3 ms·

I think the "Topics" list really needs some curation [1] and some more layers of taxonomy. Right now the "topic" breakdown seems 100% isomorphic to the "recomme

by mrec 5y ago

I think the "Topics" list really needs some curation [1] and some more layers of taxonomy. Right now the "topic" breakdown seems 100% isomorphic to the "recommender" breakdown - the links literally go to the exact same URLs - which isn't sustainable. Bookshops don't have separate shelves for each member of staff. [1] Do we really need both "Anglo-Saxon England" and "Anglo-Saxon Britain"? Or three different "Norse Mythology" topics and two different "Norse Myths" topics and a "Norse Mythology and Polytheism" topic?

bwb 5y ago
Totally, this is launching on Monday into beta and there is a lot of work to do here. The cool thing is that those recommendations are vastly different depending on the person making them. So I do want the same topic from different angles and then I am going to change how they are viewed to make that more useful. As this scales I will be drastically changing how that is displayed on the homepage and topic pages. For example, here is a future way to get books recommended on a topic one at a time... kinda like book dating: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages
- mrec 5y ago
  I dunno. It's all well and good having multiple "angles" on a given topic, but if a new user has no meaningful way of distinguishing between those angles then it's just going to be confusing and noisy for them. Self-written mini-bios are not the answer here; the question "what makes this recommender different from the others?" is not something the recommender can answer in isolation, even if they're being maximally honest.
  - bwb 5y ago
    I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have a few minutes, my email is ben@shepherd.com. Can you tell me what you would do and how you would approach it? I'd love to chat if you have a few minutes :)

3 ms·

I think the "Topics" list really needs some curation [1] and some more layers of taxonomy. Right now the "topic" breakdown seems 100% isomorphic to the "recomme

by mrec 5y ago

bwb 5y ago
Totally, this is launching on Monday into beta and there is a lot of work to do here. The cool thing is that those recommendations are vastly different depending on the person making them. So I do want the same topic from different angles and then I am going to change how they are viewed to make that more useful. As this scales I will be drastically changing how that is displayed on the homepage and topic pages. For example, here is a future way to get books recommended on a topic one at a time... kinda like book dating: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages
- mrec 5y ago
  I dunno. It's all well and good having multiple "angles" on a given topic, but if a new user has no meaningful way of distinguishing between those angles then it's just going to be confusing and noisy for them. Self-written mini-bios are not the answer here; the question "what makes this recommender different from the others?" is not something the recommender can answer in isolation, even if they're being maximally honest.
  - bwb 5y ago
    I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have a few minutes, my email is ben@shepherd.com. Can you tell me what you would do and how you would approach it? I'd love to chat if you have a few minutes :)