Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

I can’t think of a website in any domain where people don’t complain about recommendations.

People complain about goodreads, Netflix, amazon, etc.

Even things like google ads whose business is ultimately showing ads for products you might like to buy, a kind of recommendation algorithm, people constantly complain about irrelevance. And they have billions of dollars on the line for making that better, not to mention a dataset that is second to none about the internet using population.

Maybe good recommendations is actually just super hard and nobody has really solved it well.

I mostly use reddit [0][1][2] to build my TBR list. I follow only a few on goodreads, but my twitter timeline (which is mostly catered around book reading) comes up with nice recommendations.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/booksuggestions/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/

For me, recommendations got remarkably better once I used 5-10 tags ('shelves') per book for about 50 books I read - after that, the per-shelf recommendations got very good.

Amazon was pretty much forced to buy Goodreads: the original business model of Goodreads before the Amazon buyout was making money from referral links to booksellers. While links were provided to several internet booksellers besides Amazon, like Barnes & Noble, already the vast majority of internet users were hooked on Amazon and only buying through Amazon links. Consequently, Amazon was paying Goodreads a huge amount of money in referral fees each month, and it made more sense for Amazon to simply buy the site and stop that.

I agree that Amazon is nefarious and destructive, but I think any company in the same position would have bought Goodreads out.

> It is the same thing that Oracle purchasing MySQL. What once was a promising raising technology is nowadays stagnant. (Interest over time https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...)

Connecting Oracle's purchase with the MySQL's market share is a long stretch. Even based on that diagram, the decline started earlier than the time Oracle came into play.

The quality and pace of development of MySQL/InnoDB hasn't meaningfully changed (although one may subtly observe that with v8, they radically changed the release philosophy - patch versions now can introduce new features or break old ones). There have been low and high quality features developed, but that happens with any software. In order to get an idea of how MySQL was around 10 years ago, notice how by that time, MyISAM was (unfortunately) still something.

A simple interpretation of the shift in market share is that PGSQL hasn't been ready for wide adoption (historically speaking, it's been considered for a long time the slow and cumbersome RDBMS), until, after a certain functional threshold, it entered a virtuous circle of improving and getting traction.

Of course, it's also possible that people is taking distance from MySQL "because Oracle", but that doesn't constitute a technical ground.

In Amazon’s early days they had human genre section buyers who managed what was promoted. When I worked for an sf publisher in the 90s we’d see them at cons. They would come to our parties and we would spend their expense account money. They’d look at the books we recommended. It was very different.

I agree that "I can't find any good books to read" is not really a problem most readers I know have. Most have dozens, or hundreds, of books on their To Be Read pile. Finding new books to read doesn't really strike me as a big problem.

I've seen people looking for extremely specific books get stuck. "I'm looking for fantasy where the bad guy turns into a good guy but keeps working on the bad guy side but actively undermines it and also I want some LBGTI+ romance but no smut/explicit scenes". But I'm doubtful TheStoryGraph is going to help them either.

For almost any niche I've seen there's going to be someone somewhere on the internet who puts together a listicle of books in that niche which is going to provide months or years of reading for most normal people. And that's without even looking into the authors' back catalogues or looking at other authors from the same publishers.

Ooh so the "article" is really a marketing blurb for that other service!

> Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. > ... searching for 'holiday heart robayo' does

Well, this already makes Goodreads worse than any local librarian/book seller. I could go up to the counter of my local library and ask for Inferno and the person at the counter would ask "Are you looking for the one by Dante or by Dan Brown?".

> if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?"

I find this disingenuous. Bookstore clerks don't hit a dead end just because of some missing parameter in the question posted to them. If they did they're losing a lot of potential sales. Plus, any decent inventory software could aide them.

There's any number of authentic reasons why a customer might know only partial info about a book and it's a clerk/librarian's job to help them. "Do you have Narnia books?", "Do you have Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe?", "Do you have this fairy tale from C. S. Lewis" are all questions I'd expect a clerk/librarian to be able to answer adequately.

Even worse, quoting from the article:

> the first five suggestions were books that didn't even contain both words in their titles, despite the site having an entry for the book.

What kind of search system ranks books that don't even have the query that high?

(Disclaimer: I tried searching for "holiday heart" on Goodreads while logged out as a matter of due diligence; I did not get these subpar results. While Robayo's book is nowhere in sight, the search results at least have the search query in their title. Reasonable enough.)

While the article focused on how someone might bring a better algo webapp against goodreads, you've got to agree that Goodreads is badly maintained. The app is atrocious as is the website from the reader's PoV.

The groups are so badly implemented that it takes multiple clicks to do ANYTHING and there is just no "timeline" like thing where you can post on a group. It won't take much time/resources for a social media to act like a 21st century social media right? Especially since it is owned by the company which created AWS?

from the author side:

I have a very common name and I've got an ebook up on Goodreads(I did not add it & I've not, for the life of me figured out how to submit the book)

But because Good reads thinks that because my name is what it is, they merged my profile with someone else with my exact same first name and last name.

I've done all I could to get them to change it, but they didn't bother to respond.

I love Letterboxd's approach to movie recommendation wherein they don't provide any. Users can create arbitrary lists for all kinds of stuff based anything like genre, themes, feel, mood, cast/crew etc. There is probable a high quality list for anything you can think of. I have found some of my favorite movies on the site this way, no algorithms involved.

I wish more site would do this instead of collecting every single details about my life and still recommend be garbage sponsored content (looking at you Youtube).

> People still complain about Netflix recommendations and they've spent tens of millions of dollars, possibly over a hundred million dollars, on it and are one of the most valuable companies on the planet with one of the best engineering teams on the planet.

This blog post talks about this exact subject: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201

> Why do people think algorithmic recommendations are easy? Or even desirable?

They're easier than you think, it's just most of them on major platforms are optimized to maximize your engagement with the platform, rather than your enjoyment of the content.

You can only say the algorithm works when you know the precise aim of the algorithm. Perhaps the "recommendation" engine is designed to dislodge the user from engaging too much with their own assessment abilities and instead have users respond to less guarded social cues setup elsewhere in the sales funnel.

You can push a lot more pulp on unsuspecting people once it's familiar AND seen in a socially proofed popular list.

Why is nobody asking how a recommendation engine is supposed to work if there’s nothing to recommend? Is it possible that even computers recognize 90% of media as garbage?

Here's an attempt at making a Goodreads-like that runs on ActivityPub: https://github.com/mouse-reeve/bookwyrm

Is the USLC always updated with the latest books?

What would be the legal background of using their index?

It's bugging me enough to reply to myself - the author is also throwing shade at LibraryThing passive-agressively by using the association fallacy. AbeBooks owned 40% of LT and Amazon acquired AbeBooks - but that's all the author had to say, no critical comparison of LT on it's merits as a book website. I find this to be disingenuous.

There is a reason that most discussions of Goodreads here and on GR itself tend to bring up complaints. It’s not so much that Amazon hasn’t upgraded the site to a "modern" web design – plenty of people like the old-school aesthetic and we don’t want endless scrolling and an attempt to maximize the time the user spends on the site (because we’re supposed to be reading books most of the time, after all).

Rather, the problem is the long-standing bugs that Amazon has never bothered to fix, because it can’t see any financial incentive to develop Goodreads further. The book database is a mess and even those of us empowered as "Goodreads librarians" are unable to help much. For example, today many authors might have the same name, a problem only made worse with all the self-publishing going on. Yet the Goodreads librarian UI has no straightforward way to assign a new book to this or that author of the same name. Instead, you have to use a hack where for author X you have to type two spaces between the first name and surname, for author Y you have to type three spaces, etc. It is totally amateur, and when you have 20 authors all of the same name you have no reference for which author has how many spaces typed between the first name and surname.

I wouldn't say I hate goodreads, but it is probably the worst-designed website (with some tough competition) that I semi-regularly use. The book categories are nonsensical, the books that take up most real estate are either random, or selections of books so famous you've definitely read/seen them before. More minor annoyances are that the reviews smell like astroturfing, and the 'quotes' thing is totally inane, and it's cluttered while remaining information-sparse.

I've never had a problem.

It doesn't do a great job with recommendations but I don't really care. There are thousands of book recommendation blogs, lists, BookTube channels, etc.

I'm not sure why people think every site/app needs to evolve to engulf every tangential aspect of a given ecosystem.

HN can never make up its mind whether it likes distributed systems or not.

HN also loves the benign neglect of HN itself (formatting on mobile still broken after 20 years?)

I have never really been a fan. I use it mostly to discover new books and track my reading and goals, which seems to work just fine. However, the Android app, which I use the majority of the time, is pretty bad. The Home tab is blank, with only a search bar and a button to "find your friends." Seems odd for the app to start there. I guess they are trying to push the social media features of it? I'm not interested in that.

On my previous phone (iPhone 6s), the app seemed to be much better designed, though it has been a while since I have used it. Honestly, my biggest gripe is that it's owned by Amazon. I generally try to support smaller retailers when making purchases, and would love to find another service that helps me track my reading and discover new books.

Not sure but I do know that when I first found out Goodreads was owned by Amazon I was very surprised and began to look at Goodreads (perhaps unfairly?) under a very different light. I was suddenly underwhelmed with what it was.

I remember thinking surely someone like Amazon could build something better than this. Not sure what I suddenly expected it to be, exactly, but it just felt like the whole UX was something from a decade ago.

Sure it’s great for keeping track of books I’ve read and whatnot but I’ve tried to use it to dig deep and find new authors and books similar to my tastes but didn’t find a lot of success.

In the music world I’ve had a ton of success finding new artists on Spotify’s “Fans also like” section. And I can keep following one artist to another to another. Books are obviously different in that it takes quite a bit longer to learn whether or not you like a new author than it does to listen to a new artist’s top few tracks, but still...after trying a few new authors and books, I never found that magical recommendation engine I was hoping for.

I don't find it a particularly usable or appealing website, but I have been using it for a long time and I never hated it as the article implies.