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Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

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Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#371

Post by dudul »

Leires wrote: post #159
CalRobert wrote: post #18

I interviewed with Goodreads in 2012. If there's one thing I learned it's that when you give people weird gimmick problems ("How many Starbucks are there in Manhattan?") in an 8 hour interview that was supposed to be 2 hours, you're going to produce an awful lot of ill will when you reject people because they're "too technical". The whole thing was the most bizarre interview experience of my life.

I'm sorry you went through that. I had an interview recently that asked no technical questions, only logic puzzles like "princess is behind door number 1, monster is behind door number 2" scenario shit. I mentioned I'm extremely bad at these, but I have ten years of experience that I can speak to. I went ahead and did the quiz and got ghosted anyways. The silver lining is we get to watch companies like this become la…

Next time just refuse to dance and end the interview on the spot. I do that and it feels great to see the light dying in their eyes when they realize you're the one "dumping" them.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#372

Post by xhevahir »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #314
qingcharles wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF. I spent 10 years in jail reading endlessly and only managed about 900 in total. And I had LITERALLY nothing else to do.

You read 90 a year. I’ve read 75 a year while going to school or working full time. So it’s possible to read more, and for more than 10 years. (However I might lose my mind if I did that. Even at 75 I started to feel like I was wasting my life with over consumptions.)

I've read 56 books this year--keeping track of them is pretty much all I use GoodReads for--and it's feeling like too much. Not many of them stand out in my memory.

I've seen people on GoodReads reading 200+ a year, which sounds insane to me.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#373

Post by TeMPOraL »

idopmstuff wrote: post #279
Apocryphon wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a buyout even the only option? Just find new management. Keep it in the family. Turn it into a co-op. There’s also such as a thing as community businesses, apparently.

I'm guessing you've never run a small business? Sometimes people want to exit. They want to retire, move onto a new chapter of their lives and not be involved in the business anymore. Finding new management doesn't allow that - they can take on the day to day, but you still own the place and are ultimately responsible. Keeping it in the family isn't an option if you don't have family that want it. If you have multipl…

Well, fine. So maybe banning M&As is not the right way. But what is, then? Because the problem is real and severe, and it's also just another case of a more general problem - how to stop the market from creating a class of specialists gaming a single metric?

It's prevalent everywhere you look. As you say, M&As let small business owners retire or move away, without being prisoners of their own business. But the failure mode is companies being built with exit in mind, existing to be flipped - this is doing huge damage to the markets and peoples' lives right now.

Or take housing: it's nice that individuals have a way to sell their house and recover some of the money and effort put into it, when their kids leave the nest, or they retire, or they just want to move to some other location. But the failure mode of this is flipping - people and companies who buy properties, "improve" them to maximize resale value, whether the "improvements" make any sense or not for future tenants, and sell them to various actors. This creates a huge distortion on the real estate market, to the point that housing is now built for flipping, not for living.

(There's also a secondary and equally socially bad effect of owners opposing anything whatsoever that could lead to drop in (growth of) housing prices in their area.)

Or take finance: it's not hard to see the failure modes created by professional finance class, that's busy optimizing money flows in isolation from everything they relate to in the real world.

Or, take corporate management, and the rise of MBA class: specialists in running business as an abstract profit-generating machine, in complete isolation of what the business does and means in the real world.

Etc. etc.

This is the big problem I think we're facing: stopping over-optimization.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#374

Post by quxbar »

HWR_14 wrote: post #370
teamspirit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately that's exactly why so many startups get bought. Not to become part of the parent company's business, no, just not to become a competitor later. Would stronger (and enforced) anti trust laws be a solution? I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway.

> I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway. There are two main parts of this. Antitrust laws don't typically concern themselves with bury vs incorporate. Even if Goodreads had been incorporated into Amazon, it still would have accomplished their major goal (prevent them from partnering with another company). And keeping them alive would have…

Regardless of our understanding of them, antitrust laws are powerless without enforcement. It seems the only entities with standing to prevent these actions by massive corporations are other massive corporations.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#375

Post by fsckboy »

crazygringo wrote: post #306
fsckboy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vertical consolidation is also monopolistic, it reduces competition by removing a buyer and a seller from a healthy marketplace. what is actually good for consumers is fierce competition spoiling the sleep of capitalists.

It's still the same rules though. If you're buying a supplier for 5% of the marketplace it's perfectly fine. If you're buying a supplier for 65% of the market then that's a problem.

a supplier for 65% of the market is already a problem. Were the any acquisitions on the way to that market position?

even if there weren't, it's still too big, break it in half. Shareholders will still own what they owned before, 65% of the market, and all the IP that is contained therein, but the companies will have to compete.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#376

Post by selcuka »

cratermoon wrote: post #152
tecleandor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like this is culturally different for some things. And corporations can influence too. I have a friend who has four restaurants in Tokyo, and I've been several times there. If you keep attention to the restaurant reviews in Google Maps, Japanese people is very hard. They'd go like "The food is great, incredible service, surprising flavors, very good experience, best Spanish food I've had in a long time..." and…

The insiders say never to rent from AirBnB if the property isn't at least 4.8 stars. These days those ranking systems don't truly start from 0 or 1. The statistically significant range is much smaller. I don't personally know have the stats chops to do it, but I'm sure determining that range can be done.

It would be interesting to find out the mean and standard deviation for various review sites, and write a browser extension that normalizes them.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#377

Post by idopmstuff »

wyre wrote: post #328
idopmstuff wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what happens to the mom and pop hardware store that's been running for 30 years when mom and pop want to retire? They just have to shut their doors? Banning all M&A would run into a brick wall of unintended consequences. If no one can sell their business, then a significant percent of potential small business owners just wouldn't start businesses. Then what would happen? Those people would go get jobs. Instead of…

>shut their doors Yes, that’s usually what happens if they don’t have family to take over the business or employees to sell the business too. >business owners just wouldn’t start businesses. Maybe in the VC world but those aren’t small businesses are they? Are people really starting restaurants and yarn shops solely so they can sell the business later down the road? Or is it because they have an entrepreneurial spiri…

> Yes, that’s usually what happens if they don’t have family to take over the business or employees to sell the business too.

No, believe it or not, most people with small businesses, which are worth hundreds of thousands or single digit millions of dollars, don't just let the asset disappear for no value when they can find a broker and sell it.

> Maybe in the VC world but those aren’t small businesses are they?

What are you talking about? The first sentence of my post that you're responding to literally says "mom and pop hardware store" - where do you see anything about VC funding?

> It’s hard to believe you honestly think people only start businesses so they can sell it later on.

At no point did I say that. I would wager heavily that you've never owned a small business.

Most people don't start businesses for the sole purpose of selling them, but the fact that you can sell your business is important for all kinds of reasons. Businesses generally require startup capital, much of which is provided by small business loans that the owner must personally guarantee. If you're not allowed to sell your business, you're trapped under those loans. Need to move somewhere? You can't. Want to get out and get a job? You can't.

Think of it like buying a house. If you couldn't sell a house, how do you think that would affect the market? I'll tell you how - more people would rent, because otherwise most of them would be trapped in their home for the life of the mortgage. Does that mean that most people buy homes solely so they can sell them later down the road? It does not.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#378

Post by _kbh_ »

Guthur wrote: post #356

The case in point highlights that this is not a problem specific to online media, it's just made it more obvious. There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict. I like…

> There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict.

You must have the thinnest skin to imaginable to actually think this.

And the irony of this palatable considering how the Russians are acting similar to actual Nazis and mirroring some of their rhetoric.

Insulting a fascists invading force committing some of worst crimes imaginable is not the same as what the Nazis did.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#379

Post by Guthur »

_kbh_ wrote: post #378
Guthur wrote: post #356

The case in point highlights that this is not a problem specific to online media, it's just made it more obvious. There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict. I like…

> There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict. You must have the thinnest skin to imaginable to actually think this. And the irony of this palatable considering how…

Dehumanising is Dehumanising, nothing to do with my skin, I'm not Russian or Ukrainian.

Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

#380

Post by lisasays »

Guthur wrote: post #356

The case in point highlights that this is not a problem specific to online media, it's just made it more obvious. There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict. I like…

There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now.

An excellent analogy, as applies to the current Russian state having dragged its population into a senseless, expansionist war against its southern neighbor (and erstwhile "brother" nation). And its skill at turning ordinary citizens into instruments of genocide.

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