Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

What exactly is wrong with Goodreads? I keep hearing a lot of hate about it, but the reasons seem never expanded on.

I use Goodreads to maintain a public bookshelf of books I have read or want to read. It's also nice that I can check what my friends are reading. Occasionally it's nice to read other people's views on a book. I typically tend not to agree, but it's nice that these exist.

That's it. Isn't that what Goodreads is about? Seems like a nice website and perfectly suited for what it does. Am I missing something?

View on HN

- It sucks at recommending books. You may stumble upon some book in the home feed, but its recommendation is as good as if it didn't exist.

- Lists suck. For example, it never anticipates even something as simple as abandoning a book (though you can create that).

- There's like a whole industry of faking ratings and nobody cares about it enough to do anything about it.

- It's owned by Amazon, but Amazon basically didn't touch it since the acquisition almost a decade ago.

Well, they did so recently to kill the API access, which was its #1 selling point to me. I liked using it by not visiting their ugly design ever, but that's not a possibility anymore.

> Amazon basically didn't touch it since the acquisition almost a decade ago.

This is what I love about it. When something works for me (and Goodreads does), I don't want it to change.

It's not a good thing when there are glaring issues that remain unfixed, like books receiving 1 star reviews while they're still being written.

Personally, as a Goodreads user I don't care about the review ratings.

I'm there for: a) making a list of things I want to read b) finding more books by authors (including upcoming) to add to that list c) release dates for books on that list (and sorting that list by date) d) seeing what other people are reading

All of those tasks were time consuming before Goodreads and I'm extremely happy that some let's-refactor-our-website-for-whatever-reason push hasn't broken my use case.

1 and 5 star ratings for unreleased books are dumb but humans are really bad at 5 star rating systems anyway.

I find there's far more value in the number of ratings, but in the end books are often about personal taste.

Goodreads will always win simply because it's where all the users are.

Like reddit or any huge site its usefulness isn't in the presented top layer (recommendations/front page/popular list of x) it's the depth of millions of users.

If you read a relatively obscure book and look it up on goodreads then you read through the reviews to find users who gave a high quality write up and then look at that user's profile. This will lead you to other users and books that are actual quality.

You could create a smaller website with a higher quality surface level but it's going to be infected with the bias of a small "elite" userbase making it a basically useless echo chamber.

In other words, stop trying, let's just stick with the current terrible status quo. That's a supremely unhelpful comment to make, intended to discourage anyone from improving things ever. Shall we all just go back to a cave and knock some rocks together?

It's a reality check for anyone who makes a better goodreads and doesn't understand why it never gains traction.

It's on par with complaining about facebook and creating your own better version of facebook while completely ignoring the reason why everyone is on facebook to begin with.

While I generally agree that everything needs work, I also believe don't fix it if it isn't broke.'

> It's owned by Amazon, but Amazon basically didn't touch it since the acquisition almost a decade ago.

This is a good thing. In the recent year they updated the design in subtle ways to make it nicer to use and less rough around the edges too which was a nice surprise.

Lots of discussions over the years about it here.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454221

For me it works ok. But that's because I like you only use it to track. But if the other stuff worked better I might have used that too. A better recommendation system. Not insane loading times would maybe make me browse more etc. So much untapped potential here.

It does feel a bit neglected/dead (except for the fact that people still use it a bunch) - the changes come rarely. In some sense this is nice! It's a stable piece of software that does what it should do.

One thing I find lacking is that it seems to mostly be used by english-speakers. So the one case where I'd be curious to use the social networking features, for non-English-lanuage literature, it falls flat. There's no equivalent to it that I know of for the German-language world (that people actually use), which is irksome, because I'd actually use the social networking features there (whereas for English literature I know what I like and don't care what other people read, I don't know German literature as well).

But not becoming terrible is a nice side-effect of this...it's not even a managed decline, it's just pottering along okay! But it is odd. I wonder what their high-level strategy as a business is.

In the German-speaking world, LovelyBooks [1] is quite popular. It seems to be strongly focused on fiction, though.

[1]: https://www.lovelybooks.de/

You get spammed with hundreds of fake profiles trying to add you is the biggest disappointment I've seen myself firsthand (obvious phishing links included). There is a lot of botted activity.

Yeah. It's poised to become Amazon's Google Reader, but just as with Reader there's nothing truly wrong with it aside from lack of maintenance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com