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Almost Everything About Goodreads is Broken https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads-is-broken-662e424244d5 https://onezero.medium.com/almo

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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      Goodreads 'also enjoyed' is one of the best implementations of this feature. I always see related books that actually make sense to be shown there.
      - mhb 6y ago
        That's the simplest and most naive implementation of a recommender. It doesn't take into account what I liked about a book and whether the one it's recommending is similar in that way or if I will dislike it for some other reason. A better way to do recommendations is to find readers who have rated books similarly to me and tell me what books they've rated highly that I haven't already read. This is what Netflix's Cinematch once did and it was good. It used singular value decomposition and other linear algebra techniques on a giant matrix of raters. See: https://www.netflixprize.com/ https://www.netflixprize.com/
        FalconSensei 6y ago
        > doesn't take into account what I liked about a book I don't remember ever seeing a rating system (for books or tv) that let me do fine grain rating. And if it had it, most people[citation needed] might not use it anyway. Also, how would I say that what I liked the most about a fantasy book is the magic system, for example? I don't care HOW the recommendation is implemented, but what shows on the recommendation. For me, 'Readers also enjoyed' shows things that are sufficiently similar, and which people that I follow - friends and bloggers - gave good ratings. The 'lists with this book' section is also good for discovering books, as the lists are user curated, and the title helps me know what's the common theme. Ie: books with cool magic systems.
        mhb 6y ago
        That's the beauty of this. You don't need a fine grained rating system. By comparing your preferences to those of others, the aspects of what you like and don't like become implicit. A product has features in some high dimensional quality space. When you rate it, you provide information about your preference for those qualities without needing to explicitly rate them or even have a concept of what they are called.
  - robjan 6y ago
    I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but I don't find the Netflix algorithm useful. With a few exceptions everything is a 97-99% match
    - mhb 6y ago
      The current Netflix algorithm is useless. Cinematch is what they used to have and they had a prize, which they awarded, for $1M to anyone who could improve it by 10%. They've apparently abandoned it. See: https://www.netflixprize.com/ https://www.netflixprize.com/
    - FalconSensei 6y ago
      That's weird, for me I see 30% and over, although most fall into 60% and over. I think it could be: you didn't 'dislike' many titles or; you are not browsing things that are too different from what you usually watch
FalconSensei 6y ago
You can say that goodreads stagnated, in a technical sense, but it's still way better than all options. It works well on desktop, the android app let's me add books by pointing my camera to the cover or barcode. All book bloggers/youtubers are there, all my friends that read are there. When you factor in those 2 things - everyone is on goodreads, and there's no better alternative to goodreads - there's no reason to leave.

ryantgtg 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    Goodreads 'also enjoyed' is one of the best implementations of this feature. I always see related books that actually make sense to be shown there.
    - mhb 6y ago
      That's the simplest and most naive implementation of a recommender. It doesn't take into account what I liked about a book and whether the one it's recommending is similar in that way or if I will dislike it for some other reason. A better way to do recommendations is to find readers who have rated books similarly to me and tell me what books they've rated highly that I haven't already read. This is what Netflix's Cinematch once did and it was good. It used singular value decomposition and other linear algebra techniques on a giant matrix of raters. See: https://www.netflixprize.com/ https://www.netflixprize.com/
      - FalconSensei 6y ago
        > doesn't take into account what I liked about a book I don't remember ever seeing a rating system (for books or tv) that let me do fine grain rating. And if it had it, most people[citation needed] might not use it anyway. Also, how would I say that what I liked the most about a fantasy book is the magic system, for example? I don't care HOW the recommendation is implemented, but what shows on the recommendation. For me, 'Readers also enjoyed' shows things that are sufficiently similar, and which people that I follow - friends and bloggers - gave good ratings. The 'lists with this book' section is also good for discovering books, as the lists are user curated, and the title helps me know what's the common theme. Ie: books with cool magic systems.
        mhb 6y ago
        That's the beauty of this. You don't need a fine grained rating system. By comparing your preferences to those of others, the aspects of what you like and don't like become implicit. A product has features in some high dimensional quality space. When you rate it, you provide information about your preference for those qualities without needing to explicitly rate them or even have a concept of what they are called.
- robjan 6y ago
  I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but I don't find the Netflix algorithm useful. With a few exceptions everything is a 97-99% match
  - mhb 6y ago
    The current Netflix algorithm is useless. Cinematch is what they used to have and they had a prize, which they awarded, for $1M to anyone who could improve it by 10%. They've apparently abandoned it. See: https://www.netflixprize.com/ https://www.netflixprize.com/
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    That's weird, for me I see 30% and over, although most fall into 60% and over. I think it could be: you didn't 'dislike' many titles or; you are not browsing things that are too different from what you usually watch

FalconSensei 6y ago

You can say that goodreads stagnated, in a technical sense, but it's still way better than all options. It works well on desktop, the android app let's me add books by pointing my camera to the cover or barcode. All book bloggers/youtubers are there, all my friends that read are there. When you factor in those 2 things - everyone is on goodreads, and there's no better alternative to goodreads - there's no reason to leave.