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Comment by selykg | Hacker News Reader

Typical plug anytime Goodreads is mentioned that Storygraph is trying to do similar and being actively developed.

I still use Goodreads because it gives me notifications of new releases, but, aside from that Storygraph does the job well.

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There is also BookWyrm if you're into the fediverse/activitypub.

https://joinbookwyrm.com/

Second this. Storygraph is great and has a ton potential. It just needs a bit more development put into it to match Goodreads minus the bad parts. I wish had the "plus" subscription tier set at $10/yr not $49/yr. I'd definitely donate that much, but $49 is a lot in majority of the world.

I only use them to keep a list of what I read with my own reviews. For Storygraph I need more taps so it's slightly behind (I tried the switch once).

"Subscribe to our newsletter" was default unchecked on sign-up; love it.

Weird signup captcha, it requires you to open devtools and remove `onpaste="return false;"` from their email field (either that or enter your email manually, typos and all)

Does Storygraph have a better moderation story? Or does it just have fewer trolls because it’s smaller?

Everything I've seen tends to be pretty good. But it's probably more due to it being smaller, at least as far as I can tell. My guess is that the people on Storygraph actually _want_ a better Goodreads and so there's less likelihood of moderation being something that needs constant utilization. It'll be interesting to see if it gets worse as it grows.

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.

Tried Storygraph once and it lacks Japanese books so I still stick with Goodreads unfortunately.

It doesn't seem to be usable without log in: can't search books, reviews, can't do anything, so not very similar at all with Goodreads

Just because you have to sign in to use it doesn't mean it's not similar.

But it does mean that it's far less likely they will have any users. Particularly without any federated login.

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