I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for posting.
we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.
we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.
Feature wishes: Extensions on book statistics, a function for discovering like-minded users, marking books as „finished“ / „decided not to finish“ and showing this information (this could provide some very useful additional information on books), and maybe a „listened to the audiobook“ marker.
1 hated it/was offended/didn't finish
2 disliked it/likely didn't finish
3 finished but it was a struggle
4 finished/enjoyed/had some issues
5 finished fast/really enjoyed/may or may not have still had issues.
If I look back at the 30 to 50 books I read in a year, it's really difficult to get any sort of ranking out of them. I've only got two choices for books I liked (4 or 5) and two choices for books I disliked (1 or 2). Having half stars would help my ratings relative to one another.
Also, if you asked me about a book I read a year ago, I wouldn't be able to do much more than confirm I read it. That's part of why I use Goodreads.
An alternative approach:
1 - I disliked it. 2 - It's OK 3 - This is good 4 - This is great 5 - This is a must-read
That said, I think the world has also suffered from ratings inflation. I tend to assume anything under a 4 means "bad" or "meh" myself.
If you go to rate a book on good reads and hover over each of the the 5 stars, here are the "title" attributes of the links:
* title="did not like it"
* title="it was ok"
* title="liked it"
* title="really liked it"
* title="it was amazing"
I think it's interesting to have the middle/neautral rating described (3 star, middle of the range available) as "liked it" (a positive response).
What you really want is some personal bookkeeping which doesn't make sense for the 5-star system. You'd want tags or the private note textarea to scribble down your arbitrary personal rating system.
Frankly I think more ratings are just worse. You're pitching 10 or 20 different options instead of 5.
What are your biggest challenges with making them?
biggest challenge is there is too much to do and we have so few staff.
genuinely curious, why would you get fired?
Generally, it's not that you can't post, you just can't post an an employee.
The companies generally don't want something like:
"I am a Goodreads employee."
"we know it is bad today."
Yikes, that's rather dramatic! Especially since all you've said is "we're working to fix it. changes soon." That's a pretty harmless statement, I would think.
What gives you the idea that such statements put your employment at risk?
I don't know about this. Is it documented, or have you "heard it through the grapevine," so-to-speak?
This implies support for Goodreads at Amazon is very thin. It could be read as a critical statement (even though it's pretty clear to everyone that the site very clearly stagnated since the acquisition, focusing almost exclusively on Kindle integration).
Amazon management is famously militaristic in attitude and would likely take action against a low-level employee criticizing the company in public
Although I know that Amazon is hiring intelligence operatives[0] to bust unions, this aspect (militaristic middle management) is news to me. Where can I learn more?
0. https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/1/21417401/amazon-job-listin...
I'm pretty sure it was also reported in the past that Bezos traditionally favored ex-military for manager positions when Amazon was starting, but I cannot find a source atm (seems like yesterday to me but more than 20 years have since passed...).
This is the kind of thing companies love their employees to share publicly!
In fact, there's a difference between "we know it is bad," and "we've no interest, either way." How should I know which is strategic to say, publicly?
What reason does this employee have to think Amazon would retaliate against them making public statements about their own working life?
One of my memories: Being pulled into a side office and grilled for a half hour for posting a similarly harmless statement to HN.
So your comment triggered mild PTSD.
It's not your place as an individual employee to post about your employer. You work in a team setting. If the team decides it's appropriate to post to HN, then that's fine. But you alone do not get to decide that.
Strange how your response to abuse isn't to warn us about abuse, but to moralize about the actions through which your abuser justified their emotional violence.