4 ms·

Same is true of goodreads. Amazon have their market lock now, it’s the IE6 phase now. (Except it was way easier to get people off IE6 than it will be to get the

by moomin 6y ago

Same is true of goodreads. Amazon have their market lock now, it’s the IE6 phase now. (Except it was way easier to get people off IE6 than it will be to get them off the platform with all of their books.)

robin_reala 6y ago
It’s the IE6 when it comes to rendering quality too. Zero support for any sort of standards, bugs everywhere you look, and it’s users complain bitterly if you don’t go out of your way to support their entrenched ways of working.
natrik 6y ago
I use goodreads as well and find the UI/UX very old fashioned. The lag is astonishing as well. What are some issues you have with it?
- efreak 6y ago
  The mobile app is horrible. It's a webview or something, and works like total crap on old devices. If you open a notification for a group discussion post, it tells you what the title of the discussion is--but not what group it's for. As much as possible, I find myself interacting with Goodreads through calibre plugins; I've got a library with zero actual book files that contains an entry for every book in my library, and I mainly use that to browse my collection. Since syncing that list takes so long, my actual calibre libraries are also synced to Goodreads, as that's where I actually make my changes. With Library thing's recent removal of library limits, I'm thinking more and more about abandoning Goodreads--except I don't know if there's a calibre plugin for PT, and I've spent so much time adding and updating book records for items in my goodreads library, which would have to be redone for LT.
  - marvindanig 6y ago
    FYI the mobile opera browser uses the webview and is superfast, but the Kindle app is all native code.
- randomsearch 6y ago
  Kindle and Goodreads I think are both crap for the same reason: the goal is to kill the competition not make great products. Amazon should never have been allowed to buy Goodreads.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    The barrier to entry for an alternative to Goodreads isn’t exactly high. But does anyone care enough to do so?
    - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
      The barrier is actually quite high. Sure, its easy to make a CRUD app that would aggregate ratings. The difficult part is to get people to use it instead of the leader. These are called network effects, and they are very hard to break. This is why big social media sites have such high valuations. Any small group could develop an alternative to Facebook. However, the chances of that usurping them is almost zero. The same goes for Goodreads.
    - toyg 6y ago
      The barrier was not high. Now that it’s baked into Kindle (automatic sync, instant review, etc), Goodreads has a significant moat.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
The problem with Goodreads is more than just an old-fashioned website. The community there, the whole "social" angle of the site, has been taken over by the same phenomena as on Amazon.com: publishers send free copies of their books to certain reviewers, who often don’t even actually read the book before writing their review, and then those reviewers exploit this attention to build up their own reputations as "influencers" and eventually monetize those reputations. Because their reviews have bright colours and image memes, and cliques support each other with mutual likes, those reviews show up at the top of any book listing. If you are one of those reviewers who honestly reads and reviews books, then you can feel like your signal is lost in the noise of the shill reviewers. Also, for those who were initially interested in what their real-life friends were reading, the majority of those IRL friends will have dropped off the site over the years, either because of a natural attrition or because they have come to prefer snackable web content over books.
- moomin 6y ago
  This is actually what I was trying to get at: GoodReads could be so much better, but that would require the maintainers to care. And they don’t, because they’ve got the market lock and have moved into other things. Like Microsoft did with IE6. Agree completely the broken community is much more important than the aged look of the website.

by moomin 6y ago

robin_reala 6y ago

It’s the IE6 when it comes to rendering quality too. Zero support for any sort of standards, bugs everywhere you look, and it’s users complain bitterly if you don’t go out of your way to support their entrenched ways of working.

natrik 6y ago

I use goodreads as well and find the UI/UX very old fashioned. The lag is astonishing as well. What are some issues you have with it?

efreak 6y ago
The mobile app is horrible. It's a webview or something, and works like total crap on old devices. If you open a notification for a group discussion post, it tells you what the title of the discussion is--but not what group it's for. As much as possible, I find myself interacting with Goodreads through calibre plugins; I've got a library with zero actual book files that contains an entry for every book in my library, and I mainly use that to browse my collection. Since syncing that list takes so long, my actual calibre libraries are also synced to Goodreads, as that's where I actually make my changes. With Library thing's recent removal of library limits, I'm thinking more and more about abandoning Goodreads--except I don't know if there's a calibre plugin for PT, and I've spent so much time adding and updating book records for items in my goodreads library, which would have to be redone for LT.
- marvindanig 6y ago
  FYI the mobile opera browser uses the webview and is superfast, but the Kindle app is all native code.
randomsearch 6y ago
Kindle and Goodreads I think are both crap for the same reason: the goal is to kill the competition not make great products. Amazon should never have been allowed to buy Goodreads.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  The barrier to entry for an alternative to Goodreads isn’t exactly high. But does anyone care enough to do so?
  - TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    The barrier is actually quite high. Sure, its easy to make a CRUD app that would aggregate ratings. The difficult part is to get people to use it instead of the leader. These are called network effects, and they are very hard to break. This is why big social media sites have such high valuations. Any small group could develop an alternative to Facebook. However, the chances of that usurping them is almost zero. The same goes for Goodreads.
  - toyg 6y ago
    The barrier was not high. Now that it’s baked into Kindle (automatic sync, instant review, etc), Goodreads has a significant moat.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

The problem with Goodreads is more than just an old-fashioned website. The community there, the whole "social" angle of the site, has been taken over by the same phenomena as on Amazon.com: publishers send free copies of their books to certain reviewers, who often don’t even actually read the book before writing their review, and then those reviewers exploit this attention to build up their own reputations as "influencers" and eventually monetize those reputations. Because their reviews have bright colours and image memes, and cliques support each other with mutual likes, those reviews show up at the top of any book listing. If you are one of those reviewers who honestly reads and reviews books, then you can feel like your signal is lost in the noise of the shill reviewers. Also, for those who were initially interested in what their real-life friends were reading, the majority of those IRL friends will have dropped off the site over the years, either because of a natural attrition or because they have come to prefer snackable web content over books.

moomin 6y ago
This is actually what I was trying to get at: GoodReads could be so much better, but that would require the maintainers to care. And they don’t, because they’ve got the market lock and have moved into other things. Like Microsoft did with IE6. Agree completely the broken community is much more important than the aged look of the website.