4 ms·

Speaking as a working author, Goodreads is a dumpster fire. One author of my acquaintance has been the victim of someone who has created at least six fake accou

Speaking as a working author, Goodreads is a dumpster fire. One author of my acquaintance has been the victim of someone who has created at least six fake accounts in her name (taking her name and profile pics), in an attempt to trash her reputation; I've got off relatively lightly, but I've had one-star reviews posted of books of mine ... which aren't actually written yet, so these are basically fakes. Goodreads reaction to complaints by (verified) authors about this sort of abuse is to deny all responsibility. So there's zero curation going on there. (As to the list of abandoned reads, it's not surprising that the top five by ranking are all major bestsellers: and the shrunken, posterior proportions are for books with a difficult literary style to grapple with -- in other words, they're not easy reading. Between "hard to read" and "massive bestsellers, but require a reading age >12" we basically cover the obvious bases. I'd have liked to see some analysis of abandonment rate normalized for reading complexity, but that's hard to characterize ...)

sedachv 7y ago
> Goodreads reaction to complaints by (verified) authors about this sort of abuse is to deny all responsibility. So there's zero curation going on there. Goodreads was bought by Amazon in 2013, so the issues you are describing are not surprising considering that Amazon.com reviews have the same issues.
adjkant 7y ago
I think while the ratings system is a dumpster fire, it does a huge service for readers still. You can easily track your reading list, books you're read (and sharing it with friends), and their app's scan feature is lovely for me personally when in bookstores to quickly add a book to my list. And they could improve a lot on this areas for sure. In terms of reading tracking I think it's quite an interesting source and while the outcomes are not surprising, I think with just some better analysis this could be a very interesting piece. Props to the author for the idea alone.
- dorchadas 7y ago
  Yep. I don't pay any attention to ratings, though I do go through and read reviews. Mostly the middle range ones (2-4 stars), because they're usually the people who can see some good and bad and comment on it more fairly than just those who leave 5 star or 1 star reviews. It's also nice to read reviews of people I follow and to see what they think of it. Otherwise, I use it mainly to track what I've read and what I think of it. I wrote reviews for a while, and might start getting back to that this year, but it's really good for tracking my personal star rating of a book and to see what I think of stuff. It can also be useful for getting recommendations as well, based on their recommendation algorithms as well as similar books and ones people mention in reviews.
- gamesbrainiac 7y ago
  Honestly, if you haven't read that much, anything above a 4 is usually pretty darn good.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Goodreads was far more useful before it became a part of Amazon, though maybe it was declining before that -- I guess before it got too popular. Much like imdb. Where once I found both useful, nowadays I don't ever bother except maybe after reading something where I am diametrically opposed to the universe and reviews. :) I never quite figured out what changed -- whether it was gaming and abuse, Amazon buying and caring only about more sales, or simply no longer disproportionately early adopting geeks (inc me!). All I know is neither goodreads or imdb are the slightest use in deciding if I might enjoy something, where once they had been, and in its earliest days (when you downloaded db and client) imdb was almost frighteningly, telepathically good.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  For GR or any other online review site, my experience is that they are useful if you read the negative reviews. A one-star (or two-star or three-star) review which complains about things which I, on the other hand, like, is reliable. The actual star rating is not reliable, on GR or anywhere else on the internet in my experience.
  - Swenrekcah 7y ago
    I don’t know if the incentives are there for goodread, but be aware that online sellers, at for instance amazon, have gamed this method as well.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
      My understanding is that GoodReads is one of the most gamed review sites on the Internet. Amazon has a concept of Influencer Reviewers, but they should almost immediately recognize this as bs. I've never met anyone who actually cares about a general product critic. Amazon isn't niche, so even if there is, say, some guy who reviews protein powders on Amazon, and you're really into protein powders... The odds of you finding this person are low, and since Amazon isn't designed in anyway for you to interact with this person, and find more content about protein powders, nutrition, fitness, etc -- it makes no sense for you to follow this person on Amazon. Certainly, there are some influencer reviewers with genuine followers. But this should be an exception to the rule. GoodReads on the other hand is a place that lends itself to an influencer. So it's much more difficult to tell who's posting real reviews and who's posting bullshit that's being liked by bots and then added to the first review most people see, and then just getting liked a lot because it's first -- not because it's any good. Further, GoodReads is actually like the 8th biggest social network in the world and one of the most heavily trafficked websites online. These influencers can actually get a lot of eyeballs, but GoodReads provides almost no way for influencers to make money -- like YouTube, Pinterest, or even Instagram do (most Instagram influencers post ads almost exclusively now). So GoodReads influencers have to get more creative and extortive to make any money. Further, this problem is compounded because people don't finish books they don't like. Everyone watches plenty of TV and movies they don't like throughout the year, so they rate these on IMDB or wherever. They like reviews that are bad. This happens much less frequently on GoodReads. If you're an influencer, you learn very quickly that any negative review is unlikely to make the front page. And if you're trying to grow your following, that's all you really care about. So you need to post a ton of 5 star reviews. Well, books take a long time to read. I highly doubt these influencers have time to rate and write a review and make a video about their review for a novel every or two or three a day. Yet, they do. So the majority of these have to be fake just based on obvious time constraints.
gwern 7y ago
> I'd have liked to see some analysis of abandonment rate normalized for reading complexity, but that's hard to characterize ... Maybe one could do something like the Flesch-Kincaid reading index and variants of those and include other metrics like # of unique words. But it's be a real pain in the arse to do - you can get the books off Libgen, surely, but you'd have to choose manually and then often it'll be a PDF where the OCR or text layer is hot garbage...
- hug 7y ago
  Assuming that this is all largely fiction, you'll generally get a decent ePub of essentially any book published by a large publisher, and given that ePub is essentially just XHTML it's not "hard" to parse well enough for your purposes. The margin of error for parsing the books is going to be smaller than any margin of error forced on you by GoodReads, anyway... ...but it's still probably not worth it.
anotherevan 7y ago
I wonder how https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ compares these days.
rossdavidh 7y ago
Just out of curiousity, is there a different site in the same ballpark that you prefer? Or is this more of a fundamental (or at least unsolved) problem of sites with open access not paying for people to curate and therefore turning into either payola or a morass of extortion and lies?
Gatsky 7y ago
Yes, it isn't great... many top 'reviews' appear to be a platform for social justice posturing or indulgent navel gazing by the reviewer. Rather than you know, saying anything useful about the book.
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
As someone interested in publishing some work in the near future, I'd like to get your thoughts on this... I've heard that GoodReads has become a Racket in that these "Book Influencers" reach out to authors and say they have two options: they can pay for a good review of their book, or they can get a bad review. This seems like obvious extortion. Is this as bad as a problem as I've heard? Have you experienced this at all? Or do you know people who have?
lupire 7y ago
One author got hundrede of negative reviews for her non-published book because she posted a tweet photographing an anonymous subway employee illegally eating on the subway. I actually went to the effort to report this brigading to Goodreads (and had a conversation with support staffabout how their Flag function doesn't work on mobile) which they ignored.

sedachv 7y ago

> Goodreads reaction to complaints by (verified) authors about this sort of abuse is to deny all responsibility. So there's zero curation going on there. Goodreads was bought by Amazon in 2013, so the issues you are describing are not surprising considering that Amazon.com reviews have the same issues.

adjkant 7y ago

I think while the ratings system is a dumpster fire, it does a huge service for readers still. You can easily track your reading list, books you're read (and sharing it with friends), and their app's scan feature is lovely for me personally when in bookstores to quickly add a book to my list. And they could improve a lot on this areas for sure. In terms of reading tracking I think it's quite an interesting source and while the outcomes are not surprising, I think with just some better analysis this could be a very interesting piece. Props to the author for the idea alone.

dorchadas 7y ago
Yep. I don't pay any attention to ratings, though I do go through and read reviews. Mostly the middle range ones (2-4 stars), because they're usually the people who can see some good and bad and comment on it more fairly than just those who leave 5 star or 1 star reviews. It's also nice to read reviews of people I follow and to see what they think of it. Otherwise, I use it mainly to track what I've read and what I think of it. I wrote reviews for a while, and might start getting back to that this year, but it's really good for tracking my personal star rating of a book and to see what I think of stuff. It can also be useful for getting recommendations as well, based on their recommendation algorithms as well as similar books and ones people mention in reviews.
gamesbrainiac 7y ago
Honestly, if you haven't read that much, anything above a 4 is usually pretty darn good.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Goodreads was far more useful before it became a part of Amazon, though maybe it was declining before that -- I guess before it got too popular. Much like imdb. Where once I found both useful, nowadays I don't ever bother except maybe after reading something where I am diametrically opposed to the universe and reviews. :) I never quite figured out what changed -- whether it was gaming and abuse, Amazon buying and caring only about more sales, or simply no longer disproportionately early adopting geeks (inc me!). All I know is neither goodreads or imdb are the slightest use in deciding if I might enjoy something, where once they had been, and in its earliest days (when you downloaded db and client) imdb was almost frighteningly, telepathically good.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rossdavidh 7y ago
For GR or any other online review site, my experience is that they are useful if you read the negative reviews. A one-star (or two-star or three-star) review which complains about things which I, on the other hand, like, is reliable. The actual star rating is not reliable, on GR or anywhere else on the internet in my experience.
- Swenrekcah 7y ago
  I don’t know if the incentives are there for goodread, but be aware that online sellers, at for instance amazon, have gamed this method as well.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    My understanding is that GoodReads is one of the most gamed review sites on the Internet. Amazon has a concept of Influencer Reviewers, but they should almost immediately recognize this as bs. I've never met anyone who actually cares about a general product critic. Amazon isn't niche, so even if there is, say, some guy who reviews protein powders on Amazon, and you're really into protein powders... The odds of you finding this person are low, and since Amazon isn't designed in anyway for you to interact with this person, and find more content about protein powders, nutrition, fitness, etc -- it makes no sense for you to follow this person on Amazon. Certainly, there are some influencer reviewers with genuine followers. But this should be an exception to the rule. GoodReads on the other hand is a place that lends itself to an influencer. So it's much more difficult to tell who's posting real reviews and who's posting bullshit that's being liked by bots and then added to the first review most people see, and then just getting liked a lot because it's first -- not because it's any good. Further, GoodReads is actually like the 8th biggest social network in the world and one of the most heavily trafficked websites online. These influencers can actually get a lot of eyeballs, but GoodReads provides almost no way for influencers to make money -- like YouTube, Pinterest, or even Instagram do (most Instagram influencers post ads almost exclusively now). So GoodReads influencers have to get more creative and extortive to make any money. Further, this problem is compounded because people don't finish books they don't like. Everyone watches plenty of TV and movies they don't like throughout the year, so they rate these on IMDB or wherever. They like reviews that are bad. This happens much less frequently on GoodReads. If you're an influencer, you learn very quickly that any negative review is unlikely to make the front page. And if you're trying to grow your following, that's all you really care about. So you need to post a ton of 5 star reviews. Well, books take a long time to read. I highly doubt these influencers have time to rate and write a review and make a video about their review for a novel every or two or three a day. Yet, they do. So the majority of these have to be fake just based on obvious time constraints.

gwern 7y ago

> I'd have liked to see some analysis of abandonment rate normalized for reading complexity, but that's hard to characterize ... Maybe one could do something like the Flesch-Kincaid reading index and variants of those and include other metrics like # of unique words. But it's be a real pain in the arse to do - you can get the books off Libgen, surely, but you'd have to choose manually and then often it'll be a PDF where the OCR or text layer is hot garbage...

hug 7y ago
Assuming that this is all largely fiction, you'll generally get a decent ePub of essentially any book published by a large publisher, and given that ePub is essentially just XHTML it's not "hard" to parse well enough for your purposes. The margin of error for parsing the books is going to be smaller than any margin of error forced on you by GoodReads, anyway... ...but it's still probably not worth it.

anotherevan 7y ago

I wonder how https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ compares these days.

rossdavidh 7y ago

Just out of curiousity, is there a different site in the same ballpark that you prefer? Or is this more of a fundamental (or at least unsolved) problem of sites with open access not paying for people to curate and therefore turning into either payola or a morass of extortion and lies?

Gatsky 7y ago

Yes, it isn't great... many top 'reviews' appear to be a platform for social justice posturing or indulgent navel gazing by the reviewer. Rather than you know, saying anything useful about the book.

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

As someone interested in publishing some work in the near future, I'd like to get your thoughts on this... I've heard that GoodReads has become a Racket in that these "Book Influencers" reach out to authors and say they have two options: they can pay for a good review of their book, or they can get a bad review. This seems like obvious extortion. Is this as bad as a problem as I've heard? Have you experienced this at all? Or do you know people who have?

lupire 7y ago

One author got hundrede of negative reviews for her non-published book because she posted a tweet photographing an anonymous subway employee illegally eating on the subway. I actually went to the effort to report this brigading to Goodreads (and had a conversation with support staffabout how their Flag function doesn't work on mobile) which they ignored.