Goodreads has no incentive to be good
countercraft.substack.com
countercraft.substack.com
I still use it...well, can I say I still use it if the last time I tried to add a book I couldn't? ... I just checked back - that was a month ago, and I even made a forum post about the book that it be added, but nope, book's not there...it seems nobody has even looked at the post. Sad times at goodreads. What a weird site. It's still charming in many ways.
It's crazy how much Goodreads relies on unpaid "librarian" contributions to keep their data in check. One problem with allowing the general population to add titles to the database is that the chance of getting malformed entries that will require manual fix ups (from these volunteers) later on is pretty high.
> I just checked back - that was a month ago, and I even made a forum post about the book that it be added, but nope, book's not there...it seems nobody has even looked at the post.
Volunteer librarians + zero dev support means that, if you really want to see the addition, you should bump your post daily or so until by chance it catches the eye of somebody...
Also yeah, the recommendation system is pretty bad. I can't believe they can't do better with all the ratings data they have. I get recommendations externally, but track them in goodreads.
I use a notepad.
When it comes to longer term basic information, bitmaps and text are where it's at!
I can always convert my paper to a bitmap, and often from that to text if I want to. And authoring simple text basically works on every computer going back to the Apple //e I started on, which sits on my workbench to this day. (it's there to play various games people still write for it!)
I only use it for reading up reviews.
I was kinda shocked reading through their top X list and finding absolute garbage, rated 8+. I wonder if they suffer from IMDB syndrome.
I like low budget horror. I like how rookie filmmakers are capable of bringing brand new ideas out of the aether without even realizing it. I like it when a cheap actor has a single moment of greatness for no discernable reason.
I'm not stupid enough to think that any of them stack up with The Greats but I still like the films and personally rate them highly. Most film nerds would probably not appreciate my toplist, but it's not my fault everyone sorts by All.
If something has a high number of ratings it's popular enough that it's probably decent (at least if you're into that genre).
Like a 4.38 rating w/ 2.7 million ratings (The Fellowship of the Ring) is a better bet compared to a 4.98 star with 150 ratings (random new book by unknown author).
Also, Goodreads doesn't have a 10 point system like IMDB, right? I believe all the ratings are 0 to 5.
Ready Player One Ernest Cline 4.23 1,099,069 ratings 99,154 reviews
It joined club of handful of books that I just stopped reading and threw into trash. Yet its 4.23 as of writing!
There are different tastes and likes, but that book is so poorly written and has such barebones plot... I don't know how it is popular
Used to use it for book release notifications too, but that broke some years ago for me and I've yet to receive a response to my support request from like 4 years ago.
I have my library listing all the books I checked out. I have a pdf/epub reader that has a history of the books I read(although a new phone will probably wipe that out).
For a while, I was merely writing down my books in a dedicated notebook, but I realized that it didn't really matter, if a book was important, I remembered it. If it was bad, I forgot about it. I could have typed these into google sheets so it was sharable. I wonder if that is an acceptable option.
I also tag them to indicate if I already own them and in what format (physical, epub, audio).
Saves me from purchasing duplicates when I'm at the used book store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku
I know exactly what books I want to read.
10 years in jail got my reading list down considerably though. Managed to read over 800 books, though the one book that I really, really wanted to read[*] I only obtained just before my release and never finished: In Search of Lost Time by Proust.
[*] Based on a comment by a character in Murakami's 1Q84 that the only time you will have enough spare time to read Proust is if you end up in prison.
But also, more and more, having the physical space and safety to own a 'static' collection like books is becoming a luxury and a privilege.
I don't think tracking books you want to read is Tsundoku.
I have over two shelf feet of books I plan to read and haven’t yet. No that’s a lie, it’s at least four.
I also like that I can add friends and see what they read. There’s no chance that I’ll open my aunt’s book list sheet once a week to see what’s changed but I would love to see her reading in my feed along with my other friends.
I always export the books we have to a spreadsheet file for reference on my smartphone when we're going to a second-hand book fair.
I accidentally marked the wrong edition of a book as read the other day and it took me like 20 minutes to figure out how to switch the entry to the correct version.
Like a series list might only have one version of the book listed and it'll show the book as unread for you which can be really confusing when you've read 1000+ books and you're checking if you completed something or where you dropped it.
Different Translations
Corrections or Updates
Additions
Different Illustrations
I do the same with logging film watches on IMDb, which is actually useful because I can visualize exact watch behavior by the timestamps, and using exports I can also query my film history for personal recommendations (select documentaries that are horror tagged I've watched from the last 10 years).
Unlike Letterboxd, though, sometimes its reviews can be valuable, as long as you avoid big, popular books. Or you think gif extravaganzas are an acceptable means of literary criticism.
Why would you need a service to keep track on what you read? I have a text file with a list of book and some notes about every book. Works perfectly for me.
Because I can see what my connections (close and not-at-all-close friends) are reading.
Because I like it and have been using it pretty much since 2013.
Goodreads works perfectly for me as it was intended to be used: a nice book database
If it's worth remembering, you'll remember you've read it, and if you want to refresh your memory what better than to reread?
Same with books. I've had plenty of times where I'd start reading a book and then a chapter in recall it. It's just nice to have a list.
If it’s not worth remembering, you won’t remember if you read it or not — so you could waste time rereading a forgettable book until you realize. ;)
Having a couple notes about the things that stood out to me at the time is a great way to remind myself how I felt about books I’ve long since stopped thinking about.
On the flip side, I have a firm belief that every book worth reading changes you at least a little, so even if I don't remember it consciously, it has had an impact on me.
I did try writing notes at some point, and stopped after the first attempt. That was several years ago and I never read those notes :)
On the flip side, I can enjoy a book more than once. This is a definite plus.
This next section isn't meant to be shitty: but what's the purpose of even keeping track of that? I've read hundreds, maybe thousands of books over my life and don't have a list of them anywhere, nor can I see a use for that.
having a list in notion reminds me to continue.
in addition having a list of books I want to read (ghost library in japanese?) reminds of the things I don't know yet or haven't read which in turn helps keeping the reading habits.
It was the list of books already read that didn't make sense. I hadn't considered it as a motivator to pick back up the habit.
For me these lists (which I regret starting far too late in my own reading career) now cover about 9000 items.
For me the prompt to starting the process was noticing that I was again and again giving a chance to really terrible authors. That had to stop. And it did.
As a natural feature of clearing out those lists when I finish a book, you create a book read list. I don't have much use for this but it is interesting to review the stats on say author nationality.
I really should start a notes file or spreadsheet to log my collections of things; I'm at a risk to accidentally buy doubles of e.g. video games now with all the cross platform releases and promotions. Play them though? Nah, I got a backlog and I prefer my 10 year old comfort games.
I’ve always seen GoodReads as more of a social network than just a list of what one’s read because you’re right, the latter is well replaced by a document.
The most useful aspects might be community-driven, but I find the web app so sluggish that I tend not to bother with it now.
I'm someone who likes reading a good rant or complaint. I'm not sure why that is but I find them very entertaining.
It felt like some 20 year old was explaining how to life a good life with all the experience 20 year olds have. Lots of idealistic ways to organize things. Lots of mental gymnastics to supposedly make you more productive. I did like the 'improve yourself 1% a day', but I did that with a spin bike and quickly got injured...
Meanwhile Power of Habit was more like a pop-science book with the goal of teaching you brain science and apply it. I'd pay 50k-100k for that book, it has been revolutionary. I'm off all drugs, I can quit social media whenever I want(I'm only back because of LLMs), I quit video games, I made my evenings productive instead of hedonistic.
Anyway, I wanted to see if anyone agreed with me because I wasted hours reading Atomic Habits. Thank you Good Reads. It was therapeutic.
Good god, how scary. Thanks for the warning!
Anyway, getting off all drugs has been great, mostly due to the hedonic treadmill/tolerance.
Similar with video games. Games are fun today, but if I play them for a few weeks, they become work.
I get way more excitement out of achieving a new 3D print design or finishing a coding feature. Not to mention, reading non-fiction is pretty great, mind blowing stuff if you find the right book, as previously mentioned.
I somewhat blame Disney, I get all excited for some hedonism, and they release a crappy starwars episode. I'm more disappointed than if I worked all night.
That hits the nail on the head. I cannot comprehend how this book is so popular. It literally covered in dozens of cute little platitudes like "take little steps". It does not contain a single paragraph of original thought. It's just so... naively simplistic, so _obivous_.
Is it that good?
My condolences.
From my personal experience, I remembered the most from this book years later, in contrast to the other two. Specifically, I still use the idea of "prompts" for behaviour change. I remembered how it's typically not a good idea to use time as a prompt to do something (e.g. this is not effective: "At 8 pm every day, I will go outside for a jog"), but instead to use a prompt that's easy to notice (e.g. this is more effective: "After dinner every day, I will go outside for a jog").
I also really appreciated the idea of avoiding personally blaming yourself or others for unwanted behaviour, and looking at systems change first. I still remember the author's anecdote about solving a conflict with a roommate who complained about the bathroom floor being wet too often: instead of focusing on guilting the person, the systematic change was simply to put a bathroom towel on the floor to make it easier to dry the floor. Similarly, I've been able to keep my own bathroom cleaner by putting cleaning tools in easier reach.
Lastly, I appreciated the appendix that contains book summary charts, mnemonics (e.g. a habit can be thought of as "ABC": an anchor/prompt, a behaviour, and a celebration), and suggested habits (especially positive habits that help with tending to interpersonal relationships).
I still remember all of this years later, so in my personal experience, this book had the greatest impact on me.
~~~
For "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg, it's a bit harder to skim as it lacks the graphs and summaries from "Tiny Habits." However, the ideas are mostly the same. For example, this book focuses on triggering behaviour with "cues,” which are equivalent to "prompts" in "Tiny Habits.”
The idea of “keystone habits” also stood out as more emphasized to me in this book, where certain habits can have the most impact in contrast to others.
I suspect this book was popular because you might feel smarter from reading it, as it explores case studies about corporations and US military training, but it’s a bit harder to skim to refresh, due to lacking the graphs and summaries of the other two books.
~~~
For "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, I respect the book for what it is. It's engaging for most people to read, popular, and it makes the ideas easy to understand for lots of people. I prefer "Tiny Habits" more, but I respect “Atomic Habits” for making the ideas accessible to a larger audience.
I actually found it fairly similar to Tiny Habits: it also has diagrams, and it also has mnemonics (e.g. a habit as a Cue-Craving-Response-Reward). The author also talks about making positive habits easier to do in simple ways, similar to the “Tiny Habits” author.
I believe the biggest difference between the two was that "Atomic Habits" focused more on motivating behaviour change by focusing on a want to change your identity (e.g. by reminding yourself that a person you would want to become would practice different habits). This might be a source of criticism about the book, as the advice is less practical in contrast to the other ideas, though it has some plausibility (e.g. in my personal experience, reminders that one is a professional have been effective at changing behaviour).
Upon a skim now, I do remember having the feeling that the ideas of “Atomic Habits” were similar to those of “Tiny Habits,” but I preferred the “Tiny Habits” appendix more, and I also had a personal preference for the writing style of the book by Fogg.
~~~
To summarize this whole comment, I believe all three are worth at least a skim, though I like “Tiny Habits” the most for the writing style and provided graphs and mnemonics. But you can’t go wrong if you’re interested in habit change with any of them, as they overlap a lot and roughly cover the same ideas for behaviour change.
(Looks like there are a few different books you could be referring to.)
Couldn't recommend it enough. I can make my life robotic if I want, and still be happy. Its mind boggling.
(Admittedly, you have to turn it into a habit, which means like ~3 days of 'suck', but after that its automatic)
I've done things every day for 50+ days without the habit sticking. I think I heard "habit resistance" is related to ADHD.
But I also should clarify that this is specifically the basal ganglia that is being affected, and the basal ganglia works in a rigid way. A 'habit' isnt sticking after 50 days, you might be replacing it occasionally with something else, which is essentially breaking the habit. From the book, I can imagine a bunch of ways why this is going wrong.
Maybe you are doing something that scratches the itch that would otherwise drive the habit.
Maybe you are not doing the cue-routine-reward cycle when you do your new habit.
I feel like I'm doing a real disservice to the book because I'm summarizing ~300 pages, I'm about to hop off HN and don't want to go into further detail, and I don't even know what habit you were working on.
Don't let my terrible comment dissuade you. I also don't recommend summaries of this book, they missed too much.
1. Ratings: you can not compress information down to 1 byte without losing almost all of it. I've been a professional game reviewer in another life. I used to give ratings because I was forced to by the site format. When I retired from that I looked back at tens of games I rated. The scores made absolutely no sense any way you tried to look at them. Not compared to each other, not compared to what the game set out to achieve (one way I tried to grade them as objective as possible), nothing. It can not be done.
2. By definition half of the reviews/ratings are being given by stupider than average people. How are you supposed to draw any conclusion when half of the data is garbage?
Only one thing crowd sourced ratings are useful for: helping the platform become a gatekeeper and then squeezing the reviewed.
For example, if I leave a 5 star review and there is one other review, 1 star, it would be 3 stars if we had the same weight.
But if someone votes me 76% "taste score", and THEY have 50% weight, and I voted THEM 37% "taste score", then both of our votes affect each other. And this would happen for an cycle of reviewers reviewing other reviewers.
Unless you meant only personal settings, in which case I think it would only work for niche audiences. There's a good chance that there's zero overlap between sets of reviewers on many products on Amazon except perhaps people who are chronically online, reviewing products. IMO those people's reviews are not as helpful as a person who leaves an occasional review, because in the latter case, the product stood out for some reason.
I do. IMHO, star ratings are close to pointless. They are deeply flawed even without spam, advertising, or moral outrage votes. And especially for goods that depend on a subjective reception - such as books. First, grading patterns are various. Many use either 1 or 5. For others, 4 is already a failing grade. Second, I don't care what the average reception is. I might be (and usually: I am) looking for something different from the other reader.
A review offers much more. An advantage (or disadvantage) is something I deeply care about, don't care at all, or I would use the same point, but in the opposite way. And well, other times, the review points that the person has no idea what they are talking about - e.g. it is clear that these are based on hype (or: guilty-by-association) rather than the book's quality.
https://www.thestorygraph.com/
(I haven't tried any of these yet.)
LibraryThing is like a poor GoodReads, that's it.
So no.
I still use Goodreads because it gives me notifications of new releases, but, aside from that Storygraph does the job well.
I will say that I don't tend to read many reviews of books these days. I just don't find reviews of anything (including outside of books) to be worthwhile anymore. Take books as the example here, most online book platforms give you a free preview chapter or two. If a book is interesting to me I'll give the preview a read before I purchase (digital or physical). If it's not catching my attention I just move on. There are more books that I want to read than I will ever remotely be able to read before I die (thanks Four Thousand Weeks...) so I really just don't hesitate to drop something that really isn't banging in my head that I have to read it. Same goes for video games, I'll go watch one of those let's plays on YouTube and if it looks interesting after 20 minutes of game play I'll purchase. Reviews are just so easily gamed anymore and finding the good out there is super hard.
That's all to say, I don't read many reviews on Storygraph.
Before Goodreads it was a huge pain to know when authors you liked were releasing new books.
And being able to track all the books in a series is really nice too.
I have noticed that Goodreads has gotten worse in this regard though. My to-read list with future books often lacks release dates (even years) now.
I used to interact with it quite a bit, now I rarely use it anymore. After this year's reading challenge is over, I'll probably just stop using it all together.
Unrelated to the reviews the app is slow and crashes often. They use dark-ish patterns to remove support for logging in with Google and completely removed it from the mobile app so I deleted the mobile app (which can't be used offline anyway) and only use the site on my phone.
All that said, I still like it more than other ones I've tried and the social element is nice too. I enjoy seeing what Internet friends are reading and I've found some good books from it. For that I wish more folks would use it. You can find my Goodreads in my HN profile.
So what could Goodreads do differently? It's true that the owners do as little as possible with the site, but that also means that overall the scoring system has very little impact. Would you trust it?
Add a way to see ratings only from trusted people and friends.
They do this now by bubbling up ratings from my contact. Id like an option to just show their average ratings instead of site wide.
I do not trust any moderators that I don’t know. So I’d rather have them just show ratings from friends or people I’ve noted as reviewworthy. And maybe one degree from them.
I think this applies to everything and I don’t trust Amazon reviews or App Store reviews, but do trust reviews from some people I know (after I’ve filtered out the “I love everything including AntMan3 and StarWars9 and Justice League” friends).
I think this would make people who like specific books be willing to spend time moderating and they would reject negative reviews so everything would be 5 stars.
The owner is Amazon, isn’t it? They’re working on a full ui overhaul I think
8,000+ authors have shared five of their favorite books around a topic, theme, or mood. We make it easy to find the books they recommend through a book you already love, an author you adore, or a Wikipedia topic that interests you.
We are entirely focused on book exploring, discovery, and better recommendations. We are only 2 years old and bootstrapped.
We just launched genre pages here -> https://shepherd.com/bookshelf/hard-science-fiction
You can filter in on sub genres, topics, what age the book is for, and a lot more. Trying to make discovery more fun :)
Like check the fivebooks list on the history of modern Greece: a really interesting, enlightening list:
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/christos-chomenidis-real-gr...
Yes, of course. Accuracy doesn’t make money, engagement does. This is the problem with the current state of the internet. People forgot that engagement was just the path to accuracy but is much harder to measure. So people realized that they can increase engagement to make money.
Accurate information creates a better society for everyone. Angry engaged people fed bullshit create a worse society for everyone.
But yeah, the incentives are perverse, and the owner-class are willing to do whatever it takes to keep them perverse.
Accurate information does create a better society for everyone, in this society and in any. It's like physics - cultural karma.
Angry engaged people fed bullshit do create a worse society for everyone, every time. Karma. Equal reaction.
That one of these options has been weaponized for profit and control is independent of those facts.
It's no secret that if we don't change how society operates, we're going to make life on this planet unbearable very quickly; and this is part of the reason why.|
Poverty, hunger, and inequality are rampant in America; as are the drug issues and mental health problems that go with them. This is part of the reason why.
Our money is spent subsidizing war and oil. This is part of the reason why.
I sometimes looks at the reviews of the books, but never look at the star rating because of how uninformative it is. For most of the books that I care about their rating is somewhere between 3.0 and 4.5 and I can't for the life of me see any correlation between the my enjoyment of the book and its rating. I always assumed that this is just a consequence of taste in books being so different for different people. Averaging these personal preferences just doesn't produce a good signal.
Which brings me to the question: does anybody actual care about ratings on Goodreads?
> "I really thought long about this, and I haven't slept in two days due to ongoing harassments of 4chan," cookiengineer claimed in a post to the Tenacity GitHub Issues page some 13 hours ago. "As the first people were literally arriving at my place of living, where they knocked on my doors and windows to scare us, I am hereby officially stepping down as a maintainer of this project.
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/07/07/tenacity_maintain...
There is no "group" - 4chan is not a monolith, and many of boards have members that do not mix at all. /tg/ - the traditional games board (TTRPGS and the like) - might as well be an entirely different website than, say, /pol/ or /g/. 4chan in general is also extremely tame as compared to 10 or 15 years ago.
Considering a full-on transfer over to another platform. Thanks for all the recommendations here.
I could see myself spending a lot of time on a site where I could maintain one profile/habit for all of them. Each of those alone I enjoy, but I've never been able to make it a regular thing to go to a site for just one of them. I love movies but I'm not so much of a cinephile to put a lot of time into letterboxd, and so on.
Pretty much every day, one of those is important to me. But each of them alone has gaps in my life where I may not care about them much for a few weeks to a few months at a time.
For context, I am an _extremely_ happy user (and paying subscriber) of Rate Your Music . I find the genre classifications, album descriptors, user reviews and ratings incredibly useful and they have greatly enhanced my music discovery process, and my understanding of the music I come across.
Right now, my process is this: 1) buy a book, 2) read it, 3) my friends can see that I read it and left a star rating.
I think this makes a pretty hard barrier to entry in this market, because I read 99.9% of the time on my Kindle, and I'm lazy. :)
I understand fake reviews in Amazon are a problem: if I'm shopping there, I do look at the reviews, especially bad reviews to see if there is anything wrong with the product. I will disregard reviews that don't make sense and only pay attention to things that matter to me, but it's possible that I'll be influenced by review bombing... I'm only human after all.
But Goodreads? Who cares either way?
You're out of the loop.
Goodreads and Facebook groups are used heavily in the author and reading/fan communities. Heck, my wife is a Goodreads librarian and often helps out authors with issues (which are, unfortunately, incredibly common since Goodreads support is largely non-existent and yet another reason why the platform is horrible, probably due to to it being an effective monopoly in this space). My bet is, of the many people she knows in the community (both authors and readers), every single one is active on Goodreads.
I often read both Amazon and Goodreads reviews of a book; the perspective is usually different.
(Same with movies, by the way. I don't remember ever avoiding a movie because it had bad reviews, who cares?).
Also majority of reviews are fake. Go look at any new Ryan Holiday book months before it is released. Obviously these authors and their publishing teams know how to game the system so more people end up buying the book.
GoodReads has an incentive to sell books. It has no incentive to sell good books. All the good books have < 200 reviews and hardly anyone even knows of them.
- Goodreads: Broken recommendation system, meh UI, review wars
- Google Search: Pointless
- Reddit: Overtly user-hostile, poor UX, tiktokified
- YouTube: Mainstream, ad-riddled, tiktokified
- Yelp: Cluttered-UI, favors jerks, hostile to businesses
- Gmail: Oh yeah we're gonna delete your emails if you don't log in after a while
- Netflix: Shrinking catalogue, worse quality shows
- Instagram: Tiktokifying
- Twitter: Mostly the worst people remain on it
- Facebook: Not much of a social network, only decent thing left is Marketplace
- Wikipedia: Strayed far from its mission, mass editing by agenda-driven groups
- LinkedIn: Recruiter-centered, mostly garbage content
- DuckDuckGo: Can't even respect quotes or intitle like it used to.
- Amazon: Tons of shabby products, tons of fake reviews
- Medium: The TEDx talks of blogging
No wonder I visit an ever shrinking number of domains daily.
There's lots of great stuff! But yeah, none of it is really on the internet. Touch some grass!
ChatGPT is the closest thing we have to A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
I have my well curated youtube subscriptions.. but there is less content every day. Twitch died for me a while ago. Reddit was pretty fine for at least consuming stuff until this latest debacle (it stopped being a good place for discussion long ago).
Lemmy seems promising. I have yet to have luck with mastodon. As the older apps die off slowly, new ones will appear.
Also, YouTube Short was not a great addition. It entices garbage content in my opinion. There is a reason I’m on YouTube and not on TikTok.
I also think it works as a marketing tool. At this point, YT knows what I want and shorts act as a sort of teaser for new channels. 60 seconds of their most interesting content to see if I want to subscribe or not. It’s less commitment than watching a full (often 20 min +) video.
- Goodreads: Never was going to be massive social network. Hard to monetize so little investment.
- Google Search: SEO + ads obscures what people are looking for
- Reddit: Too much investment for the companies current size and lack of growth. Poor new products offerings
- YouTube: Taken over by engagement bate and need to monetize
- Yelp: business model provides bad incentives
- Gmail: promised everyone free stuff and doesn’t charge. Needs to cover costs
- Netflix: doesn’t actually own most of the content users used to watch. Has no more subscriber growth
- Instagram: Losing ground to new social network and must adapt to be more video+algorithmic
- Twitter: makes no money. Had too many employees. Run by Elon who is controversial. Moderation is expensive
- Facebook: for my generation at least, a combination of things led people to migrate to other places
- Wikipedia: people who moderate for free have agendas
- LinkedIn: business model makes for bad incentives
- DuckDuckGo: hard to be the third place social network
- Amazon: moderation is hard, too much seo and ads, direct from china allows for more cheap goods but introduces more fakes
- Medium: nobody wants to pay for pretend news
- Hacker News: filled with old ~men~ people shouting at clouds, reminiscing about how things were better in the good old days.
We should be seeing competitors emerging right now but sadly years of lax competition laws enforcement and extreme concentration of wealth amongst said companies make that unlikely in the short term.
No shouting at the cloud required here.
We should all just watch tiktok like good zombies and ignore the enshittification of the entire world.
Damn clouds! =p
But yeah that's an annoying experience if you use voice directions, and in some instances I could see it as really degrading the directions app, since "taking a left at the intersection" may be more clear than "turn left at the kfc"
Google Maps is still much better for searching, but the gap seems to be closing.
It's easy, and it's addictive, and it's not all bad. But it's irresponsible.
They will change your social activities in ways that you may or may not be ok with. They will treat you like a good to be sold in the most efficient way possible.
Basically - These companies treat the social lives of people as though they are cattle, herded around so they see the right ads and sold off or butchered when it's profitable. They care about the cattle only in the sense that they are a means to an end, and that end is profit.
There's a place for that kind of efficiency. Human relationships are not that place.
IMO the people who left Twitter (and haven't come back) were worse than anyone who's on it now. There hasn't been any meaningful change in discourse - for better or worse - that I've noticed.
Bold claim about a site that is, in the last year or so, pivoted to explicit and quite public encouragement of Nazi/racist viewpoints.
Google search is worse, twitter is becoming worse, but not unusable. I learn so much educational stuff from youtube/tiktok and connect with musicians on instagram, etc. These platforms can be useful if you want them to be.
I wish that Goodreads was more similar to RYM.
It particularly helps if you have access to multiple streaming services.
Or just find a way into RED and PTP.
Any business has thousands of moving parts which all need to work properly or the website or operation shall fail.
I just about coffee spit lol'd.
youtube ok-ish. but worse every day.
goodreads useful for reading quotes.
It's a great place to hang out for 65+ retirees posting crackpot conspiracy theories, that was the main reason I left.
While I'm yelling at clouds, Facebook was better when it was more profile and people focused instead of turning the newsfeed into a twitter copy and optimizing for engagement bait content.
Which is why I tell everyone to block every single group. If someone shares something (that is it isn't a photo they personally took, or a thought they personally wrote) hit the "block all from [whatever group it was shared from]" button. Leave all groups and market place. I did that almost a year ago and Facebook became a useful place again!
I'm so sick of it. Google can't be destroyed soon enough for me.
I don't understand how can a PM/web developer actually be this hostile. They absolutely knew it was a dark pattern and now have gone back to normal.
I'll humbly plug https://abooklike.foo just in case people want better book recommendations. You can input books u like and it'll find others you may like. I can explain more about its mechanics if useful. Been working on it for around 6 years now as a side project. Anyway, just posting in case someone's scanning through the thread and happens to see : )
It's not working for me. I have two books of my own, and still, I never go there.
AFAIK Amazon acquisition didn't ruin Zappos. IMDb is more garbage than it was before, but I still use it. But Goodreads: nope, it was too close to what they already did on book selling, so they killed it. Slowly.
As someone who used Zappos a lot before Amazon acquisition, IMO the quality and selection decreased after Amazon takeover. Today, given the authentication issues across all Amazon services, I just don't go to Zappos anymore because I don't trust the products. Because Amazon. Additionally the UI is dated. Such a bummer.
never even considered being influenced by random people from the internet, unless this is someone I know.
Goodreads can go die in a fire.