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Goodreads has no incentive to be good

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Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#51

Post by prithee »

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.

They are valuable the reasons you mention. I'm an avid reader, and sometimes people will ask me a question about a recommendation or what I've read, and I have a complete brain lapse (to the extent it's as if you'd wonder if I read at all). Having a list helps that anxiety. I don't really use the other features, and only settled on Goodreads after the Shelfari "merge".

I do the same with logging film watches on IMDb, which is actually useful because I can visualize exact watch behavior by the timestamps, and using exports I can also query my film history for personal recommendations (select documentaries that are horror tagged I've watched from the last 10 years).

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#52

Post by stared »

> Few people read reviews whether it is Amazon, Yelp, or anywhere else.

I do. IMHO, star ratings are close to pointless. They are deeply flawed even without spam, advertising, or moral outrage votes. And especially for goods that depend on a subjective reception - such as books. First, grading patterns are various. Many use either 1 or 5. For others, 4 is already a failing grade. Second, I don't care what the average reception is. I might be (and usually: I am) looking for something different from the other reader.

A review offers much more. An advantage (or disadvantage) is something I deeply care about, don't care at all, or I would use the same point, but in the opposite way. And well, other times, the review points that the person has no idea what they are talking about - e.g. it is clear that these are based on hype (or: guilty-by-association) rather than the book's quality.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#53

Post by andai »

hospitalJail wrote: post #39
dhbradshaw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is the author of Power of Habit? (Looks like there are a few different books you could be referring to.)

Charles Duhigg Couldn't recommend it enough. I can make my life robotic if I want, and still be happy. Its mind boggling. (Admittedly, you have to turn it into a habit, which means like ~3 days of 'suck', but after that its automatic)

You can form a habit in 3 days? I thought the consensus was 20-30.

I've done things every day for 50+ days without the habit sticking. I think I heard "habit resistance" is related to ADHD.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#54

Post by gdulli »

Has a good cross-media site ever been done, for books, games, shows, movies, and music in one place? Or is there anyone else who has that vision?

I could see myself spending a lot of time on a site where I could maintain one profile/habit for all of them. Each of those alone I enjoy, but I've never been able to make it a regular thing to go to a site for just one of them. I love movies but I'm not so much of a cinephile to put a lot of time into letterboxd, and so on.

Pretty much every day, one of those is important to me. But each of them alone has gaps in my life where I may not care about them much for a few weeks to a few months at a time.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#55

Post by purple_ferret »

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.

The lists are user made and can be good for finding stuff on a topic.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#56

Post by manojlds »

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…

It's social media for book readers. I user it to primarily see what my friends read and what they think about those books and about the books I read. It's not just place to keep note of books you read.

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#57

Post by manojlds »

CSMastermind wrote: post #20
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.

The new UI "upgrades" make it much harder to use as a database of books you've read. I accidentally marked the wrong edition of a book as read the other day and it took me like 20 minutes to figure out how to switch the entry to the correct version.

Genuine question, why does it matter which version?

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#58

Post by arrowsmith »

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…

You might enjoy the podcast If Books Could Kill: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/atomic-habits/id165187...

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#59

Post by bwb »

mhb wrote: post #37

I'll mention https://shepherd.com/ which has an interesting feature: 8,000+ authors have shared five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood. We make it easy to find the books they recommend through a book you already love, an author you adore, or a Wikipedia topic that interests you.

Thanks for the kind mention :)

We are entirely focused on book exploring, discovery, and better recommendations. We are only 2 years old and bootstrapped.

We just launched genre pages here -> https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/hard-science-fiction

You can filter in on sub genres, topics, what age the book is for, and a lot more. Trying to make discovery more fun :)

Re: Goodreads has no incentive to be good

#60

Post by selykg »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #48
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.

It doesn't seem to be usable without log in: can't search books, reviews, can't do anything, so not very similar at all with Goodreads

Just because you have to sign in to use it doesn't mean it's not similar.
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