6 ms·

Goodreads is desperately in need of a strong competitor.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
Aside from the spoofing issues what are the main drawbacks and benefits of GoodReads from your perspective - what's the worst of times, what's the best of times?
- yazan94 7y ago
  I want to second this question - this is a relatively easy-to-fix issue on GR's side to have more moderation tools and powers. But otherwise, are there any other substantial complaints?
  - lkbm 7y ago
    1. "Date Read" UX is terrible: My family was recently shocked to discover that adding a book as read and rating it doesn't automatically set the read date. I don't think it needs to do so, but these people are computer-literate and have entered > 1,000 books a piece. And they didn't know how it works. That suggests poor UX. As someone who DID know this and and always manually add Date Read...here's how to do it on desktop: hover over the shelf dropdown until a little popup appears above, move up to that popup without it vanishing, and click "Write a review", which secretly means "write a review or enter date read." 2. It's slow. Loading just the html of the front page is > 3 seconds. Loading My Books is > 5 seconds. Again, this is JUST the html, excluding no js, css, and images. 3. Nav is bad This combines poorly with the site speed. One thing I do most frequently is to look at my most recently read books: - Go to goodreads.com (3+ seconds) - Click "My Books" (5+ seconds) - Click "Read" (It defaults to books read and on your to-read list all mixed together.) - Sort the list by Date Finished (5+ seconds) - Re-sort the list by Date Finished because it did ascending the first time. (5+ seconds) (Obviously, I could just bookmark that page with the desired params, but if I'm bookmarking to avoid having to use your site navigation, that's a UX issue.) 4. The recommendation engine is bad. Various people have mentioned this. I will grant that recommendations are hard. But basically, don't use the recommendations. Use the lists manually built by users. (But note that on most lists the top spots will be pointless recommendations that you read Harry Potter. Gee, never heard of THAT book before, thanks!) 5. Lists aren't super-accessible As I mentioned, the lists are much more useful than the recommendation engine. They're under Browse->Lists. There's a search at the top of every single page. It searches books and authors. Not lists. If you're in the lists section, it...still won't search lists. There's a tiny search box on the lists page for this. 6. Search Breaks Middle-Click When I search a book, it populates the results without me having to click through to the results page. If I want to open those results in a new tab, though...nope! It'll just re-open the current page in a new tab. 7. Their export tool doesn't work right. This is a minor quibble--it's VERY nice that they let you export your data at all--but I recently discovered that a lot (most?) of rows in the export are missing the Date Read field even if you entered them. Not all though. I don't know what the pattern is, but it's annoying. Basically, I think Goodreads has approximately one engineer, whose job is to do some tweaks for the marketing team as needed (they renamed Giveaways recently-ish). There's clearly no designer, as UX has been essentially touched in the 12 years since I joined. It doesn't need a sweeping redesign, but there are obvious UX tweaks they could have made at any point in the past decade and instead didn't. And some performance work, please!
    - yazan94 7y ago
      Thanks for the detailed reply! I admittedly am not a GoodReads user (I have an account but never use it) so I wasn't aware of all these pain-points
  - zem 7y ago
    their search and filtering mechanisms are abysmal. they have essentially taken tons of valuable user-supplied data and locked it up behind a useless interface. some simple examples - i cannot find humorous fantasy books by searching for books tagged both "fantasy" and "humour". i cannot do a search that returns hundreds of results and then sort them so that the best ones go to the top - and i'm not even talking about some magic relevance algorithm, just sorting by explicit data. i cannot even organise my own read, unread and to-read books easily. all in all it's a usability disaster and totally wastes the labour people have put into building up the database.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Given the rulings around LinkedIn and public data, is it feasible for a competitor to scrape some of that information? Would they get sued to oblivion if they tried? Not needing to start from scratch would make building a competing service a lot easier. Sites like Stackoverflow have reasonably open licenses on user data, so you could theoretically use that data and build an alternative if the site fell apart. I'm guessing that's not the case for Goodreads though, at least for things like reviews. But even pulling in basic category information would be easier than starting from scratch.
      - zem 7y ago
        i would love to see that happen! i have occasionally wondered what it would take to reboot a goodreads clone from scratch but importing the data is definitely a plan with a higher chance of actually replacing the site.
- cbron 7y ago
  No improvements on old features or adding new features, basically no updates at all for the past few years. Recommendations and rating system are crap. Usability around core features like bookshelves are terrible. The awards are just a popularity contest.
- cosmic_ape 7y ago
  here's a recent thread discussing goodreads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549
- bduerst 7y ago
  Goodreads is a social network framing itself as a book review website. You could argue that is necessary to get engagement from reviewers, but in trying to be both, goodreads doesn't do either very well. Throw in the fact that they haven't improved much since Amazon acquired them, and they've become a sort of static site targeted at acquisitions for ebooks.
  - sailfast 7y ago
    I would argue it's an Amazon referral engine framing itself as a book review site. They have optimized for purchases and not for reader happiness / quality. A competing site that is focused on surfacing books that the reader likes, with links to more than just a single purchase point would likely gain enough traction to be useful. I imagine that scraping a user's GoodReads profile every now and again with authorization would also allow the user to update status in their Kindle / eReader while still populating another site, which would be interesting.
- xioxox 7y ago
  The ratings are useless - any author with a devoted following gets endless 5 star reviews and YA books are stuffed with 5 star reviews. The website is clunky beyond belief and never seems to get improvements. The recommendation engine is terrible. The search facilities are weak and inconsistent. It could be so much better, but it never improves.
  - lkbm 7y ago
    One thing I've noticed with the recommendation engine is that it doesn't recognize when its data set is too small. There are quite a few books where I look at the "Readers also enjoyed" list and can identify it as simply a list of other books I and one of my siblings read recently. For example: https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/1836622-dandelion-caper-the https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/1836622-dandelion-cap... It's a book that my brother and I recently re-read, and the recommendations are...four other books that I and my brother read recently. Granted, the majority are the same genre, but two aren't. They're just...books we both recently gave 4 stars.
  - occamsrazorwit 7y ago
    How would you fix the ratings issue? That's a common issue with ratings systems in general (that they reflect popularity instead of quality).
    - stubish 7y ago
      You start by allowing people to rate the ratings. For instance, flag individual titles or tags 'not interested' such as on Steam. Even just a way to hide individual titles would make a system like Netflix much better to use, and bring product customers are more likely to pay for to the foreground. And then you can feed the data to the recommendation engines, which might start to learn about what demographics are using the system rather than relying on assumptions. My personal belief (as someone with zero actual experience here), is that dislikes and disinterest would be much better for generating recommendations over likes and interest. 'likes' just gives you what is popular in your familiar genres. 'dislikes' expresses your tastes.
- varenc 7y ago
  Their Facebook integration used to be downright deceitful. It was very easy to spam all of your friends that way. After they did that I changed my Goodreads account's name to "Chris 'Goodreads spammed all my friends'" and then I discovered that having an unusually long name breaks their design in multiple places. [1] Besides the dark growth patterns, overall Goodreads feels like a clunky product suffering from feature bloat and poor usability. Unfortunately, because of the network effects and the Kindle integration, it's very hard for a competitor to get off the ground. [1] screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xh4rr6mvey1lbfh/Screenshot%202020-01-06%2014.48.08.png?raw=1 https://www.dropbox.com/s/xh4rr6mvey1lbfh/Screenshot%202020-... (it's been like this for at least a year) (Facebook's API has been locked down in the meantime and Goodreads now only has access to your FB friends that also linked Goodreads...which they use to send a friend requests to each one)
prophesi 7y ago
I recommend https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ Sadly, any Goodreads competitor will need to miraculously gain the network effect; everyone you know is on Goodreads, so it'll just be you and whoever you can convince to move to a new platform. As for the downsides for Goodreads, this blatant lack of moderation is troublesome. I also dislike that Kindle / Amazon are the only visible links to purchase books by default. Amazon already dominates the ebook/audiobook market, so I also simply dislike Goodreads due to their acquisition by Amazon.
- caiocaiocaio 7y ago
  It's quite good, and I really like their automatically-generated recommendations BUT there is a small fee, and I have a knee-jerk reaction to anything on the internet that asks me for money.
  - prophesi 7y ago
    Odd, I have a knee-jerk reaction when I see a service offered for "free."
    - rodgerd 7y ago
      Exactly. If I'm not paying for it, how are they making money? Burning cash and going broke soon? Surveillance capitalism? I like a simpler and more transparent relationship.
  - gravitas 7y ago
    You get up to 200 books at LibraryThing for free, then it's either a $10/yr or $25/once for life. If you're using the service to that degree (>200 books) then you know the value of the service and should be willing to pay a little in return. TANSTAAFL
    - caiocaiocaio 7y ago
      I wouldn't think twice about buying something nice from a store for $25 dollars. Once upon a time I bought something online for about $10 from what was a legitimate business with an address in San Francisco. About 14 months later they claimed I subscribed to some service and started making huge charges to my card ($150/week). Getting them to stop and getting my money back was an enormously stressful and difficult process. That's why I have a knee-jerk reaction - not a cold, logical reaction - to online purchases from companies I haven't used before, and I'm not the only person like that.
mmanfrin 7y ago
Goodreads has a ginormous moat for any competitor trying to get readers who primarily use ereaders, thanks to the deep integration with the Kindle. I keep wanting to try my hand at making a book social network but stop before I've begun because I don't know how to get over that hump.
teah10 7y ago
If someone sets out to build a Goodreads competitor, what's everyone's suggestion on how to aggregate book / ISBN / poster reference data? Google Books API comes to mind but I am wondering if there is a self-hosted solution.
- OldHand2018 7y ago
  Sure, you can just download the OpenLibrary dataset: https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps
  - klt39429 7y ago
    woah this is great. Thank you!

Aside from the spoofing issues what are the main drawbacks and benefits of GoodReads from your perspective - what's the worst of times, what's the best of times?

yazan94 7y ago
I want to second this question - this is a relatively easy-to-fix issue on GR's side to have more moderation tools and powers. But otherwise, are there any other substantial complaints?
- lkbm 7y ago
  1. "Date Read" UX is terrible: My family was recently shocked to discover that adding a book as read and rating it doesn't automatically set the read date. I don't think it needs to do so, but these people are computer-literate and have entered > 1,000 books a piece. And they didn't know how it works. That suggests poor UX. As someone who DID know this and and always manually add Date Read...here's how to do it on desktop: hover over the shelf dropdown until a little popup appears above, move up to that popup without it vanishing, and click "Write a review", which secretly means "write a review or enter date read." 2. It's slow. Loading just the html of the front page is > 3 seconds. Loading My Books is > 5 seconds. Again, this is JUST the html, excluding no js, css, and images. 3. Nav is bad This combines poorly with the site speed. One thing I do most frequently is to look at my most recently read books: - Go to goodreads.com (3+ seconds) - Click "My Books" (5+ seconds) - Click "Read" (It defaults to books read and on your to-read list all mixed together.) - Sort the list by Date Finished (5+ seconds) - Re-sort the list by Date Finished because it did ascending the first time. (5+ seconds) (Obviously, I could just bookmark that page with the desired params, but if I'm bookmarking to avoid having to use your site navigation, that's a UX issue.) 4. The recommendation engine is bad. Various people have mentioned this. I will grant that recommendations are hard. But basically, don't use the recommendations. Use the lists manually built by users. (But note that on most lists the top spots will be pointless recommendations that you read Harry Potter. Gee, never heard of THAT book before, thanks!) 5. Lists aren't super-accessible As I mentioned, the lists are much more useful than the recommendation engine. They're under Browse->Lists. There's a search at the top of every single page. It searches books and authors. Not lists. If you're in the lists section, it...still won't search lists. There's a tiny search box on the lists page for this. 6. Search Breaks Middle-Click When I search a book, it populates the results without me having to click through to the results page. If I want to open those results in a new tab, though...nope! It'll just re-open the current page in a new tab. 7. Their export tool doesn't work right. This is a minor quibble--it's VERY nice that they let you export your data at all--but I recently discovered that a lot (most?) of rows in the export are missing the Date Read field even if you entered them. Not all though. I don't know what the pattern is, but it's annoying. Basically, I think Goodreads has approximately one engineer, whose job is to do some tweaks for the marketing team as needed (they renamed Giveaways recently-ish). There's clearly no designer, as UX has been essentially touched in the 12 years since I joined. It doesn't need a sweeping redesign, but there are obvious UX tweaks they could have made at any point in the past decade and instead didn't. And some performance work, please!
  - yazan94 7y ago
    Thanks for the detailed reply! I admittedly am not a GoodReads user (I have an account but never use it) so I wasn't aware of all these pain-points
- zem 7y ago
  their search and filtering mechanisms are abysmal. they have essentially taken tons of valuable user-supplied data and locked it up behind a useless interface. some simple examples - i cannot find humorous fantasy books by searching for books tagged both "fantasy" and "humour". i cannot do a search that returns hundreds of results and then sort them so that the best ones go to the top - and i'm not even talking about some magic relevance algorithm, just sorting by explicit data. i cannot even organise my own read, unread and to-read books easily. all in all it's a usability disaster and totally wastes the labour people have put into building up the database.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Given the rulings around LinkedIn and public data, is it feasible for a competitor to scrape some of that information? Would they get sued to oblivion if they tried? Not needing to start from scratch would make building a competing service a lot easier. Sites like Stackoverflow have reasonably open licenses on user data, so you could theoretically use that data and build an alternative if the site fell apart. I'm guessing that's not the case for Goodreads though, at least for things like reviews. But even pulling in basic category information would be easier than starting from scratch.
    - zem 7y ago
      i would love to see that happen! i have occasionally wondered what it would take to reboot a goodreads clone from scratch but importing the data is definitely a plan with a higher chance of actually replacing the site.
cbron 7y ago
No improvements on old features or adding new features, basically no updates at all for the past few years. Recommendations and rating system are crap. Usability around core features like bookshelves are terrible. The awards are just a popularity contest.
cosmic_ape 7y ago
here's a recent thread discussing goodreads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549
bduerst 7y ago
Goodreads is a social network framing itself as a book review website. You could argue that is necessary to get engagement from reviewers, but in trying to be both, goodreads doesn't do either very well. Throw in the fact that they haven't improved much since Amazon acquired them, and they've become a sort of static site targeted at acquisitions for ebooks.
- sailfast 7y ago
  I would argue it's an Amazon referral engine framing itself as a book review site. They have optimized for purchases and not for reader happiness / quality. A competing site that is focused on surfacing books that the reader likes, with links to more than just a single purchase point would likely gain enough traction to be useful. I imagine that scraping a user's GoodReads profile every now and again with authorization would also allow the user to update status in their Kindle / eReader while still populating another site, which would be interesting.
xioxox 7y ago
The ratings are useless - any author with a devoted following gets endless 5 star reviews and YA books are stuffed with 5 star reviews. The website is clunky beyond belief and never seems to get improvements. The recommendation engine is terrible. The search facilities are weak and inconsistent. It could be so much better, but it never improves.
- lkbm 7y ago
  One thing I've noticed with the recommendation engine is that it doesn't recognize when its data set is too small. There are quite a few books where I look at the "Readers also enjoyed" list and can identify it as simply a list of other books I and one of my siblings read recently. For example: https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/1836622-dandelion-caper-the https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/1836622-dandelion-cap... It's a book that my brother and I recently re-read, and the recommendations are...four other books that I and my brother read recently. Granted, the majority are the same genre, but two aren't. They're just...books we both recently gave 4 stars.
- occamsrazorwit 7y ago
  How would you fix the ratings issue? That's a common issue with ratings systems in general (that they reflect popularity instead of quality).
  - stubish 7y ago
    You start by allowing people to rate the ratings. For instance, flag individual titles or tags 'not interested' such as on Steam. Even just a way to hide individual titles would make a system like Netflix much better to use, and bring product customers are more likely to pay for to the foreground. And then you can feed the data to the recommendation engines, which might start to learn about what demographics are using the system rather than relying on assumptions. My personal belief (as someone with zero actual experience here), is that dislikes and disinterest would be much better for generating recommendations over likes and interest. 'likes' just gives you what is popular in your familiar genres. 'dislikes' expresses your tastes.
varenc 7y ago
Their Facebook integration used to be downright deceitful. It was very easy to spam all of your friends that way. After they did that I changed my Goodreads account's name to "Chris 'Goodreads spammed all my friends'" and then I discovered that having an unusually long name breaks their design in multiple places. [1] Besides the dark growth patterns, overall Goodreads feels like a clunky product suffering from feature bloat and poor usability. Unfortunately, because of the network effects and the Kindle integration, it's very hard for a competitor to get off the ground. [1] screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xh4rr6mvey1lbfh/Screenshot%202020-01-06%2014.48.08.png?raw=1 https://www.dropbox.com/s/xh4rr6mvey1lbfh/Screenshot%202020-... (it's been like this for at least a year) (Facebook's API has been locked down in the meantime and Goodreads now only has access to your FB friends that also linked Goodreads...which they use to send a friend requests to each one)

prophesi 7y ago

I recommend https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ Sadly, any Goodreads competitor will need to miraculously gain the network effect; everyone you know is on Goodreads, so it'll just be you and whoever you can convince to move to a new platform. As for the downsides for Goodreads, this blatant lack of moderation is troublesome. I also dislike that Kindle / Amazon are the only visible links to purchase books by default. Amazon already dominates the ebook/audiobook market, so I also simply dislike Goodreads due to their acquisition by Amazon.

caiocaiocaio 7y ago
It's quite good, and I really like their automatically-generated recommendations BUT there is a small fee, and I have a knee-jerk reaction to anything on the internet that asks me for money.
- prophesi 7y ago
  Odd, I have a knee-jerk reaction when I see a service offered for "free."
  - rodgerd 7y ago
    Exactly. If I'm not paying for it, how are they making money? Burning cash and going broke soon? Surveillance capitalism? I like a simpler and more transparent relationship.
- gravitas 7y ago
  You get up to 200 books at LibraryThing for free, then it's either a $10/yr or $25/once for life. If you're using the service to that degree (>200 books) then you know the value of the service and should be willing to pay a little in return. TANSTAAFL
  - caiocaiocaio 7y ago
    I wouldn't think twice about buying something nice from a store for $25 dollars. Once upon a time I bought something online for about $10 from what was a legitimate business with an address in San Francisco. About 14 months later they claimed I subscribed to some service and started making huge charges to my card ($150/week). Getting them to stop and getting my money back was an enormously stressful and difficult process. That's why I have a knee-jerk reaction - not a cold, logical reaction - to online purchases from companies I haven't used before, and I'm not the only person like that.

mmanfrin 7y ago

Goodreads has a ginormous moat for any competitor trying to get readers who primarily use ereaders, thanks to the deep integration with the Kindle. I keep wanting to try my hand at making a book social network but stop before I've begun because I don't know how to get over that hump.

teah10 7y ago

If someone sets out to build a Goodreads competitor, what's everyone's suggestion on how to aggregate book / ISBN / poster reference data? Google Books API comes to mind but I am wondering if there is a self-hosted solution.

OldHand2018 7y ago
Sure, you can just download the OpenLibrary dataset: https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps
- klt39429 7y ago
  woah this is great. Thank you!