13 ms·

Goodreads has no incentive to be good

277 points by lawgimenez 3y ago

sydbarrett74 3y ago
Happy Story Graph user here. Goodreads can go die in a fire.
metabagel 3y ago
Alternatives (some from the comments here): https://www.thestorygraph.com/ https://www.thestorygraph.com/ https://oku.club/ https://oku.club/ https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ https://joinbookwyrm.com/ https://joinbookwyrm.com/ https://bookrastinating.com/ https://bookrastinating.com/ (I haven't tried any of these yet.)
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  I have tried all of these - yes, all of these. None of them are as good as GoodReads, not even close. And that is with the understanding that GoodReads itself is really bad. LibraryThing is like a poor GoodReads, that's it. So no.
Jemaclus 3y ago
IMO, the thing Goodreads has that nobody else is automatic updates from a Kindle. When I finish a book on my Kindle, Goodreads automatically tracks it. It doesn't seem possible for Story Graph or Bookwyrm or Librarything or any of these others to do that, which means I have to manually curate my list of books I've read and want to read. Right now, my process is this: 1) buy a book, 2) read it, 3) my friends can see that I read it and left a star rating. I think this makes a pretty hard barrier to entry in this market, because I read 99.9% of the time on my Kindle, and I'm lazy. :)
p3rls 3y ago
I have been complaining about this for years and years as someone who builds these types of platforms. It's the same for thousands of niches across google. The top result is camped by some SEO garbage. For instance, I run a kpop platform right now (kpopping.com) my competitors are making 10x what I make just copying my pages and putting them up on a wordpress. I'm so sick of it. Google can't be destroyed soon enough for me.
rents 3y ago
So goodreads reviews are being abused and Amazon needs to fix it. Well if it becomes big then they will.
LindaMadison 3y ago
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LindaMadison 3y ago
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eatonphil 3y ago
This seems focused on their review system which is fine of them to focus on. They sell books (through Amazon/Kindle) so I don't expect their own reviews to be great. Unrelated to the reviews the app is slow and crashes often. They use dark-ish patterns to remove support for logging in with Google and completely removed it from the mobile app so I deleted the mobile app (which can't be used offline anyway) and only use the site on my phone. All that said, I still like it more than other ones I've tried and the social element is nice too. I enjoy seeing what Internet friends are reading and I've found some good books from it. For that I wish more folks would use it. You can find my Goodreads in my HN profile.
a_bonobo 3y ago
It's the same with IMDB, isn't it? Toxic subgroups and communities 1-star bombing movies that haven't even come out yet. The wikipage on review bombing doesn't even list Goodreads but has many examples from IMDB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_bomb#Films,_television_and_videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_bomb#Films,_television_... So what could Goodreads do differently? It's true that the owners do as little as possible with the site, but that also means that overall the scoring system has very little impact. Would you trust it?
- seventhson 3y ago
  Require reviews to show a substantial understanding of what the book was about? That means moderation which is always dangerous but probably better than the alternative.
  - prepend 3y ago
    If this worked I would like it, but I think it’s impossible to automate and validate. So I only imagine an implementation being worse than nothing as mods tried to arbitrarily approve items. I think this would make people who like specific books be willing to spend time moderating and they would reject negative reviews so everything would be 5 stars.
- prepend 3y ago
  > So what could Goodreads do differently? Add a way to see ratings only from trusted people and friends. They do this now by bubbling up ratings from my contact. Id like an option to just show their average ratings instead of site wide. I do not trust any moderators that I don’t know. So I’d rather have them just show ratings from friends or people I’ve noted as reviewworthy. And maybe one degree from them. I think this applies to everything and I don’t trust Amazon reviews or App Store reviews, but do trust reviews from some people I know (after I’ve filtered out the “I love everything including AntMan3 and StarWars9 and Justice League” friends).
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  > the owners do as little as possible with the site The owner is Amazon, isn’t it? They’re working on a full ui overhaul I think
selykg 3y ago
Typical plug anytime Goodreads is mentioned that Storygraph is trying to do similar and being actively developed. https://thestorygraph.com https://thestorygraph.com I still use Goodreads because it gives me notifications of new releases, but, aside from that Storygraph does the job well.
- code-blooded 3y ago
  Second this. Storygraph is great and has a ton potential. It just needs a bit more development put into it to match Goodreads minus the bad parts. I wish had the "plus" subscription tier set at $10/yr not $49/yr. I'd definitely donate that much, but $49 is a lot in majority of the world.
  - soco 3y ago
    I only use them to keep a list of what I read with my own reviews. For Storygraph I need more taps so it's slightly behind (I tried the switch once).
- innocenat 3y ago
  Tried Storygraph once and it lacks Japanese books so I still stick with Goodreads unfortunately.
- the__alchemist 3y ago
  "Subscribe to our newsletter" was default unchecked on sign-up; love it.
- jszymborski 3y ago
  There is also BookWyrm if you're into the fediverse/activitypub. https://joinbookwyrm.com/ https://joinbookwyrm.com/
- unhammer 3y ago
  Weird signup captcha, it requires you to open devtools and remove `onpaste="return false;"` from their email field (either that or enter your email manually, typos and all)
dgb23 3y ago
One of the good things about sites like Goodreads is that they are a great source for long winded rants. I'm someone who likes reading a good rant or complaint. I'm not sure why that is but I find them very entertaining.
- causality0 3y ago
  It's a nice release. The two "the worst Rob Liefeld drawings" articles are some of my favorite pieces of media ever.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  Good point. I was so frustrated at how bad the book Atomic Habits was, (in comparison to Power of Habit). It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have. Lots of idealistic ways to organize things. Lots of mental gymnastics to supposedly make you more productive. I did like the 'improve yourself 1% a day', but I did that with a spin bike and quickly got injured... Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic. Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone agreed with me because I wasted hours reading Atomic Habits. Thank you Good Reads. It was therapeutic.
  - heap_perms 3y ago
    > It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have. That hits the nail on the head. I cannot comprehend how this book is so popular. It literally covered in dozens of cute little platitudes like "take little steps". It does not contain a single paragraph of original thought. It's just so... naively simplistic, so _obivous_.
  - veave 3y ago
    >Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic. Is it that good?
prepend 3y ago
> Goodreads Cares about Engagement Not Accuracy Yes, of course. Accuracy doesn’t make money, engagement does. This is the problem with the current state of the internet. People forgot that engagement was just the path to accuracy but is much harder to measure. So people realized that they can increase engagement to make money.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  > Accuracy doesn’t make money, engagement does. Accurate information creates a better society for everyone. Angry engaged people fed bullshit create a worse society for everyone. But yeah, the incentives are perverse, and the owner-class are willing to do whatever it takes to keep them perverse.
  - ezekiel68 3y ago
    You seem to be highlighting how society should operate rather than how it (often) does operate.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      I think you might have missed the point. Accurate information does create a better society for everyone, in this society and in any. It's like physics - cultural karma. Angry engaged people fed bullshit do create a worse society for everyone, every time. Karma. Equal reaction. That one of these options has been weaponized for profit and control is independent of those facts. It's no secret that if we don't change how society operates, we're going to make life on this planet unbearable very quickly; and this is part of the reason why.| Poverty, hunger, and inequality are rampant in America; as are the drug issues and mental health problems that go with them. This is part of the reason why. Our money is spent subsidizing war and oil. This is part of the reason why.
moolcool 3y ago
/r/badreads is full of funny examples of how bad goodreads can be
Eumenes 3y ago
I've found Goodreads incredibly useful for discovering books and keeping track of them. Def need to read between the lines with reviews, esp. if there is a polarizing topic like mentioned in the article (glorifying Russia with ongoing Ukraine conflict). I recently read a book about Francisco de Orellana's exploration of the Amazon River in the 16th century - many reviews upset that the author wasn't using every other word to call the Spanish evil conquering colonists.
- Brybry 3y ago
  Same, especially if you tend to read books by the same authors. Before Goodreads it was a huge pain to know when authors you liked were releasing new books. And being able to track all the books in a series is really nice too. I have noticed that Goodreads has gotten worse in this regard though. My to-read list with future books often lacks release dates (even years) now.
Paul_S 3y ago
Goodreads is only good (eh, decent?) as a database of books you've read. All the other functionality is pointless and or broken. The recommendation system is a joke and is obviously used to promote nonsense instead of giving you personalised recommendations.
- mhermher 3y ago
  For me, it's more of a database to keep track of books I want to read in the future. I can't read everything immediately after reading a recommendation or seeing it mentioned somewhere. Mostly I use goodreads to organize this list. It ends up getting into the "read" list after, but that part isn't as important. And when I am approaching an empty stack of books to read, I go on there and try to pop from the top of the stack on my "want to read" high priority list. Also yeah, the recommendation system is pretty bad. I can't believe they can't do better with all the ratings data they have. I get recommendations externally, but track them in goodreads.
  - kjs3 3y ago
    it's more of a database to keep track of books I want to read in the future. I use a notepad.
    - ddingus 3y ago
      I do that for a lot of things. Paper has no downtime, is robust, etc... When it comes to longer term basic information, bitmaps and text are where it's at! I can always convert my paper to a bitmap, and often from that to text if I want to. And authoring simple text basically works on every computer going back to the Apple //e I started on, which sits on my workbench to this day. (it's there to play various games people still write for it!)
- me_me_me 3y ago
  I have trouble finding new authors or good books on there to the point that I stopped trying. I only use it for reading up reviews. I was kinda shocked reading through their top X list and finding absolute garbage, rated 8+. I wonder if they suffer from IMDB syndrome.
camjohnson26 3y ago
Bookwyrm is a great alternative I’ve been using. It’s built on activitypub so you can follow accounts from Mastodon or kbin or whatever, and can even spin up your own server if you want. https://joinbookwyrm.com/ https://joinbookwyrm.com/
- izzydata 3y ago
  I might join this. I've been pretty invested in trying out various federated websites.
KingOfCoders 3y ago
Whenever I read about Goodreads I had a website called MustReadBooks in the 1990s which was rather successful - should have kept developing it :-)
- prepend 3y ago
  The second best time to develop MustReadBooks is today.
  - KingOfCoders 3y ago
    I'm building a DreamJob site for CTOs and developers who want to become CTOs, and started a podcast, but yes if I could clone myself, the best time is today.
trabant00 3y ago
People need to stop hoping for good crowd sourced reviews and ratings. Even if the platform would have the best interests it can't be done. Two simple reasons: 1. Ratings: you can not compress information down to 1 byte without losing almost all of it. I've been a professional game reviewer in another life. I used to give ratings because I was forced to by the site format. When I retired from that I looked back at tens of games I rated. The scores made absolutely no sense any way you tried to look at them. Not compared to each other, not compared to what the game set out to achieve (one way I tried to grade them as objective as possible), nothing. It can not be done. 2. By definition half of the reviews/ratings are being given by stupider than average people. How are you supposed to draw any conclusion when half of the data is garbage? Only one thing crowd sourced ratings are useful for: helping the platform become a gatekeeper and then squeezing the reviewed.
- pklausler 3y ago
  Here's a free idea for you budding entrepreneurs: allow the user of a review site to apply their own custom weights to reviewers. If you discover a reviewer with good taste, weight their reviews more highly. And also be able to incorporate their weightings of other reviewers into your own -- if A thinks highly of B, then that raises your default weighting of B.
  - squirtlebonflow 3y ago
    This is a decent idea, but not sure how it could work. I'm no mathematician, but it seems like you're dealing with an extremely large set of infinite fractions, that might take some time to compute. For example, if I leave a 5 star review and there is one other review, 1 star, it would be 3 stars if we had the same weight. But if someone votes me 76% "taste score", and THEY have 50% weight, and I voted THEM 37% "taste score", then both of our votes affect each other. And this would happen for an cycle of reviewers reviewing other reviewers. Unless you meant only personal settings, in which case I think it would only work for niche audiences. There's a good chance that there's zero overlap between sets of reviewers on many products on Amazon except perhaps people who are chronically online, reviewing products. IMO those people's reviews are not as helpful as a person who leaves an occasional review, because in the latter case, the product stood out for some reason.
foobarbecue 3y ago
Is there something like reviewmeta.com for goodreads?
the_af 3y ago
I must be out of the loop: I never knew that Goodreads mattered at all. I don't know anybody who uses it. I understand fake reviews in Amazon are a problem: if I'm shopping there, I do look at the reviews, especially bad reviews to see if there is anything wrong with the product. I will disregard reviews that don't make sense and only pay attention to things that matter to me, but it's possible that I'll be influenced by review bombing... I'm only human after all. But Goodreads? Who cares either way?
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  > I must be out of the loop: I never knew that Goodreads mattered at all. I don't know anybody who uses it. You're out of the loop. Goodreads and Facebook groups are used heavily in the author and reading/fan communities. Heck, my wife is a Goodreads librarian and often helps out authors with issues (which are, unfortunately, incredibly common since Goodreads support is largely non-existent and yet another reason why the platform is horrible, probably due to to it being an effective monopoly in this space). My bet is, of the many people she knows in the community (both authors and readers), every single one is active on Goodreads.
- ip26 3y ago
  It was supposed to be a review site that wasn’t trying to sell you books, ergo it would be more even-handed. I often read both Amazon and Goodreads reviews of a book; the perspective is usually different.
  - the_af 3y ago
    Interesting. However, I don't pick books based on review sites. I like reading reviews of books I've already read, a kind of "conversation" with another person across the globe. But as purchasing decisions? Nope. (Same with movies, by the way. I don't remember ever avoiding a movie because it had bad reviews, who cares?).
Etrnl_President 3y ago
Imagine what China could do with this sort of information about its' subjects.
mhb 3y ago
I'll mention https://shepherd.com/ https://shepherd.com/ which has an interesting feature: 8,000+ authors have shared five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood. We make it easy to find the books they recommend through a book you already love, an author you adore, or a Wikipedia topic that interests you.
- billfruit 3y ago
  Fivebooks.com seems better, some of their book lists are really in depth, from people who seems to know their specific topics. Like check the fivebooks list on the history of modern Greece: a really interesting, enlightening list: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/christos-chomenidis-real-greece/ https://fivebooks.com/best-books/christos-chomenidis-real-gr...
- bwb 3y ago
  Thanks for the kind mention :) We are entirely focused on book exploring, discovery, and better recommendations. We are only 2 years old and bootstrapped. We just launched genre pages here -> https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/hard-science-fiction https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/hard-science-fiction You can filter in on sub genres, topics, what age the book is for, and a lot more. Trying to make discovery more fun :)
PaulHoule 3y ago
The web really needs a web site where you can make a good landing page for any book you want to refer people to.
stared 3y ago
> Few people read reviews whether it is Amazon, Yelp, or anywhere else. I do. IMHO, star ratings are close to pointless. They are deeply flawed even without spam, advertising, or moral outrage votes. And especially for goods that depend on a subjective reception - such as books. First, grading patterns are various. Many use either 1 or 5. For others, 4 is already a failing grade. Second, I don't care what the average reception is. I might be (and usually: I am) looking for something different from the other reader. A review offers much more. An advantage (or disadvantage) is something I deeply care about, don't care at all, or I would use the same point, but in the opposite way. And well, other times, the review points that the person has no idea what they are talking about - e.g. it is clear that these are based on hype (or: guilty-by-association) rather than the book's quality.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  I don't always read reviews from Amazon, specially if it is of good enough brand that I know of, but I definitely read book reviews and not just decide on star rating. There are so many variables that definitely can't be captured in a rating. I guess majority of people does that. Most popular books are generally rated very low in Amazon or Goodreads. I don't think star rating matter as much as a single reviewer that person care about, although I could be wrong.
- waylandsmithers 3y ago
  Oftentimes I find that the written reviews are just a plot summary with little analysis or opinion
- tasuki 3y ago
  When there are ratings with 1-5 stars, I filter to only read the 3 star and 2 star reviews. The 5 star and 1 star reviews are meaningless, the 4 star reviews are a minor gripe, 2 star reviews often contain valid criticism (though sometimes it's just "I hated it but there's this one thing I liked"), and 3 star reviews offer a nuanced point of view.
gdulli 3y ago
Has a good cross-media site ever been done, for books, games, shows, movies, and music in one place? Or is there anyone else who has that vision? I could see myself spending a lot of time on a site where I could maintain one profile/habit for all of them. Each of those alone I enjoy, but I've never been able to make it a regular thing to go to a site for just one of them. I love movies but I'm not so much of a cinephile to put a lot of time into letterboxd, and so on. Pretty much every day, one of those is important to me. But each of them alone has gaps in my life where I may not care about them much for a few weeks to a few months at a time.
- mbo 3y ago
  I believe https://sonemic.com/ https://sonemic.com/ is heading down that path. For context, I am an _extremely_ happy user (and paying subscriber) of Rate Your Music . I find the genre classifications, album descriptors, user reviews and ratings incredibly useful and they have greatly enhanced my music discovery process, and my understanding of the music I come across.
DeathArrow 3y ago
Is there a good a website with a good reading recommendation system based on what you and others have read?
- padolsey 3y ago
  Biased,.. but I've been building a site that does this for a few years now and reckon it's not bad. It's more of a passion project. Lets you type in books you like and then will find the most intersecting set of other books. https://abooklike.foo https://abooklike.foo // dataset is over a year old, be warned.
ravenstine 3y ago
I anything actually good anymore? - Goodreads: Broken recommendation system, meh UI, review wars - Google Search: Pointless - Reddit: Overtly user-hostile, poor UX, tiktokified - YouTube: Mainstream, ad-riddled, tiktokified - Yelp: Cluttered-UI, favors jerks, hostile to businesses - Gmail: Oh yeah we're gonna delete your emails if you don't log in after a while - Netflix: Shrinking catalogue, worse quality shows - Instagram: Tiktokifying - Twitter: Mostly the worst people remain on it - Facebook: Not much of a social network, only decent thing left is Marketplace - Wikipedia: Strayed far from its mission, mass editing by agenda-driven groups - LinkedIn: Recruiter-centered, mostly garbage content - DuckDuckGo: Can't even respect quotes or intitle like it used to. - Amazon: Tons of shabby products, tons of fake reviews - Medium: The TEDx talks of blogging No wonder I visit an ever shrinking number of domains daily.
- pc86 3y ago
  My biggest complaint about Twitter is that the spam has gotten worse in the last year or so. I get 2-3 spam DMs a day, and probably once every week or two I go through and report all of them but it's never-ending. IMO the people who left Twitter (and haven't come back) were worse than anyone who's on it now. There hasn't been any meaningful change in discourse - for better or worse - that I've noticed.
  - memetomancer 3y ago
    | worse than anyone who's on it now. Bold claim about a site that is, in the last year or so, pivoted to explicit and quite public encouragement of Nazi/racist viewpoints.
- nindalf 3y ago
  Absolutely. May I add one more? - Hacker News: filled with old ~men~ people shouting at clouds, reminiscing about how things were better in the good old days.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    The good old days like yesterday, when ad blockers worked on Youtube, and you could read through Twitter anonymously.
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
4chan /lit/ is a highly highly underrated online 'book club'. It's almost nothing like the other boards and filled with students in literature majors. Some of my favorite books ever were recommended from there, and the 'natural flow' nature of 4chan makes it more entertaining and less mob like.
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  I’ve been wary of the group since I read this: > "I really thought long about this, and I haven't slept in two days due to ongoing harassments of 4chan," cookiengineer claimed in a post to the Tenacity GitHub Issues page some 13 hours ago. "As the first people were literally arriving at my place of living, where they knocked on my doors and windows to scare us, I am hereby officially stepping down as a maintainer of this project. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/07/07/tenacity_maintainer_quits_4chan_harassment/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/07/07/tenacity_maintain...
  - doctor_blood 3y ago
    >wary of the group There is no "group" - 4chan is not a monolith, and many of boards have members that do not mix at all. /tg/ - the traditional games board (TTRPGS and the like) - might as well be an entirely different website than, say, /pol/ or /g/. 4chan in general is also extremely tame as compared to 10 or 15 years ago.
- thissitesucks__ 3y ago
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- bronikowski 3y ago
  /lit/ is the only place I can still find a book discussion that's more than surface read. But it's hard to recommend for "normal" people because, you know, chan culture.
blueferret 3y ago
Four-book author here (will post links if requested). I used GoodReads for years, but kept running into problems with the author tools. Finally stopped when they claimed my latest book - published this year - belonged to another author! Considering a full-on transfer over to another platform. Thanks for all the recommendations here.
rcastellotti 3y ago
no, but it seems it has incentive to be reads, further investigation may be required
stolenmerch 3y ago
Every single time a Goodreads post comes up it's always negative and the comments are full of supposedly better alternatives. Except those alternatives are never better. I've tried most of them and they very often are ghost towns or don't even have the book I'm reading, let alone recommend anything useful. LibraryThing comes the closest, but its UI is equally bad if not worse than Goodreads. Goodreads is good enough for me. I follow and am followed by enough people that writing reviews is worth it.
wtf242 3y ago
I build this app over a decade ago. https://thegreatestbooks.org https://thegreatestbooks.org which I aggregate all the "lists" and use a weighted algorithm to create a single list of the best books. I've been working on a new version with genres, and a much smarter algorithm, which I am getting close to finishing.
padolsey 3y ago
What upsets me most is how much of a treasure trove of data that amazon/goodreads are sitting on and yet their recommendations are still pitiful. A basic collaborative-filtering algorithm would be better than "OH WE THINK YOU WILL LIKE THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT IS IN THE SAME GENRE AS A BOOK YOU BOUGHT A YEAR AGO!". I'll humbly plug https://abooklike.foo https://abooklike.foo just in case people want better book recommendations. You can input books u like and it'll find others you may like. I can explain more about its mechanics if useful. Been working on it for around 6 years now as a side project. Anyway, just posting in case someone's scanning through the thread and happens to see : )
eterevsky 3y ago
I'm using Goodreads to manage the books that I read and plan to read. I sometimes looks at the reviews of the books, but never look at the star rating because of how uninformative it is. For most of the books that I care about their rating is somewhere between 3.0 and 4.5 and I can't for the life of me see any correlation between the my enjoyment of the book and its rating. I always assumed that this is just a consequence of taste in books being so different for different people. Averaging these personal preferences just doesn't produce a good signal. Which brings me to the question: does anybody actual care about ratings on Goodreads?
thenerdhead 3y ago
What gave it away? The fact that Amazon bought it, retired the API, and put a "Buy on Amazon" button on every book? Also majority of reviews are fake. Go look at any new Ryan Holiday book months before it is released. Obviously these authors and their publishing teams know how to game the system so more people end up buying the book. GoodReads has an incentive to sell books. It has no incentive to sell good books. All the good books have < 200 reviews and hardly anyone even knows of them.
- _v7gu 3y ago
  I mean, Ryan Holiday actually published a book where he explains how he games the system via low effort news sites and fake controversies.
sapsan 3y ago
I have been enjoying https://oku.club/ https://oku.club/ recently in case anyone is searching for a nicely functioning alternative.
karaterobot 3y ago
Meanwhile, Librarything continues quietly being awesome, with deep tools for cataloging and a genuinely quirky vibe that feels like it's from a better era of the web.
farazzz 3y ago
Goodreads is so bad, but there’s no good book review site alternative (although many good book trackers). I’ve been wishing for a Letterboxd like alternative with good UI and features
achllies 3y ago
Lore & Quill is another site more focused on recommendations and genre based browsing and is actively being developed as well. https://lorequill.com/ https://lorequill.com/
Cenk 3y ago
I’ve been using https://oku.club https://oku.club and am very happy with it
AlbertCory 3y ago
> Goodreads Cares about Engagement It's not working for me. I have two books of my own, and still, I never go there. AFAIK Amazon acquisition didn't ruin Zappos. IMDb is more garbage than it was before, but I still use it. But Goodreads: nope, it was too close to what they already did on book selling, so they killed it. Slowly.
- dimaor 3y ago
  lol, I am only using GR for the title + image which is downloaded when you post the URL into notion. never even considered being influenced by random people from the internet, unless this is someone I know.
- scrum-treats 3y ago
  > AFAIK Amazon acquisition didn't ruin Zappos. As someone who used Zappos a lot before Amazon acquisition, IMO the quality and selection decreased after Amazon takeover. Today, given the authentication issues across all Amazon services, I just don't go to Zappos anymore because I don't trust the products. Because Amazon. Additionally the UI is dated. Such a bummer.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    ok, that's why I said AFAIK. I've only used it a couple times, but no issues.
HardwareLust 3y ago
Amazon is slowly choking the life out of it, right on cue. I used to interact with it quite a bit, now I rarely use it anymore. After this year's reading challenge is over, I'll probably just stop using it all together.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Openlibrary is an open alternative (as well as letting you actually read obscure books). They have Goodreads import I believe.
shmde 3y ago
Up until recently if you accidentally touched (NOT click/press) the star rating while scrolling through Goodreads a modal would slide up covering 3/4th of the screen asking ( more like holding at gunpoint) you to rate the book. I don't understand how can a PM/web developer actually be this hostile. They absolutely knew it was a dark pattern and now have gone back to normal.

277 points by lawgimenez 3y ago

Happy Story Graph user here. Goodreads can go die in a fire.

Alternatives (some from the comments here): https://www.thestorygraph.com/ https://www.thestorygraph.com/ https://oku.club/ https://oku.club/ https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ https://joinbookwyrm.com/ https://joinbookwyrm.com/ https://bookrastinating.com/ https://bookrastinating.com/ (I haven't tried any of these yet.)

crossroadsguy 3y ago
I have tried all of these - yes, all of these. None of them are as good as GoodReads, not even close. And that is with the understanding that GoodReads itself is really bad. LibraryThing is like a poor GoodReads, that's it. So no.

Jemaclus 3y ago

IMO, the thing Goodreads has that nobody else is automatic updates from a Kindle. When I finish a book on my Kindle, Goodreads automatically tracks it. It doesn't seem possible for Story Graph or Bookwyrm or Librarything or any of these others to do that, which means I have to manually curate my list of books I've read and want to read. Right now, my process is this: 1) buy a book, 2) read it, 3) my friends can see that I read it and left a star rating. I think this makes a pretty hard barrier to entry in this market, because I read 99.9% of the time on my Kindle, and I'm lazy. :)

p3rls 3y ago

I have been complaining about this for years and years as someone who builds these types of platforms. It's the same for thousands of niches across google. The top result is camped by some SEO garbage. For instance, I run a kpop platform right now (kpopping.com) my competitors are making 10x what I make just copying my pages and putting them up on a wordpress. I'm so sick of it. Google can't be destroyed soon enough for me.

rents 3y ago

So goodreads reviews are being abused and Amazon needs to fix it. Well if it becomes big then they will.

LindaMadison 3y ago

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LindaMadison 3y ago

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eatonphil 3y ago

This seems focused on their review system which is fine of them to focus on. They sell books (through Amazon/Kindle) so I don't expect their own reviews to be great. Unrelated to the reviews the app is slow and crashes often. They use dark-ish patterns to remove support for logging in with Google and completely removed it from the mobile app so I deleted the mobile app (which can't be used offline anyway) and only use the site on my phone. All that said, I still like it more than other ones I've tried and the social element is nice too. I enjoy seeing what Internet friends are reading and I've found some good books from it. For that I wish more folks would use it. You can find my Goodreads in my HN profile.

a_bonobo 3y ago

It's the same with IMDB, isn't it? Toxic subgroups and communities 1-star bombing movies that haven't even come out yet. The wikipage on review bombing doesn't even list Goodreads but has many examples from IMDB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_bomb#Films,_television_and_videos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_bomb#Films,_television_... So what could Goodreads do differently? It's true that the owners do as little as possible with the site, but that also means that overall the scoring system has very little impact. Would you trust it?

seventhson 3y ago
Require reviews to show a substantial understanding of what the book was about? That means moderation which is always dangerous but probably better than the alternative.
- prepend 3y ago
  If this worked I would like it, but I think it’s impossible to automate and validate. So I only imagine an implementation being worse than nothing as mods tried to arbitrarily approve items. I think this would make people who like specific books be willing to spend time moderating and they would reject negative reviews so everything would be 5 stars.
prepend 3y ago
> So what could Goodreads do differently? Add a way to see ratings only from trusted people and friends. They do this now by bubbling up ratings from my contact. Id like an option to just show their average ratings instead of site wide. I do not trust any moderators that I don’t know. So I’d rather have them just show ratings from friends or people I’ve noted as reviewworthy. And maybe one degree from them. I think this applies to everything and I don’t trust Amazon reviews or App Store reviews, but do trust reviews from some people I know (after I’ve filtered out the “I love everything including AntMan3 and StarWars9 and Justice League” friends).
barbariangrunge 3y ago
> the owners do as little as possible with the site The owner is Amazon, isn’t it? They’re working on a full ui overhaul I think

selykg 3y ago

Typical plug anytime Goodreads is mentioned that Storygraph is trying to do similar and being actively developed. https://thestorygraph.com https://thestorygraph.com I still use Goodreads because it gives me notifications of new releases, but, aside from that Storygraph does the job well.

code-blooded 3y ago
Second this. Storygraph is great and has a ton potential. It just needs a bit more development put into it to match Goodreads minus the bad parts. I wish had the "plus" subscription tier set at $10/yr not $49/yr. I'd definitely donate that much, but $49 is a lot in majority of the world.
- soco 3y ago
  I only use them to keep a list of what I read with my own reviews. For Storygraph I need more taps so it's slightly behind (I tried the switch once).
innocenat 3y ago
Tried Storygraph once and it lacks Japanese books so I still stick with Goodreads unfortunately.
the__alchemist 3y ago
"Subscribe to our newsletter" was default unchecked on sign-up; love it.
jszymborski 3y ago
There is also BookWyrm if you're into the fediverse/activitypub. https://joinbookwyrm.com/ https://joinbookwyrm.com/
unhammer 3y ago
Weird signup captcha, it requires you to open devtools and remove `onpaste="return false;"` from their email field (either that or enter your email manually, typos and all)

dgb23 3y ago

One of the good things about sites like Goodreads is that they are a great source for long winded rants. I'm someone who likes reading a good rant or complaint. I'm not sure why that is but I find them very entertaining.

causality0 3y ago
It's a nice release. The two "the worst Rob Liefeld drawings" articles are some of my favorite pieces of media ever.
hospitalJail 3y ago
Good point. I was so frustrated at how bad the book Atomic Habits was, (in comparison to Power of Habit). It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have. Lots of idealistic ways to organize things. Lots of mental gymnastics to supposedly make you more productive. I did like the 'improve yourself 1% a day', but I did that with a spin bike and quickly got injured... Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic. Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone agreed with me because I wasted hours reading Atomic Habits. Thank you Good Reads. It was therapeutic.
- heap_perms 3y ago
  > It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have. That hits the nail on the head. I cannot comprehend how this book is so popular. It literally covered in dozens of cute little platitudes like "take little steps". It does not contain a single paragraph of original thought. It's just so... naively simplistic, so _obivous_.
- veave 3y ago
  >Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic. Is it that good?

prepend 3y ago

> Goodreads Cares about Engagement Not Accuracy Yes, of course. Accuracy doesn’t make money, engagement does. This is the problem with the current state of the internet. People forgot that engagement was just the path to accuracy but is much harder to measure. So people realized that they can increase engagement to make money.

mandmandam 3y ago
> Accuracy doesn’t make money, engagement does. Accurate information creates a better society for everyone. Angry engaged people fed bullshit create a worse society for everyone. But yeah, the incentives are perverse, and the owner-class are willing to do whatever it takes to keep them perverse.
- ezekiel68 3y ago
  You seem to be highlighting how society should operate rather than how it (often) does operate.
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    I think you might have missed the point. Accurate information does create a better society for everyone, in this society and in any. It's like physics - cultural karma. Angry engaged people fed bullshit do create a worse society for everyone, every time. Karma. Equal reaction. That one of these options has been weaponized for profit and control is independent of those facts. It's no secret that if we don't change how society operates, we're going to make life on this planet unbearable very quickly; and this is part of the reason why.| Poverty, hunger, and inequality are rampant in America; as are the drug issues and mental health problems that go with them. This is part of the reason why. Our money is spent subsidizing war and oil. This is part of the reason why.

moolcool 3y ago

/r/badreads is full of funny examples of how bad goodreads can be

Eumenes 3y ago

I've found Goodreads incredibly useful for discovering books and keeping track of them. Def need to read between the lines with reviews, esp. if there is a polarizing topic like mentioned in the article (glorifying Russia with ongoing Ukraine conflict). I recently read a book about Francisco de Orellana's exploration of the Amazon River in the 16th century - many reviews upset that the author wasn't using every other word to call the Spanish evil conquering colonists.

Brybry 3y ago
Same, especially if you tend to read books by the same authors. Before Goodreads it was a huge pain to know when authors you liked were releasing new books. And being able to track all the books in a series is really nice too. I have noticed that Goodreads has gotten worse in this regard though. My to-read list with future books often lacks release dates (even years) now.

Paul_S 3y ago

Goodreads is only good (eh, decent?) as a database of books you've read. All the other functionality is pointless and or broken. The recommendation system is a joke and is obviously used to promote nonsense instead of giving you personalised recommendations.

mhermher 3y ago
For me, it's more of a database to keep track of books I want to read in the future. I can't read everything immediately after reading a recommendation or seeing it mentioned somewhere. Mostly I use goodreads to organize this list. It ends up getting into the "read" list after, but that part isn't as important. And when I am approaching an empty stack of books to read, I go on there and try to pop from the top of the stack on my "want to read" high priority list. Also yeah, the recommendation system is pretty bad. I can't believe they can't do better with all the ratings data they have. I get recommendations externally, but track them in goodreads.
- kjs3 3y ago
  it's more of a database to keep track of books I want to read in the future. I use a notepad.
  - ddingus 3y ago
    I do that for a lot of things. Paper has no downtime, is robust, etc... When it comes to longer term basic information, bitmaps and text are where it's at! I can always convert my paper to a bitmap, and often from that to text if I want to. And authoring simple text basically works on every computer going back to the Apple //e I started on, which sits on my workbench to this day. (it's there to play various games people still write for it!)
me_me_me 3y ago
I have trouble finding new authors or good books on there to the point that I stopped trying. I only use it for reading up reviews. I was kinda shocked reading through their top X list and finding absolute garbage, rated 8+. I wonder if they suffer from IMDB syndrome.

camjohnson26 3y ago

Bookwyrm is a great alternative I’ve been using. It’s built on activitypub so you can follow accounts from Mastodon or kbin or whatever, and can even spin up your own server if you want. https://joinbookwyrm.com/ https://joinbookwyrm.com/

izzydata 3y ago
I might join this. I've been pretty invested in trying out various federated websites.

KingOfCoders 3y ago

Whenever I read about Goodreads I had a website called MustReadBooks in the 1990s which was rather successful - should have kept developing it :-)

prepend 3y ago
The second best time to develop MustReadBooks is today.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  I'm building a DreamJob site for CTOs and developers who want to become CTOs, and started a podcast, but yes if I could clone myself, the best time is today.

trabant00 3y ago

People need to stop hoping for good crowd sourced reviews and ratings. Even if the platform would have the best interests it can't be done. Two simple reasons: 1. Ratings: you can not compress information down to 1 byte without losing almost all of it. I've been a professional game reviewer in another life. I used to give ratings because I was forced to by the site format. When I retired from that I looked back at tens of games I rated. The scores made absolutely no sense any way you tried to look at them. Not compared to each other, not compared to what the game set out to achieve (one way I tried to grade them as objective as possible), nothing. It can not be done. 2. By definition half of the reviews/ratings are being given by stupider than average people. How are you supposed to draw any conclusion when half of the data is garbage? Only one thing crowd sourced ratings are useful for: helping the platform become a gatekeeper and then squeezing the reviewed.

pklausler 3y ago
Here's a free idea for you budding entrepreneurs: allow the user of a review site to apply their own custom weights to reviewers. If you discover a reviewer with good taste, weight their reviews more highly. And also be able to incorporate their weightings of other reviewers into your own -- if A thinks highly of B, then that raises your default weighting of B.
- squirtlebonflow 3y ago
  This is a decent idea, but not sure how it could work. I'm no mathematician, but it seems like you're dealing with an extremely large set of infinite fractions, that might take some time to compute. For example, if I leave a 5 star review and there is one other review, 1 star, it would be 3 stars if we had the same weight. But if someone votes me 76% "taste score", and THEY have 50% weight, and I voted THEM 37% "taste score", then both of our votes affect each other. And this would happen for an cycle of reviewers reviewing other reviewers. Unless you meant only personal settings, in which case I think it would only work for niche audiences. There's a good chance that there's zero overlap between sets of reviewers on many products on Amazon except perhaps people who are chronically online, reviewing products. IMO those people's reviews are not as helpful as a person who leaves an occasional review, because in the latter case, the product stood out for some reason.

foobarbecue 3y ago

Is there something like reviewmeta.com for goodreads?

the_af 3y ago

I must be out of the loop: I never knew that Goodreads mattered at all. I don't know anybody who uses it. I understand fake reviews in Amazon are a problem: if I'm shopping there, I do look at the reviews, especially bad reviews to see if there is anything wrong with the product. I will disregard reviews that don't make sense and only pay attention to things that matter to me, but it's possible that I'll be influenced by review bombing... I'm only human after all. But Goodreads? Who cares either way?

BaseballPhysics 3y ago
> I must be out of the loop: I never knew that Goodreads mattered at all. I don't know anybody who uses it. You're out of the loop. Goodreads and Facebook groups are used heavily in the author and reading/fan communities. Heck, my wife is a Goodreads librarian and often helps out authors with issues (which are, unfortunately, incredibly common since Goodreads support is largely non-existent and yet another reason why the platform is horrible, probably due to to it being an effective monopoly in this space). My bet is, of the many people she knows in the community (both authors and readers), every single one is active on Goodreads.
ip26 3y ago
It was supposed to be a review site that wasn’t trying to sell you books, ergo it would be more even-handed. I often read both Amazon and Goodreads reviews of a book; the perspective is usually different.
- the_af 3y ago
  Interesting. However, I don't pick books based on review sites. I like reading reviews of books I've already read, a kind of "conversation" with another person across the globe. But as purchasing decisions? Nope. (Same with movies, by the way. I don't remember ever avoiding a movie because it had bad reviews, who cares?).

Etrnl_President 3y ago

Imagine what China could do with this sort of information about its' subjects.

mhb 3y ago

I'll mention https://shepherd.com/ https://shepherd.com/ which has an interesting feature: 8,000+ authors have shared five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood. We make it easy to find the books they recommend through a book you already love, an author you adore, or a Wikipedia topic that interests you.

billfruit 3y ago
Fivebooks.com seems better, some of their book lists are really in depth, from people who seems to know their specific topics. Like check the fivebooks list on the history of modern Greece: a really interesting, enlightening list: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/christos-chomenidis-real-greece/ https://fivebooks.com/best-books/christos-chomenidis-real-gr...
bwb 3y ago
Thanks for the kind mention :) We are entirely focused on book exploring, discovery, and better recommendations. We are only 2 years old and bootstrapped. We just launched genre pages here -> https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/hard-science-fiction https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/hard-science-fiction You can filter in on sub genres, topics, what age the book is for, and a lot more. Trying to make discovery more fun :)

PaulHoule 3y ago

The web really needs a web site where you can make a good landing page for any book you want to refer people to.

stared 3y ago

> Few people read reviews whether it is Amazon, Yelp, or anywhere else. I do. IMHO, star ratings are close to pointless. They are deeply flawed even without spam, advertising, or moral outrage votes. And especially for goods that depend on a subjective reception - such as books. First, grading patterns are various. Many use either 1 or 5. For others, 4 is already a failing grade. Second, I don't care what the average reception is. I might be (and usually: I am) looking for something different from the other reader. A review offers much more. An advantage (or disadvantage) is something I deeply care about, don't care at all, or I would use the same point, but in the opposite way. And well, other times, the review points that the person has no idea what they are talking about - e.g. it is clear that these are based on hype (or: guilty-by-association) rather than the book's quality.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago
I don't always read reviews from Amazon, specially if it is of good enough brand that I know of, but I definitely read book reviews and not just decide on star rating. There are so many variables that definitely can't be captured in a rating. I guess majority of people does that. Most popular books are generally rated very low in Amazon or Goodreads. I don't think star rating matter as much as a single reviewer that person care about, although I could be wrong.
waylandsmithers 3y ago
Oftentimes I find that the written reviews are just a plot summary with little analysis or opinion
tasuki 3y ago
When there are ratings with 1-5 stars, I filter to only read the 3 star and 2 star reviews. The 5 star and 1 star reviews are meaningless, the 4 star reviews are a minor gripe, 2 star reviews often contain valid criticism (though sometimes it's just "I hated it but there's this one thing I liked"), and 3 star reviews offer a nuanced point of view.

gdulli 3y ago

Has a good cross-media site ever been done, for books, games, shows, movies, and music in one place? Or is there anyone else who has that vision? I could see myself spending a lot of time on a site where I could maintain one profile/habit for all of them. Each of those alone I enjoy, but I've never been able to make it a regular thing to go to a site for just one of them. I love movies but I'm not so much of a cinephile to put a lot of time into letterboxd, and so on. Pretty much every day, one of those is important to me. But each of them alone has gaps in my life where I may not care about them much for a few weeks to a few months at a time.

mbo 3y ago
I believe https://sonemic.com/ https://sonemic.com/ is heading down that path. For context, I am an _extremely_ happy user (and paying subscriber) of Rate Your Music . I find the genre classifications, album descriptors, user reviews and ratings incredibly useful and they have greatly enhanced my music discovery process, and my understanding of the music I come across.

DeathArrow 3y ago

Is there a good a website with a good reading recommendation system based on what you and others have read?

padolsey 3y ago
Biased,.. but I've been building a site that does this for a few years now and reckon it's not bad. It's more of a passion project. Lets you type in books you like and then will find the most intersecting set of other books. https://abooklike.foo https://abooklike.foo // dataset is over a year old, be warned.

ravenstine 3y ago

I anything actually good anymore? - Goodreads: Broken recommendation system, meh UI, review wars - Google Search: Pointless - Reddit: Overtly user-hostile, poor UX, tiktokified - YouTube: Mainstream, ad-riddled, tiktokified - Yelp: Cluttered-UI, favors jerks, hostile to businesses - Gmail: Oh yeah we're gonna delete your emails if you don't log in after a while - Netflix: Shrinking catalogue, worse quality shows - Instagram: Tiktokifying - Twitter: Mostly the worst people remain on it - Facebook: Not much of a social network, only decent thing left is Marketplace - Wikipedia: Strayed far from its mission, mass editing by agenda-driven groups - LinkedIn: Recruiter-centered, mostly garbage content - DuckDuckGo: Can't even respect quotes or intitle like it used to. - Amazon: Tons of shabby products, tons of fake reviews - Medium: The TEDx talks of blogging No wonder I visit an ever shrinking number of domains daily.

pc86 3y ago
My biggest complaint about Twitter is that the spam has gotten worse in the last year or so. I get 2-3 spam DMs a day, and probably once every week or two I go through and report all of them but it's never-ending. IMO the people who left Twitter (and haven't come back) were worse than anyone who's on it now. There hasn't been any meaningful change in discourse - for better or worse - that I've noticed.
- memetomancer 3y ago
  | worse than anyone who's on it now. Bold claim about a site that is, in the last year or so, pivoted to explicit and quite public encouragement of Nazi/racist viewpoints.
nindalf 3y ago
Absolutely. May I add one more? - Hacker News: filled with old ~men~ people shouting at clouds, reminiscing about how things were better in the good old days.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  The good old days like yesterday, when ad blockers worked on Youtube, and you could read through Twitter anonymously.

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

4chan /lit/ is a highly highly underrated online 'book club'. It's almost nothing like the other boards and filled with students in literature majors. Some of my favorite books ever were recommended from there, and the 'natural flow' nature of 4chan makes it more entertaining and less mob like.

barbariangrunge 3y ago
I’ve been wary of the group since I read this: > "I really thought long about this, and I haven't slept in two days due to ongoing harassments of 4chan," cookiengineer claimed in a post to the Tenacity GitHub Issues page some 13 hours ago. "As the first people were literally arriving at my place of living, where they knocked on my doors and windows to scare us, I am hereby officially stepping down as a maintainer of this project. https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/07/07/tenacity_maintainer_quits_4chan_harassment/ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/07/07/tenacity_maintain...
- doctor_blood 3y ago
  >wary of the group There is no "group" - 4chan is not a monolith, and many of boards have members that do not mix at all. /tg/ - the traditional games board (TTRPGS and the like) - might as well be an entirely different website than, say, /pol/ or /g/. 4chan in general is also extremely tame as compared to 10 or 15 years ago.
thissitesucks__ 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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bronikowski 3y ago
/lit/ is the only place I can still find a book discussion that's more than surface read. But it's hard to recommend for "normal" people because, you know, chan culture.

blueferret 3y ago

Four-book author here (will post links if requested). I used GoodReads for years, but kept running into problems with the author tools. Finally stopped when they claimed my latest book - published this year - belonged to another author! Considering a full-on transfer over to another platform. Thanks for all the recommendations here.

rcastellotti 3y ago

no, but it seems it has incentive to be reads, further investigation may be required

stolenmerch 3y ago

Every single time a Goodreads post comes up it's always negative and the comments are full of supposedly better alternatives. Except those alternatives are never better. I've tried most of them and they very often are ghost towns or don't even have the book I'm reading, let alone recommend anything useful. LibraryThing comes the closest, but its UI is equally bad if not worse than Goodreads. Goodreads is good enough for me. I follow and am followed by enough people that writing reviews is worth it.

wtf242 3y ago

I build this app over a decade ago. https://thegreatestbooks.org https://thegreatestbooks.org which I aggregate all the "lists" and use a weighted algorithm to create a single list of the best books. I've been working on a new version with genres, and a much smarter algorithm, which I am getting close to finishing.

padolsey 3y ago

What upsets me most is how much of a treasure trove of data that amazon/goodreads are sitting on and yet their recommendations are still pitiful. A basic collaborative-filtering algorithm would be better than "OH WE THINK YOU WILL LIKE THIS BOOK BECAUSE IT IS IN THE SAME GENRE AS A BOOK YOU BOUGHT A YEAR AGO!". I'll humbly plug https://abooklike.foo https://abooklike.foo just in case people want better book recommendations. You can input books u like and it'll find others you may like. I can explain more about its mechanics if useful. Been working on it for around 6 years now as a side project. Anyway, just posting in case someone's scanning through the thread and happens to see : )

eterevsky 3y ago

I'm using Goodreads to manage the books that I read and plan to read. I sometimes looks at the reviews of the books, but never look at the star rating because of how uninformative it is. For most of the books that I care about their rating is somewhere between 3.0 and 4.5 and I can't for the life of me see any correlation between the my enjoyment of the book and its rating. I always assumed that this is just a consequence of taste in books being so different for different people. Averaging these personal preferences just doesn't produce a good signal. Which brings me to the question: does anybody actual care about ratings on Goodreads?

thenerdhead 3y ago

What gave it away? The fact that Amazon bought it, retired the API, and put a "Buy on Amazon" button on every book? Also majority of reviews are fake. Go look at any new Ryan Holiday book months before it is released. Obviously these authors and their publishing teams know how to game the system so more people end up buying the book. GoodReads has an incentive to sell books. It has no incentive to sell good books. All the good books have < 200 reviews and hardly anyone even knows of them.

_v7gu 3y ago
I mean, Ryan Holiday actually published a book where he explains how he games the system via low effort news sites and fake controversies.

sapsan 3y ago

I have been enjoying https://oku.club/ https://oku.club/ recently in case anyone is searching for a nicely functioning alternative.

karaterobot 3y ago

Meanwhile, Librarything continues quietly being awesome, with deep tools for cataloging and a genuinely quirky vibe that feels like it's from a better era of the web.

farazzz 3y ago

Goodreads is so bad, but there’s no good book review site alternative (although many good book trackers). I’ve been wishing for a Letterboxd like alternative with good UI and features

achllies 3y ago

Lore & Quill is another site more focused on recommendations and genre based browsing and is actively being developed as well. https://lorequill.com/ https://lorequill.com/

Cenk 3y ago

I’ve been using https://oku.club https://oku.club and am very happy with it

AlbertCory 3y ago

> Goodreads Cares about Engagement It's not working for me. I have two books of my own, and still, I never go there. AFAIK Amazon acquisition didn't ruin Zappos. IMDb is more garbage than it was before, but I still use it. But Goodreads: nope, it was too close to what they already did on book selling, so they killed it. Slowly.

dimaor 3y ago
lol, I am only using GR for the title + image which is downloaded when you post the URL into notion. never even considered being influenced by random people from the internet, unless this is someone I know.
scrum-treats 3y ago
> AFAIK Amazon acquisition didn't ruin Zappos. As someone who used Zappos a lot before Amazon acquisition, IMO the quality and selection decreased after Amazon takeover. Today, given the authentication issues across all Amazon services, I just don't go to Zappos anymore because I don't trust the products. Because Amazon. Additionally the UI is dated. Such a bummer.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  ok, that's why I said AFAIK. I've only used it a couple times, but no issues.

HardwareLust 3y ago

Amazon is slowly choking the life out of it, right on cue. I used to interact with it quite a bit, now I rarely use it anymore. After this year's reading challenge is over, I'll probably just stop using it all together.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

Openlibrary is an open alternative (as well as letting you actually read obscure books). They have Goodreads import I believe.

shmde 3y ago

Up until recently if you accidentally touched (NOT click/press) the star rating while scrolling through Goodreads a modal would slide up covering 3/4th of the screen asking ( more like holding at gunpoint) you to rate the book. I don't understand how can a PM/web developer actually be this hostile. They absolutely knew it was a dark pattern and now have gone back to normal.