4 ms·

I mostly use reddit [0][1][2] to build my TBR list. I follow only a few on goodreads, but my twitter timeline (which is mostly catered around book reading) come

by asicsp 6y ago

I mostly use reddit [0][1][2] to build my TBR list. I follow only a few on goodreads, but my twitter timeline (which is mostly catered around book reading) comes up with nice recommendations. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/ https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/

prepend 6y ago
Thanks, I use those subs as well. I think it’s more of whatever you call that “programmer anxious subliminal minmaxing” feeling that I get knowing that goodreads has all that info from me, and should be able to automatically help. I don’t have a shortage of books to read or anything and I have a system that works. But I suspect that there’s great books out there for me that I haven’t discovered yet and would like for technology to help with that. I mainly find books through serendipitous interactions and recommendations from friends and I read more books found accidentally than when I consciously seek out new books. It’s a problem with amazon and audible and my library too. They suck at recommending books. I think it’s just because they are happy if I just buy something, where I’m looking for five star books. So our incentives are different. I’ve spend quite a few saturdays trying to hack something from goodreads data to just do it myself. But I can’t get a good data export. I think if you just find people with at least 100 similar rating to me and then recommend books that they 5-star that would result in good stuff. The main downside of amazon buying them is that I used to wish for a breach of all their customer ratings data so I could just do the analysis on the leaked data (after de identifying the customers of course). But amazon has much better security. By the way, it seems like all the content companies are this way now. Netflix isn’t interested in me finding movies I love. Spotify is maybe the closest but I think they promote lots of stuff. I’ve been trying to think of a business model that relies on finding awesome matches, but I think there’s more money in finding marginal matches that bring customers back again. My current money is on getting local AI that I can train to serve me (instead of google, Microsoft, etc).

by asicsp 6y ago

prepend 6y ago

Thanks, I use those subs as well. I think it’s more of whatever you call that “programmer anxious subliminal minmaxing” feeling that I get knowing that goodreads has all that info from me, and should be able to automatically help. I don’t have a shortage of books to read or anything and I have a system that works. But I suspect that there’s great books out there for me that I haven’t discovered yet and would like for technology to help with that. I mainly find books through serendipitous interactions and recommendations from friends and I read more books found accidentally than when I consciously seek out new books. It’s a problem with amazon and audible and my library too. They suck at recommending books. I think it’s just because they are happy if I just buy something, where I’m looking for five star books. So our incentives are different. I’ve spend quite a few saturdays trying to hack something from goodreads data to just do it myself. But I can’t get a good data export. I think if you just find people with at least 100 similar rating to me and then recommend books that they 5-star that would result in good stuff. The main downside of amazon buying them is that I used to wish for a breach of all their customer ratings data so I could just do the analysis on the leaked data (after de identifying the customers of course). But amazon has much better security. By the way, it seems like all the content companies are this way now. Netflix isn’t interested in me finding movies I love. Spotify is maybe the closest but I think they promote lots of stuff. I’ve been trying to think of a business model that relies on finding awesome matches, but I think there’s more money in finding marginal matches that bring customers back again. My current money is on getting local AI that I can train to serve me (instead of google, Microsoft, etc).