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Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative

kaguya.io

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Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. Is there a reason Pandemic ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/710698.Pandemic ) and The Rift ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/271167.The_Rift ) aren't in Kaguya?

They're there. Looks like our search needs some improvement. We'll add a dedicated search results page too. https://kaguya.io/books/pandemic-6 https://kaguya.io/books/the-rift-1

Hah, I was just going to go back to these after I had issues with the Shadowmarch series by Tad Williams and The Wizard Knight series by Gene Wolfe. I had figured out that the books are on the authors' page even though the search wasn't serving them up.

Thanks!

Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative

#84
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rating is a mess. Still I think people are used to express their opinions on a 0-10 scale, and they will appreciate if they can just keep doing that.

0 to 10 is a mess as well because some people give 10s very often and others only give a 10 for the very best things. And of course the bots all rate everything 1 or 10.

I was once playing around with a 3-point ranking system. Think thumbs-down, thumbs-up, and double-thumbs-up. The thumbs up and down would basically function as expected, while the latter would be weighted heavier for the recommendation algorithm. Basically a `recommend me more of this, this is high quality content` action.

There is a general problem with a 5 or 10 star voting system, consider a [malicious] user who only gives a 1 or 10 star vote, thus ending up with more voice than one that votes in the range of 4-6 which would be what the majority of the content deserve. Therein lies another problem too, while the scale would imply 5.5 to be average [out of 1-10 with no 0 option], most people tend to consider 7-7.5 to be average instead, there's a very natural bias on the scale.

This idea isn't actually uncommon however, as platforms tend to work with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, and a `favorite` action of sorts. Some platforms tend to respect favorites in recommendations and some don't. I have found that YouTube doesn't care all that much about my... let alone favorites, it doesn't even care about my votes. TikTok however did this well, I had downloaded it one day and at the end of the day my feed consisted of neat programming tricks and lessons on color theory. Which kind of revealed something my own prejudice too, as I had expected TikTok to show me the worst content and it was the platform that respected my choice the most. That said these things change a lot so it wouldn't surprise me if the same test shows the opposite results a year from now on.

Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative

#85
I don't understand why we don't have a "Discuss Anything" universal app, operable on literally every tokenizable piece of human content, searchable by similarity in embedding space, and discoverable using titles, concepts, or vague impressions. Let people create threads and discuss everything, forever, with versioned references to the original content (like a website), as long as it's legal.

A browser extension called Dissenter briefly allowed this, got too popular too fast, had a data leak, and then they rolled it into a spyware browser. It also only had popularity among one extreme of politics.

Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative

#86

> 10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars) Does one really get anything meaningful out of saying this was a 6-star book vs a 7-star book? Personally I think 4 levels is sufficient. Either it's rather bad, not bad but not good, good but not great or it's great. Anything beyond that will have to be written in words.

Having worked on a rating system, I think 10 levels are useful (or 5 levels with half-stars). You can create better averages/recs using 10 levels, since ratings of 0 or 10, which are often spammy, can be down-weighed.

Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative

#87

> 10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars) Does one really get anything meaningful out of saying this was a 6-star book vs a 7-star book? Personally I think 4 levels is sufficient. Either it's rather bad, not bad but not good, good but not great or it's great. Anything beyond that will have to be written in words.

Goodfilms (goodfil.ms), rest in peace, had a great two-rating system with Quality and Rewatchability, because the latter turned out to be a really useful metric.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3082241

One of the main frustrations I have with Goodreads is how limited the API is nowadays, and how there appear to be no measures against brigading and other campaigns. One of the core issues with ratings services.

Personally I'm hoping Open Library by the Internet Archive grows more in popularity, given how most websites come and go:

https://openlibrary.org

Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative

#88
I read ~4 books a month via Audible, and tend not to find the time to add to Goodreads (maybe there's an auto connection I'm missing). I love the idea of systems like this (your design is beautiful) but there's no way I'm going to try to reimport all my ratings for 300+ books.

Is there anyway to sync with Audible? Even if it's a hacky chrome extension reading off the audible website?

Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative

#89

I don't understand why we don't have a "Discuss Anything" universal app, operable on literally every tokenizable piece of human content, searchable by similarity in embedding space, and discoverable using titles, concepts, or vague impressions. Let people create threads and discuss everything, forever, with versioned references to the original content (like a website), as long as it's legal. A browser extension calle…

I once built a prototype to a "Goodreads but for classical music", e. g. playing Chopin on a piano. I have thought about doing something like what you are talking about. My concerns are:

1. Moderation: you need to moderate content that people create and moderation is hard. If you don't, the service will be abused.

2. Order: Goodreads has "Librarians" to create some order in the chaos. I think that a meaningful search through "every tokenizable piece of human content" is very non-trivial and would require much work.

3. Monetization: ads are possible. Are they sustainable? I don't know enough of profitability to say something about that. The more specific the type of content is, the more options you have for monetization. For classical music scores my ideas were to make deals with sheet selling companies and make ads for (classical) concerts.

4. Market share: isn't Reddit pretty much a superset of this, minus a built-in rating system?

Re: Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative

#90
I came here to ask "how is this better than StoryGraph", but before I could hit send, it occurred to me:

This doesn't need to be better than StoryGraph. This just needs to be different, cater to different persons, needs. Maybe not even that. It can just be there next to StoryGraph.

My gripe with GoodReads is not that it didn't evolve, or that the UI is dated. My gripe is that it's owned by Amazon. So to the new kid on the block: Godspeed.

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