A WaPo article talking about Amazon exploits. What a bizarre world we live in. I made the mistake to join Goodreads. Makes reading a books a some sort of sport. I was not aware that it was owned by Amazon but now it makes sense on how the approach the action of reading a book into a data mining affair.
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
#42> By joining Amazon, Goodreads has accelerated their mission to delight customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology. Seriously, reading the diarrhea vomited out by corporate PR shills nowadays seriously makes my teeth hurt. Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're spouting to the general public?
I've found that "delight customers" is the key phrase.
Just write a script that excludes any articles which mentions that phrase for a better life.
That's been a pretty reliable indicator over the last decade.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#43Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…
Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database is enough to threaten their business?
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#44Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X" ranking. Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book…
And in many such systems the peer pressure to give a 5 is tremendous, which further devalues the rating system. Uber drivers for example have told me that if more than a few customers give them a 4 they will be effectively fired. Restaurants, tour companies etc have asked me to please give them the maximum number of stars on Yelp, Google, Tripadvisor, etc lest there be dire consequences for them.
This is of course Goodheart's Law in action but I don't have any ideas for fixing the problem.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#45Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X" ranking. Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book…
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 then they go "...but I know they can do better and have space to improve. 2/5".
In Spain we would be like "Nice beer, they gave us some tapas. 5/5"
Gig economy corporations also have made this worse. You're scared to score your driver, your server or your hotel by less than a 5/5 or somebody might get punished or fired (and maybe they didn't even had a contract in the first place).
And this becomes a snake biting its own tail. Now I rarely go to a place with a score of less than a 4/5, and I'll score relatively high because I know I could influence votes out of what people consider "worthy to visit".
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is correct. The acquisition was anti-competitive, and Lina Khan's FTC would probably challenge it.
Why? The FTC has shown time and again it has no interest in enforcing the rules, whether that's under Pai, Khan, or going back every administration since the Microsoft anti-competition days.
In general historically I'd agree with you but the FTC under Khan has been prolific, not to mention there was recently news that they specifically are going to target Amazon for a large antitrust case and Khan wrote what is considered her most important paper specifically on Amazon.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-29/amazon-ma...
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#47Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all. But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive. Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else…
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.
> 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.
Stronger anti-trust laws would just block many of these sales in the first place (e.g. identify that Goodreads competes with Amazon's existing dominant user book-review feature, and kill the acquisition for that reason).
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s only true for extremely small values of “censorship”.
The values that include commenting on writing in general aren't small to most people. I can't imagine a larger value. edit: hopefully somebody reading the WaPo has some sort of connection to Amazon, and can really commit to making sure that people's inappropriate opinions on the quality of books, the subjects of books, or whether books should have been written at all - will be corrected promptly and repeat offenders…
Do you consider it censorship when Amazon removes fake reviews from their products? This is something most people are in favor of.
You can write what you want about books elsewhere. On Amazon, product reviews and ratings should be from people who have used the product. On Goodreads, reviews should be by people who have read the book.
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#49For anime we have myanimelist.com, for (asian) dramas we have mydramalist.com; and both seems to work, for both tracking and for recommendations... but something like that for books does not exist.
Goodreads acts as the tracker for me, but a recommendations engine it absolutely sucks. It has never recommended me a book ever, I have to rely on /r/fantasy to churn out new recommendations for me.
In the age of AI and LLM and whatever bullshit, how hard is it for Amazon (owner of AWS) to see my read list (which I diligently update) and recommend me something based on the things I've read before, give more weight to my latest reads, and match the sentiments with the text of other books (which they have access too, and it's just text no audio/video bullshit)?
If Youtube can do it, if god damn Twitter can do it, why can't Amazon?
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(we do have mybooklist.com, but it simply does not work properly, it just seems to be a simple and literal "list" aggregator, from other sources, like newspaper etc.)
Re: Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
#50Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X" ranking. Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book…
I really like the idea of relative ratings.
But that also amplifies a problem that exists with any rating: recency bias, or any sort of time bias.
I change over time. An album that I loved when I was 15 could get a 1/5 from me today. Or a book that I hated in my teens, may now be my favorite. It's complicated.