19 ms·

Goodreads Is Broken

468 points by prostoalex 7y ago

kqr2 7y ago
I mainly use goodreads as a sanity check on Amazon reviews.
monkeypizza 7y ago
A 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.
- karaterobot 7y ago
  I'm not a Goodreads user, but this is something you can definitely do with Librarything. For any user in the system with a public collection, you can find the intersection of your books and sort by the number of members who own them (as well many other things). The interface is a little wonky, but very powerful.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  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.
- ernesth 7y ago
  > for me and a friend, show me the rarest book we have read in common Got to your Friends page (https://www.goodreads.com/friend https://www.goodreads.com/friend), click on "Compare books" in front on the friend with which you want to compare. You will see the list of books you have in common sorted by inverse popularity.
jrochkind1 7y ago
That first graphic with failed title search results reminded me of a project I did working on a library catalog search using Solr. We tuned the relevancy ranking to work for exactly those sorts of searches, and put the things the OP was looking for on top (or at least under other books with exact same title). His examples look just like some of our QA searches for our relevancy ranking (in addition to standard tf/idf: boost adjacent words matching higher than non-adjacent or out of order; boost match of complete title higher than partial title; boost match before the subtitle colon more than after; boost title matches more than author more than other fields; etc). And this was ~5 years ago, and this was an underfunded university library IT department where the development team consisted basically of me, just using stock Solr for relevancy ranking (the tuning came in how we constructed and boosted our indexed fields). No fancy machine learning, just configuring fields and boosts deterministically. So, this could be done, if they cared about the site at all. [In fact, hey, i can give you actual examples from that project. Turns out there are a lot of books called "the confession" -- we didn't do anything fancy to try to guess which one more readers would be looking for. https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?q=the+confession https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?q=the+confession https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_field=all_fields&q=catch+and+kill https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sear... (hope I don't "slashdot effect" my former employer...)]
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  I build search engines for a living. While I appreciate the hacker spirit of your project with Solr, I also see this as a huge problem that leads to bad search experiences. Tuning boosts in Solr is not even close to a reasonable way to solve problems like this. Arguably not even for an underfunded library, but certainly not for a high web traffic consumer website. For one, you need disciplined acceptance criteria in the form of both qualitative standards (things a non-technical manager can look at and say yes or no) as well as various relevancy measurements like mean reciprocal rank and normalized discounted cumulative gain (via acquiring human annotated data if needed). When people only focus on qualitative feedback on top of boosts and hacks in an off the shelf tool, they usually end up with some weird witches’ brew of bizarre boosts and time-decay weighting that is extremely fragile and can’t be robustly changed or even understood without the qualitative performance going haywire. You need disciplined study of quantitative ranking metrics to know the drivers of performance, fall off as you move down the ranking position, and to make search index updates reproducible and make incremental improvement measurable. Meanwhile if you only focus on quantitative metrics, you might miss obvious red flags. The relevance score used for NDCG might be biased some way. You might surface highly relevant results to only one context or sense of the words in a query (like only showing fruit for “apple” and never tech gadgets). You need people who make the subjective appraisal of quality for users to be looped in. Here’s the point. When this is all missing, you will lose credibility with people making the decisions. They’ll hear some engineer babble about NDCG but then say the darn thing doesn’t work in the QA testing. Or they’ll say the qualitative results look OK and get angry when weird counter-examples pop up in the second or third results pages, which might have been measured with quantitative metrics. When this happens, executives and managers just want to punt. They want the “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” equivalent for search, and that’s how you end up with Confluence still only supporting exact title matching and having no ability for actual content relevancy search. In this sense, the little projects showing “look what us non-specialists could cook up by hacking some boosts in Solr!” do a lot of harm and should not be considered as the plucky success stories they are often painted to be.
Avamander 7y ago
They haven't built any new features for years. I just keep waiting for any meaningful privacy controls, I want to keep track of what I've read and what I thought about the book without everyone seeing that. Seeing a cover just doesn't do it any more if it's your 50th space Sci-Fi. Keeping track if I've read the entire series or not is another feature I really miss for books that trakt.tv provides for shows.
mmanfrin 7y ago
I 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 engagement (when you start a book, kindle will update your profile by default, it'll add your rating, mark the book as finished, all through the normal ux of the kindle). There is no way, in my opinion, to overcome the handicap of needing users to manually update what is automatically updated by the kindle. And I can't see 'linking' accounts working because there'd be no incentive for Amazon not to block access from a competitor. And, frankly, the kindle is the only platform that matters, it likely has 95%+ of the ereader market. Goodreads is bad because it is a monopoly, and that, frankly, sucks.
- aklemm 7y ago
  If you can’t bootstrap engagement with the Kindle integrations, maybe you could bootstrap community/engagement by integrating with public library catalogs and checkout records? Patrons could opt in to sharing their activity automatically and the library website could have update options as part of the checkout management process. Might be a nice little niche entrance into a customer base there.
  - crystaln 7y ago
    Library consumers don’t seem like the most lucrative customer base.
    - aklemm 7y ago
      My instinct and experience contradicts that.
  - cglong 7y ago
    Our local library's website is based on a platform called BiblioCommons that actually provides a lot of Goodreads' features (including some off the author's wishlist). I can organize all media in their catalogs into various bookshelves, privately or publicly, and add ratings and comments to each. Amazingly though, this system also doesn't integrate with checkout/-in records, but this seems like a small, easily-fixable feature gap.
xioxox 7y ago
Yes - 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/ 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 useless, as certain categories of books just get endless 5 star reviews from fans.
- b0rsuk 7y ago
  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.
  - jml7c5 7y ago
    The proximity is not based on similar style or content, but based on how many people like author B if they like author A.
  - javajosh 7y ago
    Lem and Dick shared a penchant for framing abstract, deeply profound questions about society in the form of concrete science fiction stories. This is not common. Space opera has always dominated the genre, but neither of them spent time writing "bildungsromans with lasers". So, I'd call the connection is quite valid, having read both of them widely.
- bobcostas55 7y ago
  I like literature-map, but I wish it contained more obscure names. The recs are good, but none of them are new to me...
dlphn___xyz 7y ago
‘medium is broken’
- slenk 7y ago
  Agree whole-heartedly. Used to be ok as an aggregator, but now with their repeated force attempts to make you sign in, I just avoid it.
  - dlphn___xyz 7y ago
    its not even that - the content on medium is largely spam
    - slenk 7y ago
      I haven't actually browsed medium in a while, so I didn't know how bad it was. I do know that most stories I am linked to on there are barely a single paragraph of meat
- jasonvorhe 7y ago
  Please just don't click on Medium posts then. It's that simple. Repeating the same opinions over and over isn't providing any value at all. People on HN usually read the comments to get additional insights into a certain topic or to share their opinions on the linked content. Opening the comments of a Medium post on HN is destined to feature at least one person who a) most likely didn't read the actual post and b) feels strongly enough about Medium to share their opinion on the platform the content was published on. I get it. You dislike Medium. Then create a blog somewhere and post about it there. Don't make HN even more annoying than it already is.
lejalv 7y ago
Use librarything. That is an actual project by book lovers, for book lovers.
jwr 7y ago
I 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.
- sixhobbits 7y ago
  Medium is awful and should be boycotted.
  - basch 7y ago
    It's a shame https://telegra.ph 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.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Sounds like what that site really needs is the same thing that almost every other major site has -- accounts.
    - hnarn 7y ago
      I'm not entirely sure about this, but isn't the edit ability of Telegraph based on what I believe is a cookie, it seems to be called "tph_uuid" and you can see it if you press F12 in Firefox, go to "Network", reload the page, find the single POST and you can see it in the request headers. Meaning, as long as you don't clear your cache you should be fine, and if you do, maybe you can back it up somewhere.
    - k_vi 7y ago
      You can use @telegraph on Telegram to save/edit on your account.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
Tharkun 7y ago
I use Goodreads the way I use IMDB. To keep track of what I've read and what I want to read. I can't say I'm missing any features in that department. Not everything has to fancy. Search generally works well, and they have a pretty handy way of grouping books in a series -- which has led me to discover some that I'd missed.
TillE 7y ago
It 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.
- r00fus 7y ago
  Could it be that there is a moneyed interest in keeping things undiscovered?
  - Finnucane 7y ago
    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.
- 1998 7y ago
  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.
bredren 7y ago
The entire reading ecosystem at Amazon is stagnant. The kindle e-readers have had release after release of subpar hardware with features introduced by now-killed competitors a decade ago. Read reviews of the brand new Oasis, a $300 product featuring a micro USB port. Amazon does not care about readers, probably because they drive so few dollars and the market is won. Reading does not drive prime subscriptions, and anyone with decent product management ability and influence is working on something more important.
- _jal 7y ago
  > The entire reading ecosystem at Amazon is stagnant They are actively malignant at this point. They are breaking embargoes now[1], and clearly won't be satisfied until they kill traditional publishing. I dropped Prime last year, and it was substantially easier than I thought it would be. Since then, they've just kept doing disgusting, grotesque crap[2]. At this point, I won't buy anything from them. The whole site reminds me of that cleaning-product smell at Walmart - any time I'm exposed to it, I just want to leave. That orangey-yellow color means a fight with an untrustworthy, grubby greedhead robot that consistently fucks up delivery and makes me deal with them some more. Who needs that? [1] https://boingboing.net/2019/09/05/amazon-breaks-embargo-on-marga.html https://boingboing.net/2019/09/05/amazon-breaks-embargo-on-m... [2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190807/20024842742/ring-is-teaching-cops-how-to-obtain-doorbell-camera-footage-without-warrant.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190807/20024842742/ring-...
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  At this point, Amazon is treating Kindle like Texas Instruments is treating their graphing calculators. Both have entrenched monopolies and have no need whatsoever to improve their product, which being able to sell them at ridiculous margin. It's laughable how much a new Kindle costs the consumer vs how much it actually costs to manufacture. If this were a non-monopolistic market then many competitors would be leaping into the fray with superior products at a fraction of the cost, but because Amazon isn't forced to grant them access to the Kindle store, it's not even possible to compete. This is a clear example of an area where consumers are suffering from a monopolistic grip over the market.
lazyant 7y ago
I don't know about the quality of Goodreads but I don't see a big problem with her two search examples. In the first one she searches for "the confession" and another "the confession" title is shown, together with other way more popular titles with "confession" in their titles. I'm guessing most people want fuzzy google-like searches but sure, exact matches of more obscure books can be given more relevance or search options can be given. The second example is even worse; she searches for "title" and complaints that a book with "title" and one with "title:subtitle" are ranked higher than her "title:some other subtitle"
- brown9-2 7y ago
  The problem with Goodreads’ search is definitely that it mostly only works with full titles. It’s aggravating to have to type in the full title of a popular book for it to have to be the top result; it seems like a really basic search implementation.
davidy123 7y ago
What sites aren't badly broken? I just spent 30 minutes wrestling with Booking.com. I have many issues with Amazon, and Google keep changing their services under my feet. Not to mention all the ways they want to shape the experience that I don't want, with their useless and biased suggestions being one that sticks out for me, as well as their user communities that I'm pretty sure exist to denigrate individual perspectives, since they aren't designed to let people organize and be critical, just a noisy crowd with grossly aggregated ratings. But these big companies don't care. They dominate in their areas. Their best, only reasonable option is to drag their feet on consumer oriented features as much as possible, to save money and spread out behind the scenes. If a competitor comes along with a unique feature, they can just add it and destroy them. It's impossible for the consumer and innovation. As we go to very high levels of integration, where our activities, connections and other personal data are involved in every decision, the only solution is to separate data and services, so I can access the data I want, process it in my own system that for any activity can be more comprehensive than they can reasonably provide — unless they all, either via backend "cooperation" or duplication have an incredibly privacy invading profile of me — and finally process it with their service. This is what Solid proposes. It's a long-term, multi perspective, standards based project, and I don't know any reasonable alternative.
- dyarosla 7y ago
  they can just add it and destroy them Or buy them out and sunset them
- macleginn 7y ago
  Booking.com is exponentially better than Airbnb though.
_pmf_ 7y ago
Cannot confirm. Getting pretty good recommendations for Japanese crime novels, which is probably reasonably niche.
- kpozin 7y ago
  Keigo Higashino's novels, or something else?
  - _pmf_ 7y ago
    Exactly. (Somehow, these have an extremely calming/relaxing kind of suspension.)
wyck 7y ago
I 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.
ztarven 7y ago
My wife and I experienced the same disappointments on goodreads, and many of the same flaws exist in other media rating/cataloging sites. We're attempting to solve this problem by creating a centralized collaborative media database that we always wished existed. Without any marketing yet, https://rate.house https://rate.house currently only has ~100 users, but we'd love to hear HN's input and know if we're heading in the right direction.
- bscphil 7y ago
  I think you've got a really nice design going on already, and basic features seem to work without JS, so that's nice. I also like that you haven't polluted it with ads (I'm far more likely to donate to sites that don't have ads). Two thoughts: 1. I think I would find a 5 star rating system too constraining. My opinions in most areas have more gradations than just 0-5. 0-100 would be entirely too many. I think IMDB's 10 point scale is really the main reason why I've stuck with that for movies. On the other hand I prefer to only thumbs up / thumbs down books, so I'm really not sure you can do anything about this in a way that would make everyone happy. 2. I think there's either a bug with your weighted average or else you're ranking using something like "we're 90% confident the true rating is at least x". But this confidence level seems entirely too high for the number of users you have on your site. For example Avengers: Endgame appears on #13 on this page: https://rate.house/chart/movie https://rate.house/chart/movie despite the fact that it has a rating of only 3.64. I would probably lower the confidence required for now, and if you 10x or 100x your users you can raise it again. 3. Would be nice to know a bit more about what features it has on the home page before signing up. Can I import my ratings from other sites? Can I export my data in some usable format like CSV? Can the information database the users create for media entries be downloaded by users? (Even IMDB offers this.) Can I get recommendations from the site once I've rated enough items? Can I get music recommendations based on my movie ratings? (That would be cool.)
paxys 7y ago
Goodreads has possibly the worst search algorithm in existence today. Typing a character or two will sometimes show the book I am looking for right on top, and then typing a few more reduces the relevance of the results and hides it. I don't get it.
lordgrenville 7y ago
The article doesn't mention my biggest pet peeve about Goodreads: it makes you type reviews in HTML. It's 2019, how hard is a WYSIWYG editor? Or at least accept Markdown! One more complex feature I'd love from an ideal-world Goodreads is ephemeral book clubs. Find people who want to read this specific book, read it together with them, and then disband.
- ryacko 7y ago
  Ephemeral clubs happens on reddit, in many subreddits, involving many types of media.
  - lordgrenville 7y ago
    I mean yeah you can do it on GR with a group as well, but I'm talking about a built-in book club feature with a timetable, chat, status updates, etc. Say I'm looking to read War and Peace this winter. I find a bunch of other like-minded people, and we set a timetable, read it together, then disband.
    - ryacko 7y ago
      A timetable? On reddit the thread starter mentions when the next discussion is going to take place. The timetable reduces friction, but it doesn’t provide that much additional value.
      - lordgrenville 7y ago
        Fair point. But I looked on Reddit and couldn't find the kind of thing I'm talking about (r/bookclub chooses one book a month by vote, and r/ReadingGroup seems like an overwhelming sea of random posts). I think also the fact that it contains clubs for many different media is a bit of a handicap, since the book content gets swamped, and there's a searchability problem. (Reddit's UI isn't great at the best of times, anyway.) GR has a built-in audience of a wide range of readers, so they're better positioned to do this kind of thing.
scoobyyabbadoo 7y ago
Unless Goodreads is returning 50x errors then it is not "broken", what a misleading title.
philsnow 7y ago
> I am looking for Ronan Farrow’s ‘Catch and Kill.’ It appears, inexplicably, after two books not titled ‘Catch and Kill.’ This bothers me to no end in Google maps search results. It seems like every time I'm searching for some chain> the first two results are for stores that are hundreds of miles away and in towns that I've never visited (which Google should also know!). The one that's a couple miles away / the one that I've been to (and mapped to) a dozen times? Third or fourth on the list. Insanity.
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  In Google Maps, I go “Home” every second trip. Yet, when I type “Home” (or whatever the French equivalent is), the only suggestions I get are “Home depot” and “Homeware shops”. I went as far as setting a “place” labelled “fghjk”. I still get other results, despite using “Fghjk” every second trip!!! Also visible in Youtube. There’s a French guy who explained what it was to be raped by a woman, and I often refer people to it (and half a dozen other videos). When I search for his video’s title and his channel name, I systematically get 2 other results first, generally videos about how many women get raped, from the Huffington Post, often the ones with fewer views. It really feels like Google is trying hard to dodge the correct answer.
  - Noumenon72 7y ago
    Try Google voice search; I just say "OK Google -- navigate to home".
    - Marsymars 7y ago
      I don't want my phone listening for key phrases. This was a solved problem years ago. Windows Phone let you pin nav directions to any address you wanted directly on your home screen.
      - okasaki 7y ago
        They probably copied it from Google? https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291823?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291823?co=GENIE.Plat...
ga-vu 7y ago
I disagree with everything written in that article. Goodreads has been the best books discovery site for years.
qrv3w 7y ago
> The recommendations suck, the lists suck — it’s like, 100 lists telling me to read The Handmaid’s Tale and Harry Potter. I had the same experience with GR and also Amazon.com which constantly peddles the vampire romance books when I am looking for recommendations for horror/fantasy. Both Amazon and GR strategy make sense because best-selling books sell the best, so they should recommend them to increase profits. However, it does suck being a reader looking for new book suggestions. I've spent a good deal of time making my own book recommendation algorithm which has been working well for me for the last two years. [1] Through it I've discovered old authors I didn't know (Ted Chiang, Clive Barker) and new authors which I wouldn't have noticed (Scott Hawkins, China Mieville). Of course, it always helps to get recommendations from friends with similar tastes, too. :) [1]: https://nowwhatdoiread.com https://nowwhatdoiread.com
- llimllib 7y ago
  Suggestion: enable a website preview! https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-unfurling-but-were-afraid-to-ask-or-how-to-make-your-e64b4bb9254 https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/everything-you-ever-... I shared your link in a chat, but it doesn't show itself off: https://i.imgur.com/r5hTqwG.png https://i.imgur.com/r5hTqwG.png (Got good suggestions from the first book I put in, thanks!)
- archi42 7y ago
  Neat. Just a small note: On the "Best Of" page, the year selection is too narrow for my system (Chrome on Windows 10, WQHD). The two boxes only contains "20 " (twenty and some empty space); clicking/hovering one reveals those "up/down numerical selector arrows". You probably want to make them a little bit wider?
  - qrv3w 7y ago
    Yep, thanks!
- inapis 7y ago
  I face this problem with Netflix, Spotify and Youtube too. These algorithmic recommendations just need one improper dataset to throw everything out of the window. For weeks, my spotify is overloaded with instrumental songs. Youtube keeps on repeating the same stuff. Netflix believes that the only thing I watch is science fiction. I'm dying for human curation.
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/JCotP http://archive.is/JCotP
jonahbenton 7y ago
The artistry of writing about how Goodreads is broken, on Medium, which is completely broken. Well done, well done.
- spraak 7y ago
  Yeah, I can't even read the article because Medium says I've used up my free quota already
gamesbrainiac 7y ago
The only major complaint that I have against GR is that it is quite slow. I don't really care much for recommendations right now, because the user-created lists will often get you what you want faster. Furthermore, I think GR does a good job of classifying the books, or rather letting their readers classify their books for them. All in all, I think the site should be more responsive, but there are tonnes of places to have long discussions on books, genres, plots and other things over at reddit.
ryeguy_24 7y ago
We set out to build a better Goodreads a while back called Helloreads (my wife thinks we didn’t differentiate our name enough but whatever). It never seemed to get traction probably due to the monopoly and network effect of Goodreads. We thought and still do that Goodreads user interface is terrible, the site is slow, the reviews are too volatile. The one thing that we truly could not compete with them on is the data. The book data problem is insanely hard. New books come out and there is not authoritative database of book metadata. We had a blast building (and the iOS app) it but have put the development on hold. [0] https://www.helloreads.com https://www.helloreads.com [1] My books: https://www.helloreads.com/ryanhittner https://www.helloreads.com/ryanhittner
- justanotherhn 7y ago
  Interesting, just out of curiosity - does the website still work well? I just signed up with a dummy account and the images for the books are not showing up. I belive this might have something to do with AWS. (It might also be my browser settings)
  - ryeguy_24 7y ago
    It should work. Just tried and looks to work on my end. https://imgur.com/a/wU69opo https://imgur.com/a/wU69opo Could be browser settings but feel feee to shoot us a message. Support [at] helloreads.com
    - justanotherhn 7y ago
      It seems my VPN may be the culprit.
- kzrdude 7y ago
  I guess it's a social network, but since this is hacker news — I'd love if your front page would not be just a login screen. The front page should say something about specific books, something that draws you in! Something from the site itself. And put that book recommendations button higher up (it's not visible on first view for me). :-) Something that makes you begin browsing and using the site to get recommendations. Then in standard style, somewhere down the line you'll hit a snag where you have to register to use certain features, like commenting, liking, etc.
convivialdingo 7y ago
I just want to be able to find books with keywords. I often forget the title of books, but I can rattle off a summary. Google books has gotten worse also - to the point of useless unless you have a quote or are looking for common titles.
datguacdoh 7y ago
Barnes and Noble launched Browsery a little while back, that helped me find a litany of new recommendations. I now use that service in tandem with Goodreads, but GR is just my tracking list at this point since it integrates with my Kindle and migrating to something else would be a pain.
frabbit 7y ago
https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ is always better for finding books that I know part of the title (or sometimes even just the full title). I would like to be able to weight opinions (both positively and negatively) of individuals, and also based on criteria (e.g. "completely ignore the opinions of anyone who gave a low rating to The Good Soldier Svejk" and also "weight by 100 the opinions of anyone that rates The Silver Chair as the best of the Narnia stories".
- the_biot 7y ago
  Indeed a mention of librarything is missing from this article. Ironically I joined Goodreads after fleeing librarything as it was so stagnant.
imgabe 7y ago
Well, boo. Sounds like a terrible redesign is incoming for Goodreads. Personally, I like that it's a list-making app with minimal social aspects. Social networks are terrible. I don't want to "dish about the latest author gossip". I don't want algorithmic recommendations that assume I'll want to read another book that has 90% of the same keywords as the book I just read. Goodreads works fine for me.
B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
(Off-topic, flameable material) - Is there a female majority in goodreads users/commenters? - Is book/novel reading now a predominantly female activity?
mhb 7y ago
On a related note - what happened to the Netflix recommendation engine after they awarded the $1M prize for a 10% improvement to their already pretty good recommender? Did they just throw the whole thing out the window?
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  I cannot believe they have any kind of recommendation engine? I just see offered more seasons the same shows I watched, or shows with similar words in the title regardless of topic. I cannot believe they have even 10% success rate recommending movies, much less improved it by that much.
  - mhb 7y ago
    I guess this is ancient history (2009), but you can read about it at: https://www.netflixprize.com/ https://www.netflixprize.com/
- roryokane 7y ago
  I can’t remember all the details, but from what I remember when I looked this up a few years ago, yes, Netflix did throw the whole thing out the window. They said that the winning algorithm would require more processing power to run, or expensive code changes or something, and so they decided their current engine was good enough. Then Netflix switched strategies away from highly-personalized recommendations to a dumber algorithm that is more likely to recommend more popular movies, which ends up retaining subscribers better. The reasoning was that users were more likely to cancel their subscription if they had one obviously bad recommendation than if they had multiple so-so recommendations. So rather than recommending, for example, 80% great movies and 20% bad ones, Netflix wants to recommend 5% great movies and 95% okay ones.
rdl 7y ago
Yeah, 100% agree. I love the idea of the service and would happily pay for something 50% as good today which is improving vs stagnating.
caiocaiocaio 7y ago
1) I like about 75% of the recommendations I get, which is pretty good compared to other recommendation sites I've used. 2) I love the fact that Goodreads has an old-fashioned feeling. Modernizing it would mean a front-end JS framework - making it buggy and obnoxiously slow to use on my old laptop or phone - and a lot of aesthetic features that reduce usability. Oh, and probably light-grey text on a slightly-lighter-grey background, making it a strain on my eyes. Modern internet is meant to look good, pop on a resume, and have little or no functionality or substance. I genuinely hope the people at Goodreads ignore this article.
- gagege 7y ago
  I agree with you about the old-fashioned-ness. Disagree about the recommendations.
ernesth 7y ago
I have been using Goodreads for years. I remember when Amazon turned off API access to goodreads and how all books lost their covers and most of their data. And the shocking turn of event of Amazon taking control of Goodreads. And I am pretty happy that it hasn't evolved that much from the website it used to be. Concerning custom shelves exclusive from read/want-to-read etc. I do have created such shelves. Not for "Did not finish" list but to have 2 kinds of want to read: books on my wishlist and books I own but have not yet read. Features goodreads has that most competitors lack: I can have two different editions of the same book. I can store more than one date I read a book. I can export most of my data in csv.
Insanity 7y ago
from the article: "What Goodreads is good for is keeping your own list of books you want to read or have read this year. It’s a list-making app." That's pretty much all I want from it, so it works great for me. The recommendations are often (but not always) good enough. I usually don't read based on recommendations from GR but occassionaly something good does come out. Websites don't need to keep adding features, it's fine to look the same 12 years down the road. I think this website (HN) is a pretty good example of that.
smcl 7y ago
I had no idea it was supposed to be a social network, I'm just using it to keep track of some books I want to read
hammock 7y ago
My list of books I want to read is way too big that I'll never catch up with it. So my problem is not finding new recommendations, it's deciding which book from the list I want to read next. That's what attracted me to Goodreads, because I can download a cab of the list and sort by different fields, etc. Anyone else like me, what solutions do you use?
bobcostas55 7y ago
If you're looking for recs, check out librarything. In general it's worse than goodreads on almost all dimensions, but their recommendations algorithms are great. You can import your goodreads list, so it's no big ordeal.
- abeyer 7y ago
  I actually always thought librarything was strictly better than good reads as a list building/management tool. It has suffered from a similar lack of improvements recently, and I was never impressed with their "social" features, but personally wouldn't agree on the "all dimensions" part.
officemonkey 7y ago
The recommendation system is broken, however the social networking features can surmount it. For example, my Goodreads "friends" are people who like the books I like. There's no social obligation. FFS, I unfriended my sister. My high-school friend who only reads YA fiction: he was unfriended years ago. My favorite goodreads friends are a half-dozen people I've never even met, but I agree with their reviews. When they give a book 5 stars, I check it out. That's the key to Goodreads. If Amazon can't figure out how to make better recommendations, they should look long and hard at how the social graph beats the star-ratings.
- romack77 7y ago
  Agreed. This is how I use Goodreads for recommendations as well. There's the "Compare Books" tool to get a quick sense of whether someone reads what you read. And then reading a couple of their reviews is usually enough to get a sense of whether their recs will agree with you. It's more labor intensive than a standard recommendation system, but the results are better. Since books are a large time commitment, and people are passionate about them, a lot of people are willing to put uncommon effort into finding good ones.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
myth_drannon 7y ago
When they had recommendations based on bookshelves it was amazing since I have a bunch of very niche topic bookshelves. Once they removed it and left only recommendations based on genres it is useless now. Kindle book recommendation based on similar books are a bit better, but that's only for kindle books
roadbeats 7y ago
GoodReads and Craigslist are similar. They serve their original functions sufficiently and that's all. Personally, I like GoodReads a lot, it's the only social site I use in fact.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
...compared to what?
wenning 7y ago
douban.com is much better than it.
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  Seems like English language isn’t supported?
track_me_now 7y ago
Anyone else remember CD Now? Human-curated lists based on "if you like this you might like". Because they were actual people who loved and knew music they worked. Amazon wrecked that too.
capedape 7y ago
This author and book are in almost every quote category last time I checked “ Criss Jami, Killosophy.” Often multiple times in the same category. He has some ok quotes, but rarely are they the same caliber of others, especially not in every category. Seems the quote area has been gamed too. I contacted goodreads and they didn’t seem to care.
parliament32 7y ago
Like the article suggests, I've been using Goodreads strictly as a list-keeping app -- the recommendations are pretty useless. The star ratings, however, are somewhat useful if you know how to read them.

468 points by prostoalex 7y ago

kqr2 7y ago

I mainly use goodreads as a sanity check on Amazon reviews.

A 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.

karaterobot 7y ago
I'm not a Goodreads user, but this is something you can definitely do with Librarything. For any user in the system with a public collection, you can find the intersection of your books and sort by the number of members who own them (as well many other things). The interface is a little wonky, but very powerful.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
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.
ernesth 7y ago
> for me and a friend, show me the rarest book we have read in common Got to your Friends page (https://www.goodreads.com/friend https://www.goodreads.com/friend), click on "Compare books" in front on the friend with which you want to compare. You will see the list of books you have in common sorted by inverse popularity.

jrochkind1 7y ago

That first graphic with failed title search results reminded me of a project I did working on a library catalog search using Solr. We tuned the relevancy ranking to work for exactly those sorts of searches, and put the things the OP was looking for on top (or at least under other books with exact same title). His examples look just like some of our QA searches for our relevancy ranking (in addition to standard tf/idf: boost adjacent words matching higher than non-adjacent or out of order; boost match of complete title higher than partial title; boost match before the subtitle colon more than after; boost title matches more than author more than other fields; etc). And this was ~5 years ago, and this was an underfunded university library IT department where the development team consisted basically of me, just using stock Solr for relevancy ranking (the tuning came in how we constructed and boosted our indexed fields). No fancy machine learning, just configuring fields and boosts deterministically. So, this could be done, if they cared about the site at all. [In fact, hey, i can give you actual examples from that project. Turns out there are a lot of books called "the confession" -- we didn't do anything fancy to try to guess which one more readers would be looking for. https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?q=the+confession https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?q=the+confession https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_field=all_fields&q=catch+and+kill https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sear... (hope I don't "slashdot effect" my former employer...)]

mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I build search engines for a living. While I appreciate the hacker spirit of your project with Solr, I also see this as a huge problem that leads to bad search experiences. Tuning boosts in Solr is not even close to a reasonable way to solve problems like this. Arguably not even for an underfunded library, but certainly not for a high web traffic consumer website. For one, you need disciplined acceptance criteria in the form of both qualitative standards (things a non-technical manager can look at and say yes or no) as well as various relevancy measurements like mean reciprocal rank and normalized discounted cumulative gain (via acquiring human annotated data if needed). When people only focus on qualitative feedback on top of boosts and hacks in an off the shelf tool, they usually end up with some weird witches’ brew of bizarre boosts and time-decay weighting that is extremely fragile and can’t be robustly changed or even understood without the qualitative performance going haywire. You need disciplined study of quantitative ranking metrics to know the drivers of performance, fall off as you move down the ranking position, and to make search index updates reproducible and make incremental improvement measurable. Meanwhile if you only focus on quantitative metrics, you might miss obvious red flags. The relevance score used for NDCG might be biased some way. You might surface highly relevant results to only one context or sense of the words in a query (like only showing fruit for “apple” and never tech gadgets). You need people who make the subjective appraisal of quality for users to be looped in. Here’s the point. When this is all missing, you will lose credibility with people making the decisions. They’ll hear some engineer babble about NDCG but then say the darn thing doesn’t work in the QA testing. Or they’ll say the qualitative results look OK and get angry when weird counter-examples pop up in the second or third results pages, which might have been measured with quantitative metrics. When this happens, executives and managers just want to punt. They want the “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” equivalent for search, and that’s how you end up with Confluence still only supporting exact title matching and having no ability for actual content relevancy search. In this sense, the little projects showing “look what us non-specialists could cook up by hacking some boosts in Solr!” do a lot of harm and should not be considered as the plucky success stories they are often painted to be.

Avamander 7y ago

They haven't built any new features for years. I just keep waiting for any meaningful privacy controls, I want to keep track of what I've read and what I thought about the book without everyone seeing that. Seeing a cover just doesn't do it any more if it's your 50th space Sci-Fi. Keeping track if I've read the entire series or not is another feature I really miss for books that trakt.tv provides for shows.

mmanfrin 7y ago

I 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 engagement (when you start a book, kindle will update your profile by default, it'll add your rating, mark the book as finished, all through the normal ux of the kindle). There is no way, in my opinion, to overcome the handicap of needing users to manually update what is automatically updated by the kindle. And I can't see 'linking' accounts working because there'd be no incentive for Amazon not to block access from a competitor. And, frankly, the kindle is the only platform that matters, it likely has 95%+ of the ereader market. Goodreads is bad because it is a monopoly, and that, frankly, sucks.

aklemm 7y ago
If you can’t bootstrap engagement with the Kindle integrations, maybe you could bootstrap community/engagement by integrating with public library catalogs and checkout records? Patrons could opt in to sharing their activity automatically and the library website could have update options as part of the checkout management process. Might be a nice little niche entrance into a customer base there.
- crystaln 7y ago
  Library consumers don’t seem like the most lucrative customer base.
  - aklemm 7y ago
    My instinct and experience contradicts that.
- cglong 7y ago
  Our local library's website is based on a platform called BiblioCommons that actually provides a lot of Goodreads' features (including some off the author's wishlist). I can organize all media in their catalogs into various bookshelves, privately or publicly, and add ratings and comments to each. Amazingly though, this system also doesn't integrate with checkout/-in records, but this seems like a small, easily-fixable feature gap.

xioxox 7y ago

Yes - 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/ 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 useless, as certain categories of books just get endless 5 star reviews from fans.

b0rsuk 7y ago
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.
- jml7c5 7y ago
  The proximity is not based on similar style or content, but based on how many people like author B if they like author A.
- javajosh 7y ago
  Lem and Dick shared a penchant for framing abstract, deeply profound questions about society in the form of concrete science fiction stories. This is not common. Space opera has always dominated the genre, but neither of them spent time writing "bildungsromans with lasers". So, I'd call the connection is quite valid, having read both of them widely.
bobcostas55 7y ago
I like literature-map, but I wish it contained more obscure names. The recs are good, but none of them are new to me...

dlphn___xyz 7y ago

‘medium is broken’

slenk 7y ago
Agree whole-heartedly. Used to be ok as an aggregator, but now with their repeated force attempts to make you sign in, I just avoid it.
- dlphn___xyz 7y ago
  its not even that - the content on medium is largely spam
  - slenk 7y ago
    I haven't actually browsed medium in a while, so I didn't know how bad it was. I do know that most stories I am linked to on there are barely a single paragraph of meat
jasonvorhe 7y ago
Please just don't click on Medium posts then. It's that simple. Repeating the same opinions over and over isn't providing any value at all. People on HN usually read the comments to get additional insights into a certain topic or to share their opinions on the linked content. Opening the comments of a Medium post on HN is destined to feature at least one person who a) most likely didn't read the actual post and b) feels strongly enough about Medium to share their opinion on the platform the content was published on. I get it. You dislike Medium. Then create a blog somewhere and post about it there. Don't make HN even more annoying than it already is.

lejalv 7y ago

Use librarything. That is an actual project by book lovers, for book lovers.

jwr 7y ago

I 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.

sixhobbits 7y ago
Medium is awful and should be boycotted.
- basch 7y ago
  It's a shame https://telegra.ph 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.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Sounds like what that site really needs is the same thing that almost every other major site has -- accounts.
  - hnarn 7y ago
    I'm not entirely sure about this, but isn't the edit ability of Telegraph based on what I believe is a cookie, it seems to be called "tph_uuid" and you can see it if you press F12 in Firefox, go to "Network", reload the page, find the single POST and you can see it in the request headers. Meaning, as long as you don't clear your cache you should be fine, and if you do, maybe you can back it up somewhere.
  - k_vi 7y ago
    You can use @telegraph on Telegram to save/edit on your account.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]

Tharkun 7y ago

I use Goodreads the way I use IMDB. To keep track of what I've read and what I want to read. I can't say I'm missing any features in that department. Not everything has to fancy. Search generally works well, and they have a pretty handy way of grouping books in a series -- which has led me to discover some that I'd missed.

TillE 7y ago

It 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.

r00fus 7y ago
Could it be that there is a moneyed interest in keeping things undiscovered?
- Finnucane 7y ago
  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.
1998 7y ago
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.

bredren 7y ago

The entire reading ecosystem at Amazon is stagnant. The kindle e-readers have had release after release of subpar hardware with features introduced by now-killed competitors a decade ago. Read reviews of the brand new Oasis, a $300 product featuring a micro USB port. Amazon does not care about readers, probably because they drive so few dollars and the market is won. Reading does not drive prime subscriptions, and anyone with decent product management ability and influence is working on something more important.

_jal 7y ago
> The entire reading ecosystem at Amazon is stagnant They are actively malignant at this point. They are breaking embargoes now[1], and clearly won't be satisfied until they kill traditional publishing. I dropped Prime last year, and it was substantially easier than I thought it would be. Since then, they've just kept doing disgusting, grotesque crap[2]. At this point, I won't buy anything from them. The whole site reminds me of that cleaning-product smell at Walmart - any time I'm exposed to it, I just want to leave. That orangey-yellow color means a fight with an untrustworthy, grubby greedhead robot that consistently fucks up delivery and makes me deal with them some more. Who needs that? [1] https://boingboing.net/2019/09/05/amazon-breaks-embargo-on-marga.html https://boingboing.net/2019/09/05/amazon-breaks-embargo-on-m... [2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190807/20024842742/ring-is-teaching-cops-how-to-obtain-doorbell-camera-footage-without-warrant.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190807/20024842742/ring-...
CydeWeys 7y ago
At this point, Amazon is treating Kindle like Texas Instruments is treating their graphing calculators. Both have entrenched monopolies and have no need whatsoever to improve their product, which being able to sell them at ridiculous margin. It's laughable how much a new Kindle costs the consumer vs how much it actually costs to manufacture. If this were a non-monopolistic market then many competitors would be leaping into the fray with superior products at a fraction of the cost, but because Amazon isn't forced to grant them access to the Kindle store, it's not even possible to compete. This is a clear example of an area where consumers are suffering from a monopolistic grip over the market.

lazyant 7y ago

I don't know about the quality of Goodreads but I don't see a big problem with her two search examples. In the first one she searches for "the confession" and another "the confession" title is shown, together with other way more popular titles with "confession" in their titles. I'm guessing most people want fuzzy google-like searches but sure, exact matches of more obscure books can be given more relevance or search options can be given. The second example is even worse; she searches for "title" and complaints that a book with "title" and one with "title:subtitle" are ranked higher than her "title:some other subtitle"

brown9-2 7y ago
The problem with Goodreads’ search is definitely that it mostly only works with full titles. It’s aggravating to have to type in the full title of a popular book for it to have to be the top result; it seems like a really basic search implementation.

davidy123 7y ago

What sites aren't badly broken? I just spent 30 minutes wrestling with Booking.com. I have many issues with Amazon, and Google keep changing their services under my feet. Not to mention all the ways they want to shape the experience that I don't want, with their useless and biased suggestions being one that sticks out for me, as well as their user communities that I'm pretty sure exist to denigrate individual perspectives, since they aren't designed to let people organize and be critical, just a noisy crowd with grossly aggregated ratings. But these big companies don't care. They dominate in their areas. Their best, only reasonable option is to drag their feet on consumer oriented features as much as possible, to save money and spread out behind the scenes. If a competitor comes along with a unique feature, they can just add it and destroy them. It's impossible for the consumer and innovation. As we go to very high levels of integration, where our activities, connections and other personal data are involved in every decision, the only solution is to separate data and services, so I can access the data I want, process it in my own system that for any activity can be more comprehensive than they can reasonably provide — unless they all, either via backend "cooperation" or duplication have an incredibly privacy invading profile of me — and finally process it with their service. This is what Solid proposes. It's a long-term, multi perspective, standards based project, and I don't know any reasonable alternative.

dyarosla 7y ago
they can just add it and destroy them Or buy them out and sunset them
macleginn 7y ago
Booking.com is exponentially better than Airbnb though.

_pmf_ 7y ago

Cannot confirm. Getting pretty good recommendations for Japanese crime novels, which is probably reasonably niche.

kpozin 7y ago
Keigo Higashino's novels, or something else?
- _pmf_ 7y ago
  Exactly. (Somehow, these have an extremely calming/relaxing kind of suspension.)

wyck 7y ago

I 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.

ztarven 7y ago

My wife and I experienced the same disappointments on goodreads, and many of the same flaws exist in other media rating/cataloging sites. We're attempting to solve this problem by creating a centralized collaborative media database that we always wished existed. Without any marketing yet, https://rate.house https://rate.house currently only has ~100 users, but we'd love to hear HN's input and know if we're heading in the right direction.

bscphil 7y ago
I think you've got a really nice design going on already, and basic features seem to work without JS, so that's nice. I also like that you haven't polluted it with ads (I'm far more likely to donate to sites that don't have ads). Two thoughts: 1. I think I would find a 5 star rating system too constraining. My opinions in most areas have more gradations than just 0-5. 0-100 would be entirely too many. I think IMDB's 10 point scale is really the main reason why I've stuck with that for movies. On the other hand I prefer to only thumbs up / thumbs down books, so I'm really not sure you can do anything about this in a way that would make everyone happy. 2. I think there's either a bug with your weighted average or else you're ranking using something like "we're 90% confident the true rating is at least x". But this confidence level seems entirely too high for the number of users you have on your site. For example Avengers: Endgame appears on #13 on this page: https://rate.house/chart/movie https://rate.house/chart/movie despite the fact that it has a rating of only 3.64. I would probably lower the confidence required for now, and if you 10x or 100x your users you can raise it again. 3. Would be nice to know a bit more about what features it has on the home page before signing up. Can I import my ratings from other sites? Can I export my data in some usable format like CSV? Can the information database the users create for media entries be downloaded by users? (Even IMDB offers this.) Can I get recommendations from the site once I've rated enough items? Can I get music recommendations based on my movie ratings? (That would be cool.)

paxys 7y ago

Goodreads has possibly the worst search algorithm in existence today. Typing a character or two will sometimes show the book I am looking for right on top, and then typing a few more reduces the relevance of the results and hides it. I don't get it.

lordgrenville 7y ago

The article doesn't mention my biggest pet peeve about Goodreads: it makes you type reviews in HTML. It's 2019, how hard is a WYSIWYG editor? Or at least accept Markdown! One more complex feature I'd love from an ideal-world Goodreads is ephemeral book clubs. Find people who want to read this specific book, read it together with them, and then disband.

ryacko 7y ago
Ephemeral clubs happens on reddit, in many subreddits, involving many types of media.
- lordgrenville 7y ago
  I mean yeah you can do it on GR with a group as well, but I'm talking about a built-in book club feature with a timetable, chat, status updates, etc. Say I'm looking to read War and Peace this winter. I find a bunch of other like-minded people, and we set a timetable, read it together, then disband.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    A timetable? On reddit the thread starter mentions when the next discussion is going to take place. The timetable reduces friction, but it doesn’t provide that much additional value.
    - lordgrenville 7y ago
      Fair point. But I looked on Reddit and couldn't find the kind of thing I'm talking about (r/bookclub chooses one book a month by vote, and r/ReadingGroup seems like an overwhelming sea of random posts). I think also the fact that it contains clubs for many different media is a bit of a handicap, since the book content gets swamped, and there's a searchability problem. (Reddit's UI isn't great at the best of times, anyway.) GR has a built-in audience of a wide range of readers, so they're better positioned to do this kind of thing.

scoobyyabbadoo 7y ago

Unless Goodreads is returning 50x errors then it is not "broken", what a misleading title.

philsnow 7y ago

> I am looking for Ronan Farrow’s ‘Catch and Kill.’ It appears, inexplicably, after two books not titled ‘Catch and Kill.’ This bothers me to no end in Google maps search results. It seems like every time I'm searching for some chain> the first two results are for stores that are hundreds of miles away and in towns that I've never visited (which Google should also know!). The one that's a couple miles away / the one that I've been to (and mapped to) a dozen times? Third or fourth on the list. Insanity.

alexis_fr 7y ago
In Google Maps, I go “Home” every second trip. Yet, when I type “Home” (or whatever the French equivalent is), the only suggestions I get are “Home depot” and “Homeware shops”. I went as far as setting a “place” labelled “fghjk”. I still get other results, despite using “Fghjk” every second trip!!! Also visible in Youtube. There’s a French guy who explained what it was to be raped by a woman, and I often refer people to it (and half a dozen other videos). When I search for his video’s title and his channel name, I systematically get 2 other results first, generally videos about how many women get raped, from the Huffington Post, often the ones with fewer views. It really feels like Google is trying hard to dodge the correct answer.
- Noumenon72 7y ago
  Try Google voice search; I just say "OK Google -- navigate to home".
  - Marsymars 7y ago
    I don't want my phone listening for key phrases. This was a solved problem years ago. Windows Phone let you pin nav directions to any address you wanted directly on your home screen.
    - okasaki 7y ago
      They probably copied it from Google? https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291823?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291823?co=GENIE.Plat...

ga-vu 7y ago

I disagree with everything written in that article. Goodreads has been the best books discovery site for years.

qrv3w 7y ago

> The recommendations suck, the lists suck — it’s like, 100 lists telling me to read The Handmaid’s Tale and Harry Potter. I had the same experience with GR and also Amazon.com which constantly peddles the vampire romance books when I am looking for recommendations for horror/fantasy. Both Amazon and GR strategy make sense because best-selling books sell the best, so they should recommend them to increase profits. However, it does suck being a reader looking for new book suggestions. I've spent a good deal of time making my own book recommendation algorithm which has been working well for me for the last two years. [1] Through it I've discovered old authors I didn't know (Ted Chiang, Clive Barker) and new authors which I wouldn't have noticed (Scott Hawkins, China Mieville). Of course, it always helps to get recommendations from friends with similar tastes, too. :) [1]: https://nowwhatdoiread.com https://nowwhatdoiread.com

llimllib 7y ago
Suggestion: enable a website preview! https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-unfurling-but-were-afraid-to-ask-or-how-to-make-your-e64b4bb9254 https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/everything-you-ever-... I shared your link in a chat, but it doesn't show itself off: https://i.imgur.com/r5hTqwG.png https://i.imgur.com/r5hTqwG.png (Got good suggestions from the first book I put in, thanks!)
archi42 7y ago
Neat. Just a small note: On the "Best Of" page, the year selection is too narrow for my system (Chrome on Windows 10, WQHD). The two boxes only contains "20 " (twenty and some empty space); clicking/hovering one reveals those "up/down numerical selector arrows". You probably want to make them a little bit wider?
- qrv3w 7y ago
  Yep, thanks!
inapis 7y ago
I face this problem with Netflix, Spotify and Youtube too. These algorithmic recommendations just need one improper dataset to throw everything out of the window. For weeks, my spotify is overloaded with instrumental songs. Youtube keeps on repeating the same stuff. Netflix believes that the only thing I watch is science fiction. I'm dying for human curation.

neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/JCotP http://archive.is/JCotP

jonahbenton 7y ago

The artistry of writing about how Goodreads is broken, on Medium, which is completely broken. Well done, well done.

spraak 7y ago
Yeah, I can't even read the article because Medium says I've used up my free quota already

gamesbrainiac 7y ago

The only major complaint that I have against GR is that it is quite slow. I don't really care much for recommendations right now, because the user-created lists will often get you what you want faster. Furthermore, I think GR does a good job of classifying the books, or rather letting their readers classify their books for them. All in all, I think the site should be more responsive, but there are tonnes of places to have long discussions on books, genres, plots and other things over at reddit.

ryeguy_24 7y ago

We set out to build a better Goodreads a while back called Helloreads (my wife thinks we didn’t differentiate our name enough but whatever). It never seemed to get traction probably due to the monopoly and network effect of Goodreads. We thought and still do that Goodreads user interface is terrible, the site is slow, the reviews are too volatile. The one thing that we truly could not compete with them on is the data. The book data problem is insanely hard. New books come out and there is not authoritative database of book metadata. We had a blast building (and the iOS app) it but have put the development on hold. [0] https://www.helloreads.com https://www.helloreads.com [1] My books: https://www.helloreads.com/ryanhittner https://www.helloreads.com/ryanhittner

justanotherhn 7y ago
Interesting, just out of curiosity - does the website still work well? I just signed up with a dummy account and the images for the books are not showing up. I belive this might have something to do with AWS. (It might also be my browser settings)
- ryeguy_24 7y ago
  It should work. Just tried and looks to work on my end. https://imgur.com/a/wU69opo https://imgur.com/a/wU69opo Could be browser settings but feel feee to shoot us a message. Support [at] helloreads.com
  - justanotherhn 7y ago
    It seems my VPN may be the culprit.
kzrdude 7y ago
I guess it's a social network, but since this is hacker news — I'd love if your front page would not be just a login screen. The front page should say something about specific books, something that draws you in! Something from the site itself. And put that book recommendations button higher up (it's not visible on first view for me). :-) Something that makes you begin browsing and using the site to get recommendations. Then in standard style, somewhere down the line you'll hit a snag where you have to register to use certain features, like commenting, liking, etc.

convivialdingo 7y ago

I just want to be able to find books with keywords. I often forget the title of books, but I can rattle off a summary. Google books has gotten worse also - to the point of useless unless you have a quote or are looking for common titles.

datguacdoh 7y ago

Barnes and Noble launched Browsery a little while back, that helped me find a litany of new recommendations. I now use that service in tandem with Goodreads, but GR is just my tracking list at this point since it integrates with my Kindle and migrating to something else would be a pain.

frabbit 7y ago

https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ is always better for finding books that I know part of the title (or sometimes even just the full title). I would like to be able to weight opinions (both positively and negatively) of individuals, and also based on criteria (e.g. "completely ignore the opinions of anyone who gave a low rating to The Good Soldier Svejk" and also "weight by 100 the opinions of anyone that rates The Silver Chair as the best of the Narnia stories".

the_biot 7y ago
Indeed a mention of librarything is missing from this article. Ironically I joined Goodreads after fleeing librarything as it was so stagnant.

imgabe 7y ago

Well, boo. Sounds like a terrible redesign is incoming for Goodreads. Personally, I like that it's a list-making app with minimal social aspects. Social networks are terrible. I don't want to "dish about the latest author gossip". I don't want algorithmic recommendations that assume I'll want to read another book that has 90% of the same keywords as the book I just read. Goodreads works fine for me.

B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago

(Off-topic, flameable material) - Is there a female majority in goodreads users/commenters? - Is book/novel reading now a predominantly female activity?

mhb 7y ago

On a related note - what happened to the Netflix recommendation engine after they awarded the $1M prize for a 10% improvement to their already pretty good recommender? Did they just throw the whole thing out the window?

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
I cannot believe they have any kind of recommendation engine? I just see offered more seasons the same shows I watched, or shows with similar words in the title regardless of topic. I cannot believe they have even 10% success rate recommending movies, much less improved it by that much.
- mhb 7y ago
  I guess this is ancient history (2009), but you can read about it at: https://www.netflixprize.com/ https://www.netflixprize.com/
roryokane 7y ago
I can’t remember all the details, but from what I remember when I looked this up a few years ago, yes, Netflix did throw the whole thing out the window. They said that the winning algorithm would require more processing power to run, or expensive code changes or something, and so they decided their current engine was good enough. Then Netflix switched strategies away from highly-personalized recommendations to a dumber algorithm that is more likely to recommend more popular movies, which ends up retaining subscribers better. The reasoning was that users were more likely to cancel their subscription if they had one obviously bad recommendation than if they had multiple so-so recommendations. So rather than recommending, for example, 80% great movies and 20% bad ones, Netflix wants to recommend 5% great movies and 95% okay ones.

rdl 7y ago

Yeah, 100% agree. I love the idea of the service and would happily pay for something 50% as good today which is improving vs stagnating.

caiocaiocaio 7y ago

1) I like about 75% of the recommendations I get, which is pretty good compared to other recommendation sites I've used. 2) I love the fact that Goodreads has an old-fashioned feeling. Modernizing it would mean a front-end JS framework - making it buggy and obnoxiously slow to use on my old laptop or phone - and a lot of aesthetic features that reduce usability. Oh, and probably light-grey text on a slightly-lighter-grey background, making it a strain on my eyes. Modern internet is meant to look good, pop on a resume, and have little or no functionality or substance. I genuinely hope the people at Goodreads ignore this article.

gagege 7y ago
I agree with you about the old-fashioned-ness. Disagree about the recommendations.

ernesth 7y ago

I have been using Goodreads for years. I remember when Amazon turned off API access to goodreads and how all books lost their covers and most of their data. And the shocking turn of event of Amazon taking control of Goodreads. And I am pretty happy that it hasn't evolved that much from the website it used to be. Concerning custom shelves exclusive from read/want-to-read etc. I do have created such shelves. Not for "Did not finish" list but to have 2 kinds of want to read: books on my wishlist and books I own but have not yet read. Features goodreads has that most competitors lack: I can have two different editions of the same book. I can store more than one date I read a book. I can export most of my data in csv.

Insanity 7y ago

from the article: "What Goodreads is good for is keeping your own list of books you want to read or have read this year. It’s a list-making app." That's pretty much all I want from it, so it works great for me. The recommendations are often (but not always) good enough. I usually don't read based on recommendations from GR but occassionaly something good does come out. Websites don't need to keep adding features, it's fine to look the same 12 years down the road. I think this website (HN) is a pretty good example of that.

smcl 7y ago

I had no idea it was supposed to be a social network, I'm just using it to keep track of some books I want to read

hammock 7y ago

My list of books I want to read is way too big that I'll never catch up with it. So my problem is not finding new recommendations, it's deciding which book from the list I want to read next. That's what attracted me to Goodreads, because I can download a cab of the list and sort by different fields, etc. Anyone else like me, what solutions do you use?

bobcostas55 7y ago

If you're looking for recs, check out librarything. In general it's worse than goodreads on almost all dimensions, but their recommendations algorithms are great. You can import your goodreads list, so it's no big ordeal.

abeyer 7y ago
I actually always thought librarything was strictly better than good reads as a list building/management tool. It has suffered from a similar lack of improvements recently, and I was never impressed with their "social" features, but personally wouldn't agree on the "all dimensions" part.

officemonkey 7y ago

The recommendation system is broken, however the social networking features can surmount it. For example, my Goodreads "friends" are people who like the books I like. There's no social obligation. FFS, I unfriended my sister. My high-school friend who only reads YA fiction: he was unfriended years ago. My favorite goodreads friends are a half-dozen people I've never even met, but I agree with their reviews. When they give a book 5 stars, I check it out. That's the key to Goodreads. If Amazon can't figure out how to make better recommendations, they should look long and hard at how the social graph beats the star-ratings.

romack77 7y ago
Agreed. This is how I use Goodreads for recommendations as well. There's the "Compare Books" tool to get a quick sense of whether someone reads what you read. And then reading a couple of their reviews is usually enough to get a sense of whether their recs will agree with you. It's more labor intensive than a standard recommendation system, but the results are better. Since books are a large time commitment, and people are passionate about them, a lot of people are willing to put uncommon effort into finding good ones.

deleted 7y ago

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myth_drannon 7y ago

When they had recommendations based on bookshelves it was amazing since I have a bunch of very niche topic bookshelves. Once they removed it and left only recommendations based on genres it is useless now. Kindle book recommendation based on similar books are a bit better, but that's only for kindle books

roadbeats 7y ago

GoodReads and Craigslist are similar. They serve their original functions sufficiently and that's all. Personally, I like GoodReads a lot, it's the only social site I use in fact.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

...compared to what?

wenning 7y ago

douban.com is much better than it.

thundergolfer 7y ago
Seems like English language isn’t supported?

track_me_now 7y ago

Anyone else remember CD Now? Human-curated lists based on "if you like this you might like". Because they were actual people who loved and knew music they worked. Amazon wrecked that too.

capedape 7y ago

This author and book are in almost every quote category last time I checked “ Criss Jami, Killosophy.” Often multiple times in the same category. He has some ok quotes, but rarely are they the same caliber of others, especially not in every category. Seems the quote area has been gamed too. I contacted goodreads and they didn’t seem to care.

parliament32 7y ago

Like the article suggests, I've been using Goodreads strictly as a list-keeping app -- the recommendations are pretty useless. The star ratings, however, are somewhat useful if you know how to read them.