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Comment by heisnotanalien | Hacker News Reader

If it's not broken, why fix it? I go to goodreads for the high-quality book reviews and community. I literally don't care about UX or fancy algorithms. I'd rather use an old algorithm called 'talking to someone I know' for book recommendations. Right now it feels like a clunky old site made for books reviews and I like that feel. I don't want some Amazon product manager who only cares about monetising (where can I smack ads?!) to touch it thank you very much. And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel (so it loads fast and we can smack lots of ads on it).

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It actually is broken in a lot of ways, and I don't mean the complaints about stalkers or fake reviews or other community problems, just on the pure technical level. It's been slowly bitrotting, it feels like it somehow gets slower every year, and they've been removing features. I recently moved all of my stuff off GR and stopped using it because I asked myself why I was putting up with it when it clearly was only going to get worse over time.

For example: lists in reviews don't render, somehow they broke list markers, and this has been the case for like a decade now (?!); you can't add links to profiles anymore, and you can't edit your profile if it already has a link (because 'spam'); you can write book reviews which you can't then edit (because the edited, but somehow not the original, violates 'length limits' - which are shockingly easy to run into if you include any links); they disabled part of the export API recently, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years you can't even export your books...

Gets slower? It loads every page I tried in probably under 2 seconds? Is that slow these days?

I want to assume this is tongue-in-cheek.. but I'm not actually sure?

The whole page. The text is available almost immediately, so not tongue-in-cheek. Who the fuck leaves a page that they went to if the see text and a page don't see all the pictures in 2 seconds? We have a shorter attention span but not that short.

I meant your comment. I think I have my answer.

Yes, it is. The popularly cited studies these days suggest an upper limit of one second to ensure a user maintains flow.

And consistent <250ms will feel like magic — try pinboard as an example of lightning fast UI

Pinboard doesn't have near the traffic or complexity as goodreads. It's basically fetching text out of a database with a user-id lookup. No multiple databases for books, user profile, reviews, etc.

So a new goodreads minus the technical problems comes along.

It gets popular. The community becomes a mess, it becomes costly to police, you have people upload an ID and the world hates you for invading their privacy, management shifts resources away since its stable-y making money regardless (given some Byzantine model that matters to ownership anyway) and then it falls victim to bit rot.

So a replacement to your goodreads replacement comes along...

I think what actually happens is a new Goodreads minus the technical problems and also minus the reviews and community comes along. Turns out people prefer having actual book reviews to faster page loads and more stable link structures, and everyone stays where they are...

You can do ID (or just validate a few other ways) with anonymous accounts, done properly seems a good balance.

Some would hate it, but if it actually improves the quality and the company has some security chops I’d see it as a selling point.

By definition, you cannot have ID for anonymous accounts. Not without a third party (who I want nothing to do with anyway).

Furthermore, is it really up to a book review site to solve the problem of identity and anonymity on the Internet? Seems like the wrong place in the stack to focus on that.

Yea, I think it's a good model for other type of companies and have thought of it before which is why I brought it up here, just felt like clarifying it is possible to do if desired.

Communication issue:

I'm defining "anonymous to the world" or "anonymous publicly", whereas you're defining it as "anonymous to everyone, even the company".

But in the scope of a book review website, and this thread about preventing spam by having ID enforced, my comment made sense as that. The company knows you, but you can have an anonymous handle to the world. I had clarified that with the line about trust.

I considered that, but most people who get annoyed about privacy are upset that private companies have any data at all. e.g. location data on Facebook.

It's good opsec to assume all private data at companies may get leaked, including links between your ID and your name.

Consider the scenario where somebody is reviewing books on dangerous subjects (politics, religion, LGBT+, etc...) and is suddenly outed to the whole world due to a data breach.

For some set of people it would be a problem, I think for book reviews that’s a tiny set, not to be dismissive of them, but still.

For other types of applications you’d want to have a better system, like a writing platform.

But still, there’s ways to do it. You can validate the high res copies of whatever you want to validate, then make a hash using a few key numbers, in partial. Stuff like that gets you close to ideal, even the worst case break would expose almost nothing, and you’d prevent duplicate accounts. Only risk is losing the documents during validation before they’re deleted.

You can actually do validation for completely anonymous accounts. The most common version is DDOS protection where even read only websites can still benefit.

An anonymous review website could similarly rate limit how quickly reviews change, so someone spamming 1,000 reviews accomplishes little.

Actually, a decent anonymous single login you could do today roughly is basically TouchID. You’d have to implement it yourself with ML, a webcam and some client side code that hashes it.

If it worked well, I’d use it in a snap.

More React will solve everything.

> And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel

It sounds like you care about UX a great deal, and the UX currently suits you fine!

I mostly agree with you; it has a few pain points, but I fear the day when it goes through the great Digg/Reddit redesign and becomes virtually unusable due to information density plummeting to zero.

I think it's not likely to go that route, though - since it's owned by Amazon, it doesn't have to be profitable by itself, it just needs to result in enough referrals to buy books on Amazon.

that is underway right now actually. theres a beta in-progress for a re-design of a couple pages including the book page.

Almost Everything About Goodreads is Broken

https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549

Counterpoint: Goodreads isn't broken.

It's not at all broken for me, nor for my friends. As the article up top says, there are two ways to discover books: incidental discovery and intentional discovery. On Goodreads, incidental discovery largely flows from a daily email showing me what my friends (who are all real life friends) are reading. That daily email is the #1 reason why I won't leave Goodreads. Any site can manage my read/to-read list, but if I don't have any friends on that site, then I lose out on a big source of discovery. And I can see from the email that my friends also use that email to discover new books.

It's great that your tastes are similar enough to those of your friends' that that works for you. But I doubt that that is universal.

Recommendations could be so much more helpful if they were done by an algorithm similar to what Netflix used to have - Cinematch. Then even people without friends could get good recommendations.

My tastes are not necessarily similar to my friends. That's actually what makes the email feed cool. I am open to branching out and reading books that I normally wouldn't expect to read.

In terms of recommending what I am already likely interested in based on my previous reads, the "Readers also enjoyed" section seems decent to me. Is that what people think sucks? I've used that a fair amount and found it to be valuable. Or is it the whole "Browse" section that's bad? I never look under there.

I use goodreads every day, but that means spending 5 mins max on it (I hop in, add a book that I heard about somewhere to my to-read list, then I hop off). And, like I alluded to in my first reply, from what I can tell this behavior also holds true for my friends. I don't think I'm an outlier, though I totally understand that people use the site differently than me and they find it wanting.

Goodreads 'also enjoyed' is one of the best implementations of this feature. I always see related books that actually make sense to be shown there.

That's the simplest and most naive implementation of a recommender. It doesn't take into account what I liked about a book and whether the one it's recommending is similar in that way or if I will dislike it for some other reason.

A better way to do recommendations is to find readers who have rated books similarly to me and tell me what books they've rated highly that I haven't already read. This is what Netflix's Cinematch once did and it was good. It used singular value decomposition and other linear algebra techniques on a giant matrix of raters.

See: https://www.netflixprize.com/

I have no expectation of ever seeing useful recommendations from the sites I frequent. This might be heresy on HN, but by and large recommendation engines are pure trash. Have you ever been recommended a useful product on Amazon? One would think that a company with such large resources could occasionally point me to a product I might want.

> doesn't take into account what I liked about a book

I don't remember ever seeing a rating system (for books or tv) that let me do fine grain rating. And if it had it, most people[citation needed] might not use it anyway. Also, how would I say that what I liked the most about a fantasy book is the magic system, for example?

I don't care HOW the recommendation is implemented, but what shows on the recommendation. For me, 'Readers also enjoyed' shows things that are sufficiently similar, and which people that I follow - friends and bloggers - gave good ratings.

The 'lists with this book' section is also good for discovering books, as the lists are user curated, and the title helps me know what's the common theme. Ie: books with cool magic systems.

That's the beauty of this. You don't need a fine grained rating system. By comparing your preferences to those of others, the aspects of what you like and don't like become implicit.

A product has features in some high dimensional quality space. When you rate it, you provide information about your preference for those qualities without needing to explicitly rate them or even have a concept of what they are called.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one, but I don't find the Netflix algorithm useful. With a few exceptions everything is a 97-99% match

That's weird, for me I see 30% and over, although most fall into 60% and over.

I think it could be: you didn't 'dislike' many titles or; you are not browsing things that are too different from what you usually watch

The current Netflix algorithm is useless. Cinematch is what they used to have and they had a prize, which they awarded, for $1M to anyone who could improve it by 10%. They've apparently abandoned it.

See: https://www.netflixprize.com/

You can say that goodreads stagnated, in a technical sense, but it's still way better than all options. It works well on desktop, the android app let's me add books by pointing my camera to the cover or barcode. All book bloggers/youtubers are there, all my friends that read are there.

When you factor in those 2 things - everyone is on goodreads, and there's no better alternative to goodreads - there's no reason to leave.

It is broken in certain aspects, Goodreads is one of the slowest sites around, if nothing else is done that alone needs fixing. And it has been in this state for years now.

I don't actually use good reads, but I clicked around - everything I clicked on loaded faster (less than 2 seconds, usually less than 1) than everything I clicked on in medium (always more than 2 seconds, where this blog post is hosted).

Neither site is fast, but "one of the slowest around" doesn't track either.

I think it may be more so for logged in users. When logged in, and I go to the homepage, which is essentially an activity feed, it has 93 requests, 4.4MB of resources (1.5MB transferred), and took 7.66 seconds to finish.

In my experience, Goodreads loads slower on a phone than on a desktop browser (and it's only the initial load that I notice being slow). I've long suspected (without evidence) that this is intentional because they nerf the mobile web experience in an attempt to get you to use their app.

I don't use their mobile site, but the android app works really well, and looks great.

How do you make a better goodreads that is sustainable when Amazon will always make it free as a way to sell more books on Amazon? It is pretty easy to make a X that is better than the status quo. How will you compete with the big guys financially? People want everything for free.

Do you remember when people made websites to solve problems and build community, instead of to make a profit? You can always just shill for amazon using affiliate links, everyone wins.

The value of a social network is directly proportional to the number of edges in the network graph (I.e., SocialNetworkX might be better than Facebook, but if none of your friends are on it, it’s worthless). For Goodreads, couple that with the vast amount of book metadata they have + Kindle integration, and any startup would have a long way to go to even reach parity.

Scalability + data aggregation + user adoption == lots of funding + a clever business model + a significant reason to switch from $DOMINANT_COMPANY + a good bit of luck.

That requires huge financial resources, and thus, a solid monetization scheme.

Making money (and this site will take a lot of money to build, even if it's just to break even) via Amazon -- while competing with an Amazon property -- is not something that is going to work. I frankly think this is the central reason there's no goodreads competitor: how to make enough money to break even when Amazon becomes your enemy...

This is the billion dollar question, but having the right answer at the outset may not be necessary. In fact, most successful business go through multiple iterations on monetisation opportunities before they strike gold.

It is more important to build a product that solves problems that Goodreads doesn't solve right now, and find a way to acquire customers that doesn't rely on Google SEO.

That is a good approach but the risk is that if the feature you add that people really want is trivial for Amazon to copy after you've proven it.

Not to mention amazon will very aggressively react when you start cutting into an (effectively free) leadgen source from them.

Good first step would be to free the data under an open license. A MusicBrainz for books.

Now that I think about it, there probably are multiple projects already trying to do that.

goodreads is not supported by amazon. its self sustaining through ads, affiliate links and publisher promotions.

I find goodreads has a bit of bias problem on their ratings. Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate because most people who didn't finish the book (an indicator of low quality) will not leave a review.

> Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate

Sometimes I agree with you (because it's annoying to me too), but other times I feel like that's accurate. The difference in quality between a book that's in the 75th percentile quality-wise among the books I've read and a book that's in the 25th percentile is not very large! I'd say, by and large, most books that get published are pretty good. Few of them are completely flawless or life-changing, and that's okay. 3-4 seems about right for 50% of the books I read.

If you combine that basic fact with a range of people with differing tastes, you get even more reversion to the mean, so just about every book has a 3-4 rating.

The same goes with beer. If you check the major beer rating sites, you'll see most beers end up with a 3-4 rating. Personally I think movies have a much wider range in quality, but you still see this effect somewhat with IMDb: a huge proportion of movies is in the 6-8 range.

You might think that the ratings would be more useful if what we got was a percentile rather than an absolute rating, and that might be right... or it might disguise the fact that I really would get close to the same amount of enjoyment out of a 3.5 as a 3.9, even though they're separated by 30 percentiles or whatever.

It's strange to me that this is the pattern for things like books, movies, or beer but with Uber drivers the pattern seems to be "Give 5 stars unless something was wrong."

Before I learned this Uber etiquette I would rate drivers the same way. "Well, he got me from A to B without issue, but was there anything that set this ride apart and elevated it?"

That is due to Uber corporate misunderstanding ratings and penalizing drivers who get anything less than a perfect rating.

One aspect of this problem might be that there's no incentive to have a wider dynamic range in your ratings. A naive recommendation system which just suggests highly rated books similar in some metric to ones I rated highly could be improved enormously if it took into account books I didn't like. In return for accurate ratings, I would get good recommendations.

Yeah, most review sites have the 5 or nothing problem. I look at the distribution and then find some medium to low starred reviews to see why I might not like a book that otherwise seems a good match for me.

In aggregate the star rating is pretty good for literature and non-fiction. For mass fiction it's fairly useless.

But that's a problem with people doing the ratings, not Goodreads. I see this problem with IMDB, trakt, myanimelist, anilist, etc... Because for many people, it's either 1, 4 or 5.

I think that's honestly how most people score. If you read the entire book and it was okay you give it a 3 if it was great a 4 best book ever a 5. If you hated the book you may not finish or review.

The opposite is uber where rating affects future service and puts a lot of power over others in your hand. Not giving 5 is socially unacceptable like not tipping vs tipping less and complaining.

It's all about framing though isn't it? If Uber were '1 (miserably below expectations) .. 3 (met expectations) .. 5 (above and beyond)', you wouldn't see that.

It doesn't really matter as long as everyone's on the same page I suppose. Sure, you clip stuff off the end.. but doesn't everyone just want a taxi that gets them A-B without problem? Who's actively seeking 'above and beyond'? Maybe 'would've scored >5 if I had them' is not a problem, because nobody cares?

(I should maybe say I've never actually used Uber!)

Modern UX design seems enamored with sites that refuse to scroll smoothly, which is maddening and quite unpleasant.

The recommendations generally seem reasonable.

What bothers me is that they clearly have the data to allow for very specific queries, but there's no way to make them.

what bothers me even more is that all the data for those queries is user-generated, which means that users have essentially contributed value to the site but cannot get it back. that's the competition I would really like to see - a site that crowd sources book metadata in the form of tags and then makes the data freely available and searchable.

The review page and discussion thread is hideous and painful to navigate. If a site is to be able to recommend $nextbook it has to curate inputs, either as ratings or text reviews. There are huge bookclub memberships but hardly anybody write anything substantial because it's a quagmire to wade through (thus implying few review readers). Lapsed readers like me would love a place to talk books, obscure, trendy or not. r/books is a never-ending loop of "I've just finished Ender's Game and I ..." and "Why we do $something when we read", and similar dross. If there's any space that could use a boost in "user engagement" I wish it could be for readers. But, as we bookish lot aren't terribly argumentative, and unwilling to shiv anyone who opines that they loved DaVinci Code, it's an unknown with what to bait us. I log into Goodreads probably twice a month, avert my eyes and then close tab.

I think Steam is probably a decent model of what Goodreads could have looked like. Full of product reviews, with a carefully crafted recommendation engine that focuses in on genres/studios of interest based on a combination of what your friends are reading/reviewing/liking, your past purchases, new release, etc.

Video games have a similar problem to books in that there’s a lot of genre, and genre is also often a hazy line. And, too, some people really like stuff that I think is total crap (and vice versa).

These days I am almost exclusively shown content that I am at least somewhat interested in.

I actually would like a better algorithm for suggestions. I can scroll fifty pages of their basic suggestions before I hit something I’m interested in and don’t already have. I would really like to fetch their catalogue and try the Netflix search improvement contest, but for books!

I hear you. It's not broken. It does serve the primal use cases like shelving, reviews/ratings, meta-information pretty well. But there is also so much more to the experience of reading. Is Goodreads really the best we deserve?

> But there is also so much more to the experience of reading

Like what? For me, most of the experience of reading is:

1 - actually reading the book

2- sharing my thoughts/recommending it

3 - seeing what other people recommend.

Goodreads, Youtube and Reddit cover all my needs for #2 and #3, and any attempt to cover the social aspect of it will pale in comparison to those 3, at least regarding #3.

For instance, there are things that I don't like about Twitter, and Mastodon has some things that I like, like being able to tag a specific post as NSFW, or add a spoiler tag to make part of the text hidden. But after a few months of using it in parallel to Twitter, I ended up abandoning it, because ''everyone''[0] is on Twitter.

[0] I mean: my real life friends, my online friends, bloggers, youtubers, cosplayers, illustratos, support profiles for online stores and services.

Exactly. Same with boardgamegeek or old.reddit

How do you find high quality book reviews? Or, is it the average review that's high quality?

One things that is nice, is that if you have friends / follow people with similar tastes, when you see a book page, it'll feature their reviews first. For me, that's what matters. A review quality is very related to the taste of whoever is reading it in relation to you - although there are other things that matter.

But I would say that, in general, reviews are ok quality, and honest.

I follow people whose reviews I like.

the spam emails are pretty shit

Since you call them "spam", I assume you do not want the emails you're getting, rather than saying you want the communication but they're lower quality than you want. If that's the case, I've been a GR member for years and only get emails from them when a particular author does something I've asked GR to notify me about. Implies to me that merely unsubscribing and managing your preferences seems to work.

I have a GR account due just to having a Kindle subscription and I don't use it and haven't configured anything (nor want to). Just for having the account I get emails like "the official adult site <some url> of Goodreads."

If there were some way I didn't have this goodreads account at all, that would be preferable.

You can turn that off in settings. I have and get nothing from them.

That's not the point.

I didn't sign up for a goodreads account. I was given one. And it's sharing my email address with third parties by default.

That's scummy company behavior.

> I was given one.

Huh?

Purchase a Kindle Fire. It comes with Goodreads preinstalled and cannot be removed. When you set up the device, it either asks you for your goodreads account or makes one for your amazon-linked email.

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