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If it's not broken, why fix it? I go to goodreads for the high-quality book reviews and community. I literally don't care about UX or fancy algorithms. I'd rath

If it's not broken, why fix it? I go to goodreads for the high-quality book reviews and community. I literally don't care about UX or fancy algorithms. I'd rather use an old algorithm called 'talking to someone I know' for book recommendations. Right now it feels like a clunky old site made for books reviews and I like that feel. I don't want some Amazon product manager who only cares about monetising (where can I smack ads?!) to touch it thank you very much. And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel (so it loads fast and we can smack lots of ads on it).

busterarm 5y ago
the spam emails are pretty shit
- inanutshellus 5y ago
  Since you call them "spam", I assume you do not want the emails you're getting, rather than saying you want the communication but they're lower quality than you want. If that's the case, I've been a GR member for years and only get emails from them when a particular author does something I've asked GR to notify me about. Implies to me that merely unsubscribing and managing your preferences seems to work.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    I have a GR account due just to having a Kindle subscription and I don't use it and haven't configured anything (nor want to). Just for having the account I get emails like "the official adult site <some url> of Goodreads." If there were some way I didn't have this goodreads account at all, that would be preferable.
- afterburner 5y ago
  You can turn that off in settings. I have and get nothing from them.
  - busterarm 5y ago
    That's not the point. I didn't sign up for a goodreads account. I was given one. And it's sharing my email address with third parties by default. That's scummy company behavior.
    - afterburner 5y ago
      > I was given one. Huh?
      - busterarm 5y ago
        Purchase a Kindle Fire. It comes with Goodreads preinstalled and cannot be removed. When you set up the device, it either asks you for your goodreads account or makes one for your amazon-linked email.
bagofbones 5y ago
I hear you. It's not broken. It does serve the primal use cases like shelving, reviews/ratings, meta-information pretty well. But there is also so much more to the experience of reading. Is Goodreads really the best we deserve?
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  > But there is also so much more to the experience of reading Like what? For me, most of the experience of reading is: 1 - actually reading the book 2- sharing my thoughts/recommending it 3 - seeing what other people recommend. Goodreads, Youtube and Reddit cover all my needs for #2 and #3, and any attempt to cover the social aspect of it will pale in comparison to those 3, at least regarding #3. For instance, there are things that I don't like about Twitter, and Mastodon has some things that I like, like being able to tag a specific post as NSFW, or add a spoiler tag to make part of the text hidden. But after a few months of using it in parallel to Twitter, I ended up abandoning it, because ''everyone''[0] is on Twitter. [0] I mean: my real life friends, my online friends, bloggers, youtubers, cosplayers, illustratos, support profiles for online stores and services.
pavel_lishin 5y ago
> And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel It sounds like you care about UX a great deal, and the UX currently suits you fine! I mostly agree with you; it has a few pain points, but I fear the day when it goes through the great Digg/Reddit redesign and becomes virtually unusable due to information density plummeting to zero. I think it's not likely to go that route, though - since it's owned by Amazon, it doesn't have to be profitable by itself, it just needs to result in enough referrals to buy books on Amazon.
- throwawayjcvbs 5y ago
  that is underway right now actually. theres a beta in-progress for a re-design of a couple pages including the book page.
gwern 5y ago
It actually is broken in a lot of ways, and I don't mean the complaints about stalkers or fake reviews or other community problems, just on the pure technical level. It's been slowly bitrotting, it feels like it somehow gets slower every year, and they've been removing features. I recently moved all of my stuff off GR and stopped using it because I asked myself why I was putting up with it when it clearly was only going to get worse over time. For example: lists in reviews don't render, somehow they broke list markers, and this has been the case for like a decade now (?!); you can't add links to profiles anymore, and you can't edit your profile if it already has a link (because 'spam'); you can write book reviews which you can't then edit (because the edited, but somehow not the original, violates 'length limits' - which are shockingly easy to run into if you include any links); they disabled part of the export API recently, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years you can't even export your books...
- bandAid0 5y ago
  So a new goodreads minus the technical problems comes along. It gets popular. The community becomes a mess, it becomes costly to police, you have people upload an ID and the world hates you for invading their privacy, management shifts resources away since its stable-y making money regardless (given some Byzantine model that matters to ownership anyway) and then it falls victim to bit rot. So a replacement to your goodreads replacement comes along...
  - nwienert 5y ago
    You can do ID (or just validate a few other ways) with anonymous accounts, done properly seems a good balance. Some would hate it, but if it actually improves the quality and the company has some security chops I’d see it as a selling point.
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      By definition, you cannot have ID for anonymous accounts. Not without a third party (who I want nothing to do with anyway).
billfruit 5y ago
It is broken in certain aspects, Goodreads is one of the slowest sites around, if nothing else is done that alone needs fixing. And it has been in this state for years now.
- jacobsenscott 5y ago
  I don't actually use good reads, but I clicked around - everything I clicked on loaded faster (less than 2 seconds, usually less than 1) than everything I clicked on in medium (always more than 2 seconds, where this blog post is hosted). Neither site is fast, but "one of the slowest around" doesn't track either.
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    In my experience, Goodreads loads slower on a phone than on a desktop browser (and it's only the initial load that I notice being slow). I've long suspected (without evidence) that this is intentional because they nerf the mobile web experience in an attempt to get you to use their app.
    - FalconSensei 5y ago
      I don't use their mobile site, but the android app works really well, and looks great.
  - davidwparker 5y ago
    I think it may be more so for logged in users. When logged in, and I go to the homepage, which is essentially an activity feed, it has 93 requests, 4.4MB of resources (1.5MB transferred), and took 7.66 seconds to finish.
snarf21 5y ago
How do you make a better goodreads that is sustainable when Amazon will always make it free as a way to sell more books on Amazon? It is pretty easy to make a X that is better than the status quo. How will you compete with the big guys financially? People want everything for free.
- bagofbones 5y ago
  This is the billion dollar question, but having the right answer at the outset may not be necessary. In fact, most successful business go through multiple iterations on monetisation opportunities before they strike gold. It is more important to build a product that solves problems that Goodreads doesn't solve right now, and find a way to acquire customers that doesn't rely on Google SEO.
  - snarf21 5y ago
    That is a good approach but the risk is that if the feature you add that people really want is trivial for Amazon to copy after you've proven it.
- oauea 5y ago
  Do you remember when people made websites to solve problems and build community, instead of to make a profit? You can always just shill for amazon using affiliate links, everyone wins.
  - dlivingston 5y ago
    The value of a social network is directly proportional to the number of edges in the network graph (I.e., SocialNetworkX might be better than Facebook, but if none of your friends are on it, it’s worthless). For Goodreads, couple that with the vast amount of book metadata they have + Kindle integration, and any startup would have a long way to go to even reach parity. Scalability + data aggregation + user adoption == lots of funding + a clever business model + a significant reason to switch from $DOMINANT_COMPANY + a good bit of luck. That requires huge financial resources, and thus, a solid monetization scheme.
HKH2 5y ago
The recommendations generally seem reasonable. What bothers me is that they clearly have the data to allow for very specific queries, but there's no way to make them.
- zem 5y ago
  what bothers me even more is that all the data for those queries is user-generated, which means that users have essentially contributed value to the site but cannot get it back. that's the competition I would really like to see - a site that crowd sources book metadata in the form of tags and then makes the data freely available and searchable.
dmos62 5y ago
How do you find high quality book reviews? Or, is it the average review that's high quality?
- heisnotanalien 5y ago
  I follow people whose reviews I like.
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  One things that is nice, is that if you have friends / follow people with similar tastes, when you see a book page, it'll feature their reviews first. For me, that's what matters. A review quality is very related to the taste of whoever is reading it in relation to you - although there are other things that matter. But I would say that, in general, reviews are ok quality, and honest.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
devchix 5y ago
The review page and discussion thread is hideous and painful to navigate. If a site is to be able to recommend $nextbook it has to curate inputs, either as ratings or text reviews. There are huge bookclub memberships but hardly anybody write anything substantial because it's a quagmire to wade through (thus implying few review readers). Lapsed readers like me would love a place to talk books, obscure, trendy or not. r/books is a never-ending loop of "I've just finished Ender's Game and I ..." and "Why we do $something when we read", and similar dross. If there's any space that could use a boost in "user engagement" I wish it could be for readers. But, as we bookish lot aren't terribly argumentative, and unwilling to shiv anyone who opines that they loved DaVinci Code, it's an unknown with what to bait us. I log into Goodreads probably twice a month, avert my eyes and then close tab.
- IggleSniggle 5y ago
  I think Steam is probably a decent model of what Goodreads could have looked like. Full of product reviews, with a carefully crafted recommendation engine that focuses in on genres/studios of interest based on a combination of what your friends are reading/reviewing/liking, your past purchases, new release, etc. Video games have a similar problem to books in that there’s a lot of genre, and genre is also often a hazy line. And, too, some people really like stuff that I think is total crap (and vice versa). These days I am almost exclusively shown content that I am at least somewhat interested in.
jborichevskiy 5y ago
Almost Everything About Goodreads is Broken https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads-is-broken-662e424244d5 https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  Counterpoint: Goodreads isn't broken. It's not at all broken for me, nor for my friends. As the article up top says, there are two ways to discover books: incidental discovery and intentional discovery. On Goodreads, incidental discovery largely flows from a daily email showing me what my friends (who are all real life friends) are reading. That daily email is the #1 reason why I won't leave Goodreads. Any site can manage my read/to-read list, but if I don't have any friends on that site, then I lose out on a big source of discovery. And I can see from the email that my friends also use that email to discover new books.
  - mhb 5y ago
    It's great that your tastes are similar enough to those of your friends' that that works for you. But I doubt that that is universal. Recommendations could be so much more helpful if they were done by an algorithm similar to what Netflix used to have - Cinematch. Then even people without friends could get good recommendations.
    - ryantgtg 5y ago
      My tastes are not necessarily similar to my friends. That's actually what makes the email feed cool. I am open to branching out and reading books that I normally wouldn't expect to read. In terms of recommending what I am already likely interested in based on my previous reads, the "Readers also enjoyed" section seems decent to me. Is that what people think sucks? I've used that a fair amount and found it to be valuable. Or is it the whole "Browse" section that's bad? I never look under there. I use goodreads every day, but that means spending 5 mins max on it (I hop in, add a book that I heard about somewhere to my to-read list, then I hop off). And, like I alluded to in my first reply, from what I can tell this behavior also holds true for my friends. I don't think I'm an outlier, though I totally understand that people use the site differently than me and they find it wanting.
seppin 5y ago
While the phrase "X is broken" is maybe the most overused in our society, GRs is functional but far from optimal. And there appears to be no incentives to get better.
jquaint 5y ago
I find goodreads has a bit of bias problem on their ratings. Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate because most people who didn't finish the book (an indicator of low quality) will not leave a review.
- bscphil 5y ago
  > Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate Sometimes I agree with you (because it's annoying to me too), but other times I feel like that's accurate. The difference in quality between a book that's in the 75th percentile quality-wise among the books I've read and a book that's in the 25th percentile is not very large! I'd say, by and large, most books that get published are pretty good. Few of them are completely flawless or life-changing, and that's okay. 3-4 seems about right for 50% of the books I read. If you combine that basic fact with a range of people with differing tastes, you get even more reversion to the mean, so just about every book has a 3-4 rating. The same goes with beer. If you check the major beer rating sites, you'll see most beers end up with a 3-4 rating. Personally I think movies have a much wider range in quality, but you still see this effect somewhat with IMDb: a huge proportion of movies is in the 6-8 range. You might think that the ratings would be more useful if what we got was a percentile rather than an absolute rating, and that might be right... or it might disguise the fact that I really would get close to the same amount of enjoyment out of a 3.5 as a 3.9, even though they're separated by 30 percentiles or whatever.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    It's strange to me that this is the pattern for things like books, movies, or beer but with Uber drivers the pattern seems to be "Give 5 stars unless something was wrong." Before I learned this Uber etiquette I would rate drivers the same way. "Well, he got me from A to B without issue, but was there anything that set this ride apart and elevated it?"
    - Tagbert 5y ago
      That is due to Uber corporate misunderstanding ratings and penalizing drivers who get anything less than a perfect rating.
BikiniPrince 5y ago
I actually would like a better algorithm for suggestions. I can scroll fifty pages of their basic suggestions before I hit something I’m interested in and don’t already have. I would really like to fetch their catalogue and try the Netflix search improvement contest, but for books!
WalterBright 5y ago
Modern UX design seems enamored with sites that refuse to scroll smoothly, which is maddening and quite unpleasant.
cush 5y ago
Exactly. Same with boardgamegeek or old.reddit

busterarm 5y ago

the spam emails are pretty shit

inanutshellus 5y ago
Since you call them "spam", I assume you do not want the emails you're getting, rather than saying you want the communication but they're lower quality than you want. If that's the case, I've been a GR member for years and only get emails from them when a particular author does something I've asked GR to notify me about. Implies to me that merely unsubscribing and managing your preferences seems to work.
- busterarm 5y ago
  I have a GR account due just to having a Kindle subscription and I don't use it and haven't configured anything (nor want to). Just for having the account I get emails like "the official adult site <some url> of Goodreads." If there were some way I didn't have this goodreads account at all, that would be preferable.
afterburner 5y ago
You can turn that off in settings. I have and get nothing from them.
- busterarm 5y ago
  That's not the point. I didn't sign up for a goodreads account. I was given one. And it's sharing my email address with third parties by default. That's scummy company behavior.
  - afterburner 5y ago
    > I was given one. Huh?
    - busterarm 5y ago
      Purchase a Kindle Fire. It comes with Goodreads preinstalled and cannot be removed. When you set up the device, it either asks you for your goodreads account or makes one for your amazon-linked email.

bagofbones 5y ago

I hear you. It's not broken. It does serve the primal use cases like shelving, reviews/ratings, meta-information pretty well. But there is also so much more to the experience of reading. Is Goodreads really the best we deserve?

FalconSensei 5y ago
> But there is also so much more to the experience of reading Like what? For me, most of the experience of reading is: 1 - actually reading the book 2- sharing my thoughts/recommending it 3 - seeing what other people recommend. Goodreads, Youtube and Reddit cover all my needs for #2 and #3, and any attempt to cover the social aspect of it will pale in comparison to those 3, at least regarding #3. For instance, there are things that I don't like about Twitter, and Mastodon has some things that I like, like being able to tag a specific post as NSFW, or add a spoiler tag to make part of the text hidden. But after a few months of using it in parallel to Twitter, I ended up abandoning it, because ''everyone''[0] is on Twitter. [0] I mean: my real life friends, my online friends, bloggers, youtubers, cosplayers, illustratos, support profiles for online stores and services.

pavel_lishin 5y ago

> And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel It sounds like you care about UX a great deal, and the UX currently suits you fine! I mostly agree with you; it has a few pain points, but I fear the day when it goes through the great Digg/Reddit redesign and becomes virtually unusable due to information density plummeting to zero. I think it's not likely to go that route, though - since it's owned by Amazon, it doesn't have to be profitable by itself, it just needs to result in enough referrals to buy books on Amazon.

throwawayjcvbs 5y ago
that is underway right now actually. theres a beta in-progress for a re-design of a couple pages including the book page.

gwern 5y ago

It actually is broken in a lot of ways, and I don't mean the complaints about stalkers or fake reviews or other community problems, just on the pure technical level. It's been slowly bitrotting, it feels like it somehow gets slower every year, and they've been removing features. I recently moved all of my stuff off GR and stopped using it because I asked myself why I was putting up with it when it clearly was only going to get worse over time. For example: lists in reviews don't render, somehow they broke list markers, and this has been the case for like a decade now (?!); you can't add links to profiles anymore, and you can't edit your profile if it already has a link (because 'spam'); you can write book reviews which you can't then edit (because the edited, but somehow not the original, violates 'length limits' - which are shockingly easy to run into if you include any links); they disabled part of the export API recently, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years you can't even export your books...

bandAid0 5y ago
So a new goodreads minus the technical problems comes along. It gets popular. The community becomes a mess, it becomes costly to police, you have people upload an ID and the world hates you for invading their privacy, management shifts resources away since its stable-y making money regardless (given some Byzantine model that matters to ownership anyway) and then it falls victim to bit rot. So a replacement to your goodreads replacement comes along...
- nwienert 5y ago
  You can do ID (or just validate a few other ways) with anonymous accounts, done properly seems a good balance. Some would hate it, but if it actually improves the quality and the company has some security chops I’d see it as a selling point.
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    By definition, you cannot have ID for anonymous accounts. Not without a third party (who I want nothing to do with anyway).

billfruit 5y ago

It is broken in certain aspects, Goodreads is one of the slowest sites around, if nothing else is done that alone needs fixing. And it has been in this state for years now.

jacobsenscott 5y ago
I don't actually use good reads, but I clicked around - everything I clicked on loaded faster (less than 2 seconds, usually less than 1) than everything I clicked on in medium (always more than 2 seconds, where this blog post is hosted). Neither site is fast, but "one of the slowest around" doesn't track either.
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  In my experience, Goodreads loads slower on a phone than on a desktop browser (and it's only the initial load that I notice being slow). I've long suspected (without evidence) that this is intentional because they nerf the mobile web experience in an attempt to get you to use their app.
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
    I don't use their mobile site, but the android app works really well, and looks great.
- davidwparker 5y ago
  I think it may be more so for logged in users. When logged in, and I go to the homepage, which is essentially an activity feed, it has 93 requests, 4.4MB of resources (1.5MB transferred), and took 7.66 seconds to finish.

snarf21 5y ago

How do you make a better goodreads that is sustainable when Amazon will always make it free as a way to sell more books on Amazon? It is pretty easy to make a X that is better than the status quo. How will you compete with the big guys financially? People want everything for free.

bagofbones 5y ago
This is the billion dollar question, but having the right answer at the outset may not be necessary. In fact, most successful business go through multiple iterations on monetisation opportunities before they strike gold. It is more important to build a product that solves problems that Goodreads doesn't solve right now, and find a way to acquire customers that doesn't rely on Google SEO.
- snarf21 5y ago
  That is a good approach but the risk is that if the feature you add that people really want is trivial for Amazon to copy after you've proven it.
oauea 5y ago
Do you remember when people made websites to solve problems and build community, instead of to make a profit? You can always just shill for amazon using affiliate links, everyone wins.
- dlivingston 5y ago
  The value of a social network is directly proportional to the number of edges in the network graph (I.e., SocialNetworkX might be better than Facebook, but if none of your friends are on it, it’s worthless). For Goodreads, couple that with the vast amount of book metadata they have + Kindle integration, and any startup would have a long way to go to even reach parity. Scalability + data aggregation + user adoption == lots of funding + a clever business model + a significant reason to switch from $DOMINANT_COMPANY + a good bit of luck. That requires huge financial resources, and thus, a solid monetization scheme.

HKH2 5y ago

The recommendations generally seem reasonable. What bothers me is that they clearly have the data to allow for very specific queries, but there's no way to make them.

zem 5y ago
what bothers me even more is that all the data for those queries is user-generated, which means that users have essentially contributed value to the site but cannot get it back. that's the competition I would really like to see - a site that crowd sources book metadata in the form of tags and then makes the data freely available and searchable.

dmos62 5y ago

How do you find high quality book reviews? Or, is it the average review that's high quality?

heisnotanalien 5y ago
I follow people whose reviews I like.
FalconSensei 5y ago
One things that is nice, is that if you have friends / follow people with similar tastes, when you see a book page, it'll feature their reviews first. For me, that's what matters. A review quality is very related to the taste of whoever is reading it in relation to you - although there are other things that matter. But I would say that, in general, reviews are ok quality, and honest.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

devchix 5y ago

The review page and discussion thread is hideous and painful to navigate. If a site is to be able to recommend $nextbook it has to curate inputs, either as ratings or text reviews. There are huge bookclub memberships but hardly anybody write anything substantial because it's a quagmire to wade through (thus implying few review readers). Lapsed readers like me would love a place to talk books, obscure, trendy or not. r/books is a never-ending loop of "I've just finished Ender's Game and I ..." and "Why we do $something when we read", and similar dross. If there's any space that could use a boost in "user engagement" I wish it could be for readers. But, as we bookish lot aren't terribly argumentative, and unwilling to shiv anyone who opines that they loved DaVinci Code, it's an unknown with what to bait us. I log into Goodreads probably twice a month, avert my eyes and then close tab.

IggleSniggle 5y ago
I think Steam is probably a decent model of what Goodreads could have looked like. Full of product reviews, with a carefully crafted recommendation engine that focuses in on genres/studios of interest based on a combination of what your friends are reading/reviewing/liking, your past purchases, new release, etc. Video games have a similar problem to books in that there’s a lot of genre, and genre is also often a hazy line. And, too, some people really like stuff that I think is total crap (and vice versa). These days I am almost exclusively shown content that I am at least somewhat interested in.

jborichevskiy 5y ago

Almost Everything About Goodreads is Broken https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads-is-broken-662e424244d5 https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549

ryantgtg 5y ago
Counterpoint: Goodreads isn't broken. It's not at all broken for me, nor for my friends. As the article up top says, there are two ways to discover books: incidental discovery and intentional discovery. On Goodreads, incidental discovery largely flows from a daily email showing me what my friends (who are all real life friends) are reading. That daily email is the #1 reason why I won't leave Goodreads. Any site can manage my read/to-read list, but if I don't have any friends on that site, then I lose out on a big source of discovery. And I can see from the email that my friends also use that email to discover new books.
- mhb 5y ago
  It's great that your tastes are similar enough to those of your friends' that that works for you. But I doubt that that is universal. Recommendations could be so much more helpful if they were done by an algorithm similar to what Netflix used to have - Cinematch. Then even people without friends could get good recommendations.
  - ryantgtg 5y ago
    My tastes are not necessarily similar to my friends. That's actually what makes the email feed cool. I am open to branching out and reading books that I normally wouldn't expect to read. In terms of recommending what I am already likely interested in based on my previous reads, the "Readers also enjoyed" section seems decent to me. Is that what people think sucks? I've used that a fair amount and found it to be valuable. Or is it the whole "Browse" section that's bad? I never look under there. I use goodreads every day, but that means spending 5 mins max on it (I hop in, add a book that I heard about somewhere to my to-read list, then I hop off). And, like I alluded to in my first reply, from what I can tell this behavior also holds true for my friends. I don't think I'm an outlier, though I totally understand that people use the site differently than me and they find it wanting.

seppin 5y ago

While the phrase "X is broken" is maybe the most overused in our society, GRs is functional but far from optimal. And there appears to be no incentives to get better.

jquaint 5y ago

I find goodreads has a bit of bias problem on their ratings. Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate because most people who didn't finish the book (an indicator of low quality) will not leave a review.

bscphil 5y ago
> Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate Sometimes I agree with you (because it's annoying to me too), but other times I feel like that's accurate. The difference in quality between a book that's in the 75th percentile quality-wise among the books I've read and a book that's in the 25th percentile is not very large! I'd say, by and large, most books that get published are pretty good. Few of them are completely flawless or life-changing, and that's okay. 3-4 seems about right for 50% of the books I read. If you combine that basic fact with a range of people with differing tastes, you get even more reversion to the mean, so just about every book has a 3-4 rating. The same goes with beer. If you check the major beer rating sites, you'll see most beers end up with a 3-4 rating. Personally I think movies have a much wider range in quality, but you still see this effect somewhat with IMDb: a huge proportion of movies is in the 6-8 range. You might think that the ratings would be more useful if what we got was a percentile rather than an absolute rating, and that might be right... or it might disguise the fact that I really would get close to the same amount of enjoyment out of a 3.5 as a 3.9, even though they're separated by 30 percentiles or whatever.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  It's strange to me that this is the pattern for things like books, movies, or beer but with Uber drivers the pattern seems to be "Give 5 stars unless something was wrong." Before I learned this Uber etiquette I would rate drivers the same way. "Well, he got me from A to B without issue, but was there anything that set this ride apart and elevated it?"
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    That is due to Uber corporate misunderstanding ratings and penalizing drivers who get anything less than a perfect rating.

BikiniPrince 5y ago

I actually would like a better algorithm for suggestions. I can scroll fifty pages of their basic suggestions before I hit something I’m interested in and don’t already have. I would really like to fetch their catalogue and try the Netflix search improvement contest, but for books!

WalterBright 5y ago

Modern UX design seems enamored with sites that refuse to scroll smoothly, which is maddening and quite unpleasant.

cush 5y ago

Exactly. Same with boardgamegeek or old.reddit