What Goodreads could have been | Hacker News Reader

What Goodreads could have been

notfunatparties.substack.com

93 pointstomjohnneill35 comments

What is this article? It doesn’t present what goodreads could have been, or what it is.

Editorially, it was had to read. The author references a super popular previous post but doesn’t link to it. Why is that important?

I tried going to the home page to get a list of articles but it asked me to sign up for a newsletter.

Seems light on content and just SEO blargh trying to collect subscribers.

The boat stuck site was neat though.

The HN submission of their one and only previous post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813

It's not really directly pertinent to whatever this post is about. They did one post. It did well. Now they are struggling to relate to this blog that had runaway success on the first post when they may not have some clear idea of what they are doing with this blog.

BTDT, got the t-shirt.

Runaway success on a first post to a new blog that's only kind of a half-baked idea can make it hard to sort out what you are doing and it can feel like other people have big expectations and yadda.

I would chalk up that first paragraph to "free therapy masquerading as PR by someone who probably has a poor grasp of PR."

The state of the internet today means it's inevitable you see weird mash-ups of odd things at times like that.

HN: The internet has changed, it's lost all personality.

ALSO HN: WHY IS THIS NOT EDITORIALISED. I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU.

Goodreads is dead to me but for different reasons. I don't care about social networks or affiliate links. I just want a working website. I've moved to LibraryThing. Much better. It's even got a better recommendation engine that isn't trying to push an agenda. Although I prefer to pick up books semi randomly instead of based on recommendations. But maybe that's a self defence mechanism from years of biased recommendations.

My experience of Goodreads is that it used to be weird and unpolished, but basically on a trajectory towards being a solid niche social network for book readers.

But then, Amazon spent a lot of money to buy it, so they did the sensible thing and turned it into a big clunky funnel for book sales.

My only gripe with it is that being Amazon, it has no excuse for being so slow. The revenue it must bring should justify better servers.

Every so often, I would say like at least twice a month, someone publishes a new article regarding Goodreads and how it sucks.

And I really enjoy reading these articles, they are not wrong in any way, Goodreads sucks, yet people (including me) keep using it because I want to have all my read and to-read books in one place.

Yet none of these articles address the elephant in the room. Why Goodreads sucks, and why there is no alternative.

There is no viable business plan!

Simple as that, we can love reading, we can love making a better product, want something better, but truth of the matter is books are not really such a hot commodity in financial terms.

I personally have been tempted numerous times to build my own alternative, but as soon as I start planning, I see that it has no viable future.

Now if someone cracks the code, and finds a way to make a social network about books profitable, they have a billion dollar idea.

And if you do, please notify me, because I would love to see it.

Yeah I don't think anyone is ever going to build a better Goodreads from a bookmarking & automated recommendations perspective for exactly that reason. I think there is scope for some nice little niche tools for individuals to recommend books though. Whether that's the one I made in a weekend, seems doubtful, but I think there is a path there.

You don't think that a website that encourages that people to buy more books -- books that they pay for with money -- has a viable business plan?

I am not doing social, but I am building a book discovery website as we speak, launching in 1 to 2 weeks. You can see a beta as I am building it here:

https://shepherd.com/

Pretty basic to start, and then going to be adding topics, search, and so on.

I do like the approach of personal recommendations over algorithmic. It's just inherently more meaningful if it's from a person you trust or somebody that knows what you're into. We're trying to lean more that way with https://beta.readng.co

I’m intrigued. Care to elaborate on your service? I’m not certain exactly what it is after visiting the page, although there were some snippets I enjoyed[1] and the site performance is unusually good. It’s social media for book lovers?

[1] > Your data is your business, not ours. We'll never sell it to somebody else and we don't use invasive tracking that advertisers rely on. And since you're in charge, you're free to export your data and take it with you.

I mean it's relatively simple still, mainly book tracking/collecting/reviewing with a slick UI & activity feed. But we have a lot of plans and fostering something more meaningful than clicking a heart button is pretty important to us. Personal (1-1) recommendations could be a good example of that, wouldn't you want to put your friend onto their new favourite book?

Side projects are slow going though so we do what we can, prioritization can be rough!

Very cool! Can I ask what data source you're using for book metadata?

Is there a web app? I'd rather use another tab than install another app.

Everyone seems to be building "recommendation list" apps nowadays. Similar projects I just recently stumbled upon:

- https://reclist.me/

- https://www.zeneca.io/

- https://getcatalist.com/

- https://trove.to/

- https://beta.readng.co/

- https://bookshlf.com/

I want to add

https://beta.thestorygraph.com/

I've recently been using that along with Goodreads to track, and I enjoy it. Not huge into the social aspect of Goodreads, though there's a few I follow with similar proclivities but I can (and do) easily live without that.

Zeneca founder here : ) -- Glad you mentioned us!

Before Goodreads there was no Goodreads. Goodreads was a great Goodreads. There will always be room for another new and improved Goodreads. People have been reading for thousands of years, and ain't going to stop now.

"In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero." — Charlie Munger

A podcast idea everyone tells me is good but I’m not sure I have time for:

The Good Shit Stays — book reviews done 1 month after reading.

This article is all over the place. Actually on the topic of Goodreads, there was a recent Show HN for Zeneca, a new place to share/discuss books: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387444

I'm not sure how the title relates to this article. I had to scroll through a bunch of stuff not related to Goodreads (supabase? istheshipstillsunk?, burying something called a lede?). Eventually, I found a section called "GOODREADS" that seems to be about the title of this submission. But then more stuff about a sunken or stuck ship, including screenshots that are not goodreads.

At this point I'm not so interested anymore. Didn't finish.

In case you never end up going back to read it, I did read the beginning and there was a good bit of background on why the author wishes Goodreads was better.

TLDR: The author made istheshipstillsunk.com and was hoping to add affiliate links for purchasing related books to help with hosting costs, but found that Goodreads's integrations were severely lacking.

There are at least 2 projects I know of where the functionality of Goodreads is being reimplemented with ActivityPub support:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goodreads+activitypub&t=hc&va=o

I really hate to generalize but seeing the Substack domain in the url is becoming the new Medium for me.

While it's a very difficult problem to crack, I do think there's a way to serve both the bookmarking ("single player") and recommendation ("multiplayer") use cases with one product. Fred Wilson has a good article from 2015 on this dilemma [1].

My personal opinion is that Goodreads and other similar services have failed to do this because they don't make their user-generated content a first-class citizen. The focus is on rating and making lists of books, not their users' thoughts and annotations on those books (which would tie content creation and consumption into a much tighter feedback loop).

I'm working on Trove [2] because I think this is a problem worth solving — we recently did a Show HN [3] you may have seen. Would love to hear if anyone has more ideas on how to tackle this.

[1] https://avc.com/2015/11/lists-2/

[2] https://trove.to/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582658

Interesting that you see things that way. I think the biggest hurdle to any Goodreads competitor for me is that it would be without GR's massive amount of user-content.

My reading loop is like this:

I start a book on my kindle ; it's automatically added to my GR collection.

I highlight as I read, on my kindle ; those highlights are transferred automatically to my GR account.

I finish the book, give it a lame 5-star rating ; its status and rating updated automatically on my GR account.

I write my own notes & thoughts about the book (pen and paper style in my own journal).

I go to GR to read what others have thought about the book. There are always a couple decent commentaries (and I read a lot of somewhat obscure translated fiction, sometimes only 100 or so other readers of it).

I just don't see any other service pulling me away, no matter how slick the interface.

Yeah, for your workflow here I don't think there is any better solution, especially because of the Kindle / Goodreads integration (which Amazon will never open up to other services).

As the Fred Wilson piece I linked above notes:

> I wonder if listmaking is really a vertical thing instead of a horizontal thing. That would suggest that there will be successes in verticals like food, travel, shopping, reading, film, music, etc but that each will be its own thing and not part of some meta listmaking community.

With Trove we're trying to build something closer to the "horizontal" thing, but I suspect power users of a particular vertical (e.g. "power readers" like yourself) will still flock to vertically focused and integrated solutions (like Goodreads for books).

Along with storygraph and readng.co and librarything, there are several other goodreads alternatives.

This was my recent attempt to find the best one for my purposes:

https://bookapps.info

I ended up deleting my Goodreads account. I don't want to share the for-fun books I read and it was kind of a hassle to deal with settings and 'friends' and whatnot.

Is "I don't even like Infinite Jest" the new "I don't even own a TV?"

The article is right that Goodreads is used as "an organizational tool to keep track of what you've read" (or what you're planning to read). But that's actually a bad thing. Selecting books should have an element of randomness to it. You should buy the books in a bookstore, by browsing, and you should read them in a haphazard way. If you don't want to use bookstores, you can simulate this by buying lots of books online and reading them in a disorganized way.

Books are much better this way. Worrying about efficiency, must-reads, and creating lists are bad ideas. It takes the fun out of it and you won't enjoy reading as much.

Also the presentationalism of Goodreads is a huge negative. If you have to make lists, keep them private. By publishing your lists, you're going to end up worrying about what other people think or even censoring yourself. E.g. not listing A Sport and a Pastime because you don't want people judging you for reading "erotic fiction" or lying about having read Jordan Peterson because you don't want people to think you're a wingnut.

>The article is right that Goodreads is used as "an organizational tool to keep track of what you've read" (or what you're planning to read). But that's actually a bad thing. Selecting books should have an element of randomness to it.

I think that would have to be at least part of the reason why they didn't call it "a selection tool to keep track of what you want to buy."

But Goodreads is that, it has a to-read and have-read list.

Hey team,

Founder of Zeneca here. I think there’s so much room to deeply engage with books. From sharing a list, to discussing a technical book like SICP. Our current version solves some of the problems the author mentions. Right now, you can share lists of books you like, take notes, and discover other people with similar books: i.e https://zeneca.io/stopa

We show hn’ed a few weeks ago and are iterating. If you get time to try it and have feedback we’re all ears

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