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If you've got the patience to feed all your books into librarything, the recommendations are incredible - for me virtually the whole first page are all books I'

• jonasmerlin 4y ago
  Psss. Please don't ruin Librarything by getting more people on there. Its recommendation algorithm is pure perfection—basically magic—and I fear it's mostly because it's only used by a very particular group of people.
  • metadaemon 4y ago
    ew gatekeeping.
    • jonasmerlin 4y ago
      That's really not what I'm doing, at all. My point is that recommendations that are based on social networks become less and less useful as that network grows. And LT seems to have hit the perfect size for its recommendations to be useful. I'm actively dreading the day that they either get worse (i.e. the network gets too big), or that LT goes away entirely because it has no place in the modern internet anymore, multiple times a week, to the point where I'm thinking about ways to preserve its current form in some way or another. If more people would be on there it wouldn't be as useful too anyone anymore, instead of being as useful to more people. So instead of gatekeeping it's more like preservation of something that would otherwise vanish. Librarything is basically one of the few national parks the internet has left. Finally, and maybe most importantly, my original comment was really meant as a light-hearted comment on the magic of LT with some of the thoughts I have on the matter sprinkled in. But I should've known that HN would interpret it in the least favorable way.
      • metadaemon 4y ago
        I'm also a fan of LT, but most importantly I'm a fan of spreading the wonderful feeling you get from reading. If LT's recommendation algorithm is only good because of its pool size, then it's bound to fail at some point in the future. Rather than delaying this inevitability -- which effectively sweeps the issue under the rug -- the better solution would be to ensure that their recommendations stay high-caliber regardless of scale. I'd imagine the only way to perform this test would to be for them to actually grow in scale, so they should be advertised as much as possible.
      • flir 4y ago
        I really think it's the depth, not the breadth, that makes the recommendations work. I've been a member since 2005, and SciFi was pretty good right out of the gate. Now, everything's pretty good. If it hasn't been harmed by its growth up to this point, I honestly doubt a little more will hurt it.
• whiplash451 4y ago
  Do we know which data it uses? Collaborative filtering or content/metadata?
  • flir 4y ago
    It's got 2.8m members who have entered 186m books that they own. It cross-references those collections in some way (I don't know anything about the internals). I just checked, and it says it's recommending a book to me (Singularity Sky) based on five other books I own (Engine City, Spin State, A Deepness In The Sky, Recursion, The Skinner). But as it's always "based on these five books", I have to assume it's doing a lot more matching than that.
• blowski 4y ago
  I found that it recommended poor imitations of books I liked. I’d rather read the best in a range of genres than all the books in a specific genre.
  • slothtrop 4y ago
    Personalized recommendation does not address that use-case. All you need to do is check reviews, lists and favorites among users on r/books or other platforms.
  • flir 4y ago
    That is very interesting. I think most home libraries must go deep on a few genres, rather than selecting the best from many genres. I can absolutely see how it would fail for you.