycotted.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#34I read quite a bit and generally like Goodreads for what it is, but I agree that it's essentially not grown at all in 12 years. There are parts that are broken, there are features that are lacking, and it frustrates me to no end. Many, many times I've thought of how I'd build a competitor, but it is pointless because Goodread's moat is too big: the integrations with the kindle go a very long way towards cultivating e…
This seems like a fun side project idea honestly - can I ask what’s most broken and which great features are missing? I took a quick look and there is a official Goodreads API that you can use to pull titles from people’s accounts (once they authorize your app). Yes, Amazon could shut it down but eh, might be worth the risk
My bouts of wanting to build a competitor usually arise when I'm trying to find something I'd assume would be a feature and isn't, and I'm having a hard time remembering everything, but:
1) I desperately want a feature that'll show me the books most-reviewed among my friends, or highest reviewed with >X # of reviews. You can see what individual friends have reviewed, but there is nothing I've found to aggregate.
2) More reading stats (right now it shows number of books, and total pages at the end of the year). I wanna see breakdowns of categories, authors, fiction/nonfiction.
3) I had an idea for per-book or per-series wikis that have spoiler-bracketed info. E.g., [spoiler b2p300 "King Soandso is murdered by Assassin Soandso"] would show in a book wiki if you are past book 2, page 300. I read a bit of fantasy and have a tendency to want to google 'who is x', but that is fraught with spoilers. This is a feature that could exist as its own site, but I think it'd be a good companion to a goodreads-esque site.
4) Book Discovery seems super weak on Goodreads and I feel I could build something significantly more useful.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#35It astounds me that after 20+ years of Amazon, nobody's come close to creating a good way to discover books. Amazon.com is particularly bad at it, but browsing the shelves of a library is still a better experience than what I can get from Goodreads.
The single thing that bothers me most about goodreads is that they’re owned by a bookseller, the have a list of 200 books I’ve read, and every month they email me promoting romance novels, bestsellers and books about america culture. The one I just checked includes an advertisement for dresses (I’m male) If they would literally just list new releases by authors I’ve read it would be 100% more useful.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#36I don't know what people expect , you're going to have to do some digging to find the gems, like everything else in life. There no magical algorithm that can't be gamed or eventually skewed to be bland, boring, sales driven, and altogether less creatively interesting.
If you want real discussion nothing really beats the classic forum bulletin board.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#37It astounds me that after 20+ years of Amazon, nobody's come close to creating a good way to discover books. Amazon.com is particularly bad at it, but browsing the shelves of a library is still a better experience than what I can get from Goodreads.
Could it be that there is a moneyed interest in keeping things undiscovered?
Not exactly. The moneyed interest is in driving dollars to the things that they invested heavily in, and need to get that money back. They paid big bucks for a book they expect to be a bestseller, they want attention on that book. So there’s no incentive to drive attention to the little books.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#38I wonder if people posting on Medium realize that for many of us the articles are inaccessible ("Sign up for a free Medium account, and you’ll get one more story in your member preview this month"). It seems that people missed the change in Medium's business model and still think that it's a site for posting publicly accessible articles.
For me, the window containing that message has a "close" icon at the top right, and then I can read the article.
If you don't have a similar close icon I'd be interested in seeing a screenshot of what you can see.
I have no love for Medium, but so far I've been able to read everything, so I'd be interested to see how my experience differs from yours.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#39Yes - Goodreads is pretty awful when it could be so much better. The searching is awful, the comment UI is grim and the suggested books lists are poor. The most useful tool I've found for finding new authors is this: https://www.literature-map.com/ I only use it for keeping track of what I've read and to look up negative reviews to see whether a book is likely to be one I won't like. The scoring system is almost usel…
I'm not impressed. Philip K. Dick next to Stanisław Lem. The two lived in the same period, and there's a funny anecdote about them (Philip believed Stanisław was invented by communists to trick him, because no single person could be so resourceful. Consequently, Philip K. Dick refused to communicate with Stanisław Lem). But their literature is very different.
Dick's stories are typically short and easy to digest, with fast action. Lem's is ponderous, filled with long sentences and complex ideas. Little is happening.
Re: Goodreads Is Broken
#40I wonder if people posting on Medium realize that for many of us the articles are inaccessible ("Sign up for a free Medium account, and you’ll get one more story in your member preview this month"). It seems that people missed the change in Medium's business model and still think that it's a site for posting publicly accessible articles.
Medium is awful and should be boycotted.
It's a shame https://telegra.ph doesnt have the ability to save/send yourself an edit link. Being able to only edit your story on the computer you made it on is a big turnoff.