Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
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But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive.
Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from acquiring or partnering with Goodreads, because their database of books and reviews could be used to instantly start competing with Amazon's book business. Amazon snuffed out that threat of competition in an instant.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-29/amazon-ma...
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
It's not that they haven't gotten better, but "better" and "what they should be" are very different things. One only hopefully leads to the other.
Stronger anti-trust laws would just block many of these sales in the first place (e.g. identify that Goodreads competes with Amazon's existing dominant user book-review feature, and kill the acquisition for that reason).
One incredible journey later and the product is already on the sunset.
That's where my pet antitrust solution succeeds where others fail: ban all M&A. Companies only engage in mergers to consolidate market share, but their market share consolidation (i.e. monopolization) not only decreases competition, but also comes at the expense of employees and customers of the acquired businesses. Nobody wins except the monopolist, and monopolies are already bad, so why help them?
(I think of monopoly and market concentration on a gradient scale, from a little bit monopolized to completely monopolized, so don't get stuck on a monopoly being a single entity)
companies merge to concentrate market share, i.e. eliminate competition, i.e. increase prices, i.e. monopolize. Let's not ban just monopolies, let's also ban monopolize.
All joking aside, supply chain shenanigans are a nightmare.
Here's what they teach in business school: if you have a cloud computing business, and you have an advertising business, and your cloud business wants to advertise its services, should the cloud business get a discount on the ads, maybe the ad business has some surplus capacity you could soak up for free? Nope. The cloud business taking advantage of "free" ads from your ad business will make the health of the cloud business look better than it is. It will cover up overcapacity in the ad business, hiding the poor way it is being run. To properly assess your two businesses so you can make internal investing decisions, you need a clear picture of how those two businesses are operating in their respective markets. If a competitor is selling ads cheaper than you are, your cloud business should buy them.
So, if this is how managers and cost accountants are trained to think rationally, well guess what, that's what markets are good at.
Vertical integration is part of the monopolization problem.
Maybe the bottler bottles for multiple companies. Maybe Coca Cola could redesign their own bottles to target specialized bottle-filling machines, and Coca Cola would have enough volume to use all of that bottler's capacity.
But the bottler won't invest in the machines, because they don't want to only bottle Coca Cola products. And absent that, the bottles never get redesigned and the efficient machines never get bought. And absent that, Coca Cola is more expensive than it could be.
Or maybe absent an integration, the product offering isn't what the market really wants, because it doesn't want to have to combine two things.
Vertical integration can breed efficiency.
It can also breed monopoly, but you need to address the iron man if you're making an argument.
Shuffle here, shuffle there, viola! Tax evasion.
Like Twitch and YouTube.
Or perhaps "Anyone with contractual obligations to one of the merged companies is released from those obligations".
Both of those would be half way to just dissolving one of the companies and re-hiring the staff by the other company to release a similar product.
This sounds very extreme to me, sometimes acquisitions are done exactly because the buyer is interested in the other company's IP. This would be a showstopper even in the cases where the buyer really wants to use the IP it is going to aquire.
How many of those cases produce an outcome that is beneficial to the public?
Also, this is easily circumvented by just buying the crucial assets of a competitor, like trade secrets, factories, offices, patents, etc.
don't confuse economic profit with accounting profit: the promise/goal/benefit of competitive markets is that economic profit goes to zero. (quickest way to describe the difference is, there are dry cleaners dotting the landscape in competition with each other, they make income which pays the owner's living including saving for retirement, kids college fund, etc. That's accounting profit. That's not economic profit, which is why you don't see VCs and investment banks investing in dry cleaning startups.)
Another important aspect of competitive markets is that weak companies die, and new companies enter, what Schumpeter called creative destruction. The 10 firms "losing money" is 10 firms competing, some of whom will fail. The 8 firms making healthy profits with fat (and lazy) R&D departments is attractive for disruption.
And your second paragraph fails to address my point too. I acknowledged that in the long run, the health of the industry could be restored by some of the firms failing. But that can take way too long, and in the meantime, all of them are capital-starved and unable to invest in improving their businesses.
But then Company B agrees to buy them for $1 so that they continue running. Pays the employees, and continues running the service for customers.
Ban it?
Company B can instead spin up its own business and ask Company A to advertise for them, but anything else is just selling out users.
Again, though, I'm not advocating for that position. I'd hate to spend part of my life building a business and not be able to cash out when the time comes for me to retire.
You can perfectly cash out by selling your business to private equity, or to anyone really.
Ban on M&A just means you cant sell a social network to Facebook, but you could sell it to Microsoft, to Autodesk, to Berkshire capital, etc.
Would anyone ever invest in startups, in that scenario?
And, hey, if the business is successful, you own part of a successful business.
I feel old and you goddamn kids better be off my lawn by the time I get back with the shotgun.
The way you do it is the way it's always been done historically: offer a value proposition that justifies the money. And don't offer it for free at the beginning. People rightfully get very angry if you change the deal after they've come to rely on your product or service.
I still am clueless as to how to generate a network effect without giving things away for free. And as you said, once it's free, it's expected to remain free
The cynical me says that some people are able to generate a network effect because of fame or because of an existing network to which they belong (i.e. being chosen at YC or published in a newspaper). For example, FB was promoted to death in all US campuses for free during the 2000s. I wonder how that happened (honest question)
Are we discussing drug cartels? Because this reads literally like it could apply only to a highly criminal business.
We're just talking about a situation where some existing large interests have a lucrative business peddling some pretty addictive stuff, and they want to make sure nobody else encroaches on their turf. To that end, they're willing to spend a lot of money to "make the problem go away". Sometimes that means bringing the upstarts into the fold!
Not at all like drug cartels.
Sometimes it means asking the upstarts to say hello to your little friend.
Because they are expecting that the startup will turn into a profitable business, maybe?
Being acquired is very far from the only way that an investor can see returns.
Consider: if it is as you're implying, that investors expect their returns to be realized mainly through acquisition, and if it's indeed common that startup acquisitions are done to kill a potential competitor, then... all the investors are doing is extorting large corporations. If you include IPO in the picture, they're also alternatively robbing the public.
If it's just rich getting richer by pulling money out of megacorps and large populations, then this is... literally the opposite of useful, valuable contribution to the society.
The way I see it, the above isn't 100% true, but it seems true in majority of cases, which makes me inclined to support the "M&A ban" idea.
Not necessarily.
In fact, based on my experience I'd wager that in the bulk of the cases a bankruptcy would be far simpler from a paperwork perspective (but harder on the creditors).
little fish companies will be less likely to go out of business, and the economy will be more agile when they do if we stop allowing these big fat catfish to swallow everything in their pond.
I know this is already a stressed straw man in the first place but M&A are aren't a short simple process anyway. Adding some oversight isn't going to change that.
Yes there are tradeoffs to more regulation vs total anarchy/free market. That doesn't mean they're not worth it. "Good" is not the enemy of "perfect" and all.
Youtube, for one: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/30/the-entire-1-65b-acquisiti...
Android as well, if I'm remembering correctly.
They don't necessarily need to complete the acquisition in a week, just get the broad details negotiated and agreed to. Given the GP's bankruptcy example, if they thought it was worth the risk the acquirer can extend a bare minimum amount of credit to keep the company alive while they do the rest of due diligence and finish the acquisition, folding it into a breakup fee.
Virtually every single bank failure that happens results in an M&A that is negotiated over a weekend.
Most recently Credit Suisse collapsed in March. UBS bought it on Monday, March 19, after negotiations began on Friday, March 16. UBS offered a price that was 60% lower than the Friday closing price. The deal was accepted.
A homeless man that has 6 hours left to live in the cold winter often cant get shelter, because instead we are really concerned with caterting the entire fabric of society to fictiontion problems that might one day affect a mismanaged business.
Clearly there are serious scenarios outside M&A where we accept terrible failures due to regulations. Why not accept some in M&A as well?
I think one could argue that the business failure is likely to affect more people, therefore it’s a greater impact. Still, I ultimately agree with this stance (in the context of business survival, not personal); failure is an inherent risk of business.
The context in this discussion is comparing the hypothetical of a homeless person dying due to a systemic failure to the hypothetical of a business going bankrupt (without being acquired) due to a systemic failure.
This concept of presumed innocence ought to apply to this hypothetical homeless person: why not give them shelter (analogous to allowing M&A) by default, until someone decides it’s a problem? If a society is willing to accept this personal death, they should be willing to accept a business failure.
versus scenario 2, Company A is profitable. Company B is smaller, but up and coming. An announcement is made that A will buy B and everything will be better. Layoffs ensue, product lines are dropped, employees and customers are very unhappy, but prices and profits are up.
Since scenario 2 is quite common today, and scenario 1 is relatively uncommon, yes, ban it, that's a better way to run markets.
We're conducting a thought experiment here. So we think through the implications and try to figure out if there is a way to achieve benefits for all, benefits that we know exist. Don't be scared of a single negative scenario, have to look at the big picture, what is better overall. I'm glad billionaires have the freedom to build kooky submarines that other multimillionaires can climb aboard and go on dangerous adventures, sometimes ending in the ultimate sacrifice. Why a whole bunch of other people who were uninvolved engage in weeks of hand-wringing, I can't grok at all.
I'm highly skeptical that heavily restricting buying and selling of companies in general will be a better way to run a market when it seems your goal is to prevent monopolies (or put another way, ensure competition).
Laser focused policies work for a short periods but tend to be worked around quickly as the thing they regulate falls out of favor in lieu of something functionally the same but different enough it doesn't match. Blanket policies tend to stifle the market in general, causing other problems. Rather than assuming that any specific law actually "solves" the problem, we'd probably be much better off setting criteria we're trying to match and and reassessing regulations regularly to try to meet that criteria. Anything unresponsive will be routed around.
The real problem is that we have things that do that (the SEC and FTC) and they're broken. We should fix them, not swap to a sledgehammer as the only tool available.
ah, the markets I am talking about are goods and services markets. Financial markets, they take care of themselves, and at the same time garner no sympathy from the majority who don't participate in them.
if monopolies emerge some other way, sure, break 'em up just the same.
But right now we let the market consolidate to the point where major industries have 2-4 major players with 80-90% market share between them.
I support the "no M&A" policy.
So while possible in theory, if it's impossible to happen in practice, it's not a valid counterargument to a practical proposal.
If Company A was providing a service that people found helpful, someone else who is more competent at running a business will step in to fill that need. Employees will flock to the new better run business or move to some other better run business.
When new companies have to step up to provide popular goods and services that were previously being provided by failing, poorly run companies, it results in innovations and new ways of doing things instead of just letting bloated industry giants continue to be propped up artificially by restricting consumer choice.
Having more players in a market also increases resiliency and improves stability. If one company runs into problems, the others in that space can pick up the slack. No more "Too Big to Fail".
But I agree that the vast majority of mergers that make the news are not good for consumers.
Agree on scrutinizing M&A of competitors.
Banning all M&A would run into a brick wall of unintended consequences. If no one can sell their business, then a significant percent of potential small business owners just wouldn't start businesses.
Then what would happen? Those people would go get jobs. Instead of them owning the things they create, those things would be owned by their employers. Instead of having the issue where someone goes and creates Goodreads but it gets bought by Amazon, nobody would ever create Goodreads. All you've done is save Amazon the acquisition cost.
They could sell it to another mom and pop? It's only an M&A if the shop is bought by / becomes part of another business.
If nobody wants to continue running the independent shop, it doesn't make much difference to consumers if a chain buys it, or if it closes down and the chain just opens a new shop there.
> If nobody wants to continue running the independent shop, it doesn't make much difference to consumers if a chain buys it, or if it closes down and the chain just opens a new shop there.
You're pointing out exactly why banning M&A would be good for big businesses. Now instead of having to buy out the little guy, they just wait for it close and then buy all the assets (can assets be sold under this regime? do you just have to throw everything away?) and reopen under their own name. Now the mom and pop lost a bunch of money and the big company got a new location at a big savings.
Sometimes people want to exit. They want to retire, move onto a new chapter of their lives and not be involved in the business anymore.
Finding new management doesn't allow that - they can take on the day to day, but you still own the place and are ultimately responsible.
Keeping it in the family isn't an option if you don't have family that want it. If you have multiple family members that want it, you can give it to one and probably cause conflict, or you can have them share management/ownership of it and probably also cause conflict.
Turn it into a co-op? What if the owners have no idea how to do this? What if they don't want to?
Why should people who have created a business not be allowed to sell it and cash out? Why can't they get a payoff for their investment and move on? The solutions you're proposing are all about the community and totally ignore the actual people who spent years of their life getting the business going and probably took meaningful financial risk to do so. Why should we just ignore their desires and tell them what they're allowed to do with their business?
It's prevalent everywhere you look. As you say, M&As let small business owners retire or move away, without being prisoners of their own business. But the failure mode is companies being built with exit in mind, existing to be flipped - this is doing huge damage to the markets and peoples' lives right now.
Or take housing: it's nice that individuals have a way to sell their house and recover some of the money and effort put into it, when their kids leave the nest, or they retire, or they just want to move to some other location. But the failure mode of this is flipping - people and companies who buy properties, "improve" them to maximize resale value, whether the "improvements" make any sense or not for future tenants, and sell them to various actors. This creates a huge distortion on the real estate market, to the point that housing is now built for flipping, not for living.
(There's also a secondary and equally socially bad effect of owners opposing anything whatsoever that could lead to drop in (growth of) housing prices in their area.)
Or take finance: it's not hard to see the failure modes created by professional finance class, that's busy optimizing money flows in isolation from everything they relate to in the real world.
Or, take corporate management, and the rise of MBA class: specialists in running business as an abstract profit-generating machine, in complete isolation of what the business does and means in the real world.
Etc. etc.
This is the big problem I think we're facing: stopping over-optimization.
Thiz is a fantasy, these businesses were not going bancrupt - they were challanging big business and making a killing. Your scenario is detached from reality
Assuming that they close. If it continues to be successful and they can find someone else to run the business when they retire than Big Business never gets a chance to move in. If they don't, Big Business can buy their assets and try to open a new store there just like anyone else could.
Either way, everyone is happy. The owners of the store still retire, and the Big Business gets a chance to outbid everyone else who wants to move into a market that's already proven itself to be a success. That happens enough right now and it's not caused the collapse of society.
> Now the mom and pop lost a bunch of money and the big company got a new location at a big savings.
Why would Big Business acquire the store by paying Mom & Pop more money than M&P would have made letting it close and putting the assets up for sale to the highest bidder? Seems like the smart move for Big Business in that case is to wait it out anyway. If Big Business can convince Mom & Pop to let them be absorbed for less money than Big Business would have had to pay them at auction then M&P still loses money.
The way you typically do this is by selling the business to someone who wants to continue operating it.
> Either way, everyone is happy. The owners of the store still retire
Owning a business that is managed by somebody else in retirement is not the same as selling the business and retiring. If you still own the business, you are still responsible for it. If you have a great manager and just collect your checks from it, great! But what if that person quits suddenly/dies/etc.? Now you're managing the business again. If the manager of the business needs to work in it (e.g. retail store manager) and you moved away, now you've gotta get back there and start running it again.
Lots of answers in here speaking from very theoretical perspectives with a clear lack of understanding of the actual day-to-day reality of what owning a small business looks like.
Why did the big company save money this way? If it's cheaper for them to just wait for bankruptcy, why don't they just always do that?
It seems the only answer is that they are counting on continuing the popular "brand" of the independent store. But that brand is exactly tied up to this store not being part of the big chain, so continuing it would be pure deceit.
Or as ClumsyPilot says, the business wasn't going bankrupt at all. Bit chain just wanted it, and now they can't.
The $x million limit can be decided upon based on the industry and other factors.
>nobody would ever create Goodreads
Lots of people create of businesses and pursue non-profitable enterprises for non-profitable reasons.
Yes, that’s usually what happens if they don’t have family to take over the business or employees to sell the business too.
>business owners just wouldn’t start businesses.
Maybe in the VC world but those aren’t small businesses are they? Are people really starting restaurants and yarn shops solely so they can sell the business later down the road? Or is it because they have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to build a business the community is lacking in.
It’s hard to believe you honestly think people only start businesses so they can sell it later on.
No, believe it or not, most people with small businesses, which are worth hundreds of thousands or single digit millions of dollars, don't just let the asset disappear for no value when they can find a broker and sell it.
> Maybe in the VC world but those aren’t small businesses are they?
What are you talking about? The first sentence of my post that you're responding to literally says "mom and pop hardware store" - where do you see anything about VC funding?
> It’s hard to believe you honestly think people only start businesses so they can sell it later on.
At no point did I say that. I would wager heavily that you've never owned a small business.
Most people don't start businesses for the sole purpose of selling them, but the fact that you can sell your business is important for all kinds of reasons. Businesses generally require startup capital, much of which is provided by small business loans that the owner must personally guarantee. If you're not allowed to sell your business, you're trapped under those loans. Need to move somewhere? You can't. Want to get out and get a job? You can't.
Think of it like buying a house. If you couldn't sell a house, how do you think that would affect the market? I'll tell you how - more people would rent, because otherwise most of them would be trapped in their home for the life of the mortgage. Does that mean that most people buy homes solely so they can sell them later down the road? It does not.
There's no problem if a company with 2% of the market merges with another company with 2% -- it tends to lower prices by removing inefficiencies. It's only a problem when prices rise or innovation stops when there are only ~2 competitors left, or when the a single player has 40%+ market share.
Also a large proportion of mergers have nothing to do with market share -- they're acquiring a supplier for vertical consolidation, they're buying a product because it's faster than building it in-house, etc. These are generally entirely legitimate as they enable companies to compete more, not less -- which is good for consumers.
what is actually good for consumers is fierce competition spoiling the sleep of capitalists.
If you're buying a supplier for 5% of the marketplace it's perfectly fine.
If you're buying a supplier for 65% of the market then that's a problem.
even if there weren't, it's still too big, break it in half. Shareholders will still own what they owned before, 65% of the market, and all the IP that is contained therein, but the companies will have to compete.
That makes about as much sense as banning marriage.
M&A is fundamental and important.
Banning marriage actually makes a lot of sense, according to some. Why is the state even involved in such private matters in the first place anyhow?
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/sltb.12157
Lots of women get murdered by their husbands (and sometimes the reverse).
1) building a business with a goal of being acquired often builds lazy unsustainable businesses built only to be cashed out, often at the expense of employees.
2) buying good businesses seems frequently to do what you said: they get absorbed and lost and the social cost is a lost source of jobs, innovation, and competition.
I know the companies I worked for acquired wonderful smaller companies doing decent things, made happy speeches about their future, then they were gradually pushed out and shut down. Would they have failed anyway? Maybe, but I'd like to see more businesses rise and fall rather than cannibalize each other.
I'm not a smart man, so I don't know what to do specifically, but I definitely see the problem this solution is getting at - I hope some day society has figured out a good answer.
This is important, because it means that new companies that compete with the monopolies have many paths to success. If the only possible outcomes are "beat Amazon" and "fail hard", you won't get many attempts; it's better to get an entry-level job at Amazon and climb the ladder.
So yeah, monopolies are bad, but banning M&A only helps them.
If you start a car company, are your only two options 'beat Wolkwagen" and fail hard? How many car companies do we have?
May mergers of huge companies often have negative impact. Firstly most mergers do not involve multi-billion dollar companies at all, secondly many mergers occur when one company is is trouble, and thirdly good takeovers increase distribution of the smaller companies brand.
Good examples of successful mergers/takeovers like this include:
Halotop bought by Wells Enterprises
Geely buying Volvo
SAIC buying MG
Most acquisitions by Proctor & Gamble
Most acquisitions and mergers in the markup and beauty space.
Most acquisitions by Proctor & Gamble
I'm sure there have been some that haven't been successful, but most that I'm aware of have gone very well.
How are you defining "good" or "successful" here?
The improved availability via better distribution is a win for consumers and the increase in revenue is a win for the company and shareholders.
You are obviously entitled to the opinion that monopolies are bad but, fwiw, the ftc is a lot more concerned with anti-competitive behavior than it is with monopolies. Those get conflated because they frequently occur together but a lot of companies have monopolies that most people don't really have an issue with because they aren't anti-competitive.
Sometimes a monopoly is a monopoly because they are better than everyone else.
There is also the case of "natural monopolies" in economics, these are railways, postal services, etc. where it wouldn't make sense for multiple players to waste resources and the one player can benefit from economies of scale. It'd be hilarious if 2-3 rail companies tried setting up their own tracks, stations, signals, etc. in a small town for example. So much redundancy all going waste.
Another example is multiple telecom companies trying to erect their own towers in vicinity of a little town where only one is enough to provide coverage. It's a collosal waste for the whole society, not just those companies.
This would never happen. If roads were privatized they wouldn't care about connecting as many homes/business as possible, they'd only care about building roads where it was the most profitable for them and even then any roads that made less money would be left in increasingly poor condition.
It wouldn't leave taxpayers off the hook either. Governments would have to spend taxpayer money to incentivize private companies to build out in "unprofitable" areas, but those roads would be kept in the worst conditions of all (assuming that companies didn't just repeatedly promise to build them, only to pocket the taxpayer's money while providing nothing)
Some services are worth enough to the public good that profit shouldn't be the only consideration, and some are worth so much that profit shouldn't be the goal at all and instead those services should simply strive to do the job required for every citizen with as little genuine waste as possible.
Let's think through this. Company A wants to buy Company B. M&A is banned.
1. A pays B's owners $X for all IP and other properties of B.
2. B fires everyone.
3. A hires whoever they want out of B's former employees.
A "ban" will simply not work as long as your country has a concept of property rights and ownership.
Such a weird take. Most of the acquisition the big tech does is acquihires. Basically, a way to keep a team employed and return some of the money to the investors and make the team's stock worth something at least.
This would potentially kill the VC industry.
You might not care, but it’s enough of a problem that a lot of entrepreneurs would side with the monopolists and stop this dead in its tracks.
It breaks something precious.
Old programmers are discriminated against because they point out when you're taking managerial shortcuts or, as in this case, outright lying.
Goodreads' Otis Chandler in 2021 invested [0] in BookClub [1] ("building actionable learning cultures through books, for teams").
And Elizabeth Khuri [2] and Chandler both also invested in Looped [3] (a more engaged and interactive livestreaming event service for concerts, comedy and other entertainment)
[0]: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/otis-chandler
[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bookclub
This applies even without the non-competes - it takes time to set up a new company and gain marketshare, so even without non-competes the monopoly is successfully kicking the can down the road. And every extra year of monopoly is another years' worth of price-gouging profits, so repeatedly buying out competitors can be worthwhile.
I wondered why noone else had since tried to do a book discovery engine at an industrial-scale to compete with Amazon. Here's one 2019 list of book-discovery sites: "Broke By Books: 20 Great Book Websites for Finding What to Read Next" [0]
and here's one analysis [1] of the key things Goodreads added value for Amazon: Kindle integration (social, ratings), a storefront that lets them push Kindle as the preferred version for purchases (or else Audible, or Prime and Kindle Unlimited subscription programs), data that can be mined from user reviews and ratings to power ML for better recommendations, understanding users' book- and reading-habits, rich content to increase interaction and hold user attention...
I also wondered why the Goodreads cofounders hadn't gone and founded other companies, in other sectors.
But essentially Amazon dwarfed other online book retailers, then moved on to much bigger and more profitable sectors (Kindle, digital music, streaming, Alexa, AWS itself, and tons more).
[0]: https://brokebybooks.com/20-great-book-websites-for-finding-...
[1]: "Who owns Goodreads?" https://bookriot.com/who-owns-goodreads/
I was surprised neither of them left sooner than that to do anything new, in any sector.
Stronger employee control and delayed decision-making would be a solution.
To take a spin at it:
- Any business that merges would be subject to two binding votes (x+2 & x+5 years) with "We wish to remain merged" or "We wish to spin off," voted upon by anyone who has been employed in the merged business at any time between the merger and vote (subject to some voting power apportionment, but resolutely not using share ownership)
- The federal government is obligated to perform an x+5 & x+10 year review of the merger's effect on the competitive landscape, with the power to forcibly unwind the merger
It would decrease valuations of M&A-targets, and decrease M&A activity, but I don't think anyone would argue that's intrinsically a bad thing in the modern competitive landscape.
It's also why so many startups get started in the first place. Buyout being the goal.
Everything that gets bought gets sold as well. The founders of the companies are willfully and eagerly selling the companies they created. Who are you to ban it? Then you have to chain them to their desks and force them to try to dedicate the rest of their lives to the business.
this is a terrible argument.
Some people sell their kidneys. Some people sold their own children. Some people even sold themselves into slavery. Who are you to judge?
Or you have to force people to continue with their businesses, which is akin to trying to force an artist or athlete to continue to be at top level. You can't force that, no matter how many hackers agree with you.
Unfortunately that's exactly why so many startups are founded.
I can't say what things are like today, but in Seattle in the 2010's, it seemed like 90% of the startups existed solely to get bought by Microsoft.
There are two main parts of this.
Antitrust laws don't typically concern themselves with bury vs incorporate. Even if Goodreads had been incorporated into Amazon, it still would have accomplished their major goal (prevent them from partnering with another company). And keeping them alive would have been just another part of Amazon's cost of acquisition. I wonder if it would have resulted in a lower offer.
Secondly, the government doesn't take companies at their word. When, for instance, Microsoft promises that Activision Blizzard titles will remain on Playstation for at least a decade, the government gets that in an enforceable contract.
When will consumers have protection against this degrading of the marketplace already?
As a disclaimer, I have never used it myself but I have heard good things of it.
For Books, Amazon has (1) Kindle, (2) Kindle Unlimited (... a direct competitor to Audible), (3) Kindle Vella (somewhat of a Goodreads competitor), (4) Audible, (5) Amazon.com (retail), (6) Prime Reading, and externally (7) Abe Books, (8) Comixology, (9) Book Depository. And then there are Children's versions...
For Music, Amazon has (1) Amazon Music Unlimited, (2) Prime Music, (3), Amazon Music Free, (4) Amp, and has just acquired (5) Wondery.
I'm cool with checking out audiobooks from Libby, and whatever music app opens consistently when I want it to (i.e., not Amazon Music). Support your local libraries!
Didn't the GP already answer the question you asked of them?
>> It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from acquiring or partnering with Goodreads, because their database of books and reviews could be used to instantly start competing with Amazon's book business. Amazon snuffed out that threat of competition in an instant.
A catalog of user reviews is a pretty important feature for a successful eCommerce site. To the point where I've seen some "review sharing" between non-Amazon sites (the specific case was an eCommerge platform showing reviews from their own site and the manufacturer's direct-to-customer site). Goodreads was ready-made to provide that to a competitor, which would give them a shortcut around that moat.
Do you really that the question was asked in good faith? I know, I know, HN guidelines, but that question was asked to rephrase the question in overly simplistic terms, willfully ignoring that there is more to Goodreads than a mere DB.
I don't go to Amazon and browse for books, reading reviews. I go to Amazon when I've already determined from other sources which book(s) I want to buy.
Maybe I'm in the minority.
I have found and read a fair few from that method.
- Amazon
- Audible
- Barnes & Noble
- AbeBooks
- Walmart
- Libraries
Interestingly, 3/6 of the places you list are owned by Amazon.
And all those options are hidden behind a menu. I checked a few books on that site, the button itself is always either "Buy on Kindle" or "Buy on Amazon" (if Kindle isn't available).
You think that to start an Amazon competitor you need a book database?
Obviously.
I can't conceive of a modern-day online bookseller not having a book database, and one pre-populated with human-written reviews gives you a head start in that area.
So now any social network kind of service, which isn’t legally non-profit and open source and preferably federated, doesn’t get any cookie from me including the ones like LetterBoxd and StoryGraph.
But the problem is federated services, where you have to “choose” an instance among other frictions and all, are kinda doomed to fail. So I just use the established ones until they are unusable and keep my data regularly exported if it’s worth exporting, that is. It’s just sad.
I've tried a few other places, but my friends use Goodreads, so if I want to evaluate books based on ratings from friends whom I know have similar taste, Goodreads is the only viable option.
Goodreads is the present of book reviews, and in the past it was the future of book reviews.
Rose tinted view.
Maybe the reviews were better, but I think in general the trend of trying to replace discussing things with people with an automated service or social network leads to a poorer result. I read a ton and have never used a recommendation tool to find them, I just read books, go to bookstores and talk to people about them.
Second, the observation is that you can literally characterize every online discussion forum that way. It's a pointless comment that borders on tautology. Put people in a space together to share their thoughts, and some of them will end up behaving badly.
Third, it was an observation of the silliness and, frankly, hypocrisy of simultaneously complaining about the behaviour of shouting baseless opinions on discussion forums by shouting a baseless opinion on a discussion forum.
> incredibly anti-competitive.
A description of Amazon in general.
>as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything.
There are links between the two. You can buy my books on amazon (the dropdown supports other vendors) from their Goodreads pages.
But to your point about anticompetitive, I completely agree.
Why are corporations even allowed to just buy other corporations, at all?
A shitty bank bought my bank and promptly made everything about it shittier. Why is this even allowed at all? Companies buying other companies is about the most fundamentally anti-competitive thing there is.
In good news though, a number of other products are starting to fill that feature gap, but because they simply don’t have the massive amount of title, edition, and cover data (which was community-sourced), it’ll be a very long time before those products will have parity with Goodreads circa 2015.
Better would be an independent Goodreads with incentives to find features that fight spam and such.
But it's hard to imagine them being able to make much money doing that, and them going under would be worse.
And honestly I'd MUCH rather have a Goodreads that Amazon does nothing with than a Goodreads that chased growth from VC money or PE or whatever to try to turn into another retail site and abandoned the "your reading history" angle.
Free market means, freely allowing people to trade using persuasions — not government using its coercion. People also often forget other side of the picture.
1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to sell their companies to Amazon or Microsoft. 2. Why don't they ask government to put people in jail who are buying products from Amazon and making Amazon big?
Recently EU also making plans to regulate the battery replacement. I covered that here briefly in my site political-ledger dot com
Have you ever heard of market manipulation, wash trading, self dealing, and other kinds of fraud in the 'free market'?
1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to sell their companies to Amazon or Microsoft. 2. Why don't they ask government to put people in jail who are buying products from Amazon and making Amazon big?
Recently EU also making plans to regulate the battery replacement. I covered that here briefly in my site political-ledger dot com
I think there's another angle you're missing here - Amazon wanted to stop paying so much in affiliate sales. At their size, they were easily taking in tens of millions a year from all the Amazon affiliate links.
Now Amazon own it, they don't have to pay that out.
Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book should have a 2.5. If you don't rate like this then you just end up with garbage.
Just allowing a boolean rating (ala Rotten Tomatoes when aggregated) is much better, assuming you can get enough reviews for that system to actually work (probably > 30 is required for most applications).
I think "aggregated personal Elo" would be a fun way to rank things: I just give you two books that you've read and you tell me which is better. Do this loads of times and eventually you have a solid ranking of every book you've ever read. Aggregate everyone's rankings and you have a much more robust system then "please rate this book out of 5 stars".
It'd be definitely interesting to see a book review site like this. In the meantime, for math books, I trust curated rankings by MAA: https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews
As for the grandparent comment: recency bias, as pointed out by another commenter is a thing, as is the tediousness of doing a bunch of pairwise decisions. I think a happier medium is to have everyone fill in tier charts (with variable number of tiers) and build the pairwise rankings from that.
I've always been so for this in situations where the users also have a database of their own history on the site, like Goodreads or Boardgamegeek.com, for example. Just throw up modals every once and a while comparing two books that you know the user knows, and make it easy to opt out of. I probably wouldn't opt out, because it would appeal to my ego and feel like a game.
> Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish. When in reality the average book should have a 2.5. If you don't rate like this then you just end up with garbage.
Just normalize the users against themselves. I wouldn't be giving a 4-star review, I'd be giving a pessimizer(4-star review).
This is of course Goodheart's Law in action but I don't have any ideas for fixing the problem.
I have a friend who has four restaurants in Tokyo, and I've been several times there. If you keep attention to the restaurant reviews in Google Maps, Japanese people is very hard. They'd go like "The food is great, incredible service, surprising flavors, very good experience, best Spanish food I've had in a long time..." and then they go "...but I know they can do better and have space to improve. 2/5".
In Spain we would be like "Nice beer, they gave us some tapas. 5/5"
Gig economy corporations also have made this worse. You're scared to score your driver, your server or your hotel by less than a 5/5 or somebody might get punished or fired (and maybe they didn't even had a contract in the first place).
And this becomes a snake biting its own tail. Now I rarely go to a place with a score of less than a 4/5, and I'll score relatively high because I know I could influence votes out of what people consider "worthy to visit".
I have a simpler heuristic. I ignore all customer ratings entirely, and refuse to leave any.
Coincidentally, NPS is entirely based on this fact. 8+ is required for a "happy customer". 7 is given a little wiggle room to win them back and under 6 is a lost cause.
Huh, could you give an example of it? I am new to the Netherlands and hadn’t realized this yet.
https://www.overstappen.nl/energie/vergelijken/
Under "Beste energievergelijker"
> Onze klanten beoordelen ons daarom met gemiddeld een 8,6.
If you scroll further, you can see their ratings for other services; none reach even an 8.
Compare that to Nerd Wallet's "Best Life Insurance Companies" (a segment that is nearly identical from all providers if you purchase term life).
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/best-life-insur...
5/5 across the board for all parties. I get that it's a "best of" list, but you seriously mean to tell me all of these companies are exactly the same? The rest of Nerd Wallet's top pick lists are the same.
1-5. Ranging from pathetic to inadequate, in any case you didn't pass.
6. Adequate, the minimum needed to pass. A culturally important number as it expresses the "zesjescultuur", a phenomenon where somebody is intentionally doing the absolute bare minimum to not get into trouble.
7. More than adequate.
8. Good. Even if near-perfect, few Dutch people would rate above this number because we don't want you to get all cocky.
9. Excellent. In service, only awarded when you did something completely unexpected or memorable.
10. Perfect, flawless.
This is because 1 is the highest grade (mark) in school, and 5 is failing, as is the even-worse 6.
And even so informed, or accustomed to 1-5 scale used by everyone else, Germans are more likely than Americans to give a 4 instead of a 5 to something that they were happy with, but was not the best they’d ever experienced.
I also get the impression that American grades are like this:
- A is good. You made an effort.
- A [however modified with +/++]: great job!
- C is terrible. You skipped all classes or fell into a coma.
The last AirBnB I rented was a five-star house where the host had installed one of those Nest smoke detectors with the motion-sensing night light directly above the bed. He still got a five-star rating, but I went well out of my way to mention the night light in my review.
There was also a massive foam rubber pad on the mattress that made the first night a rough one... but again, some people who are wrong prefer those, and again, it was easy enough to remove. Or at least, it would've been if my partner hadn't already been asleep on it when I came to bed. The resulting tossing and turning was what made the motion-sensing night light a problem.
Basically I didn't want to go full Karen on the landlord because everything else about the house was comfortable and thoughtful. I felt that a four-star rating would have been projecting a combination of my personal preferences and comically-bad luck on his other potential renters.
It's a complete farce.
About skewed ratings:
0) there is no objective point of reference, every rating is about the reviewer more than the place.
1) google knows about it. they have weighed rating of some sort so 2/5 rating is not going to kill.
2) people in some cultures can give low rating without explaining what they didn't like. either it is complicated to explain what it is or it may be misinterpreted or not publicly acceptable.
But that also amplifies a problem that exists with any rating: recency bias, or any sort of time bias.
I change over time. An album that I loved when I was 15 could get a 1/5 from me today. Or a book that I hated in my teens, may now be my favorite. It's complicated.
Maybe also allow ratings to be a list over time rather than one, single data point. That'll make calculating an average more involved, but also more realistic.
1 - I hated it
2 - It was okay
3 - I liked it
4 - It was great
5 - I loved it
I thought it was helpful for framing what a score would be but I haven’t seen this in the app or anywhere for a long time. At least it avoids the problem of Amazon where a review is like “Best book I’ve ever read but the copy I received had a rip on the dust jacket - 1/5”.
Learned through experience to skip anything below a 4 or very high 3 now. Probably missing some interesting stuff but I don’t read that often anyway.
* Recommend this thing
* Neutral opinion
* Do not recommend this thing
Not sure how much "neutral" would be used: kind of like thumbs-up/down or up-down-vote mechanic: if you're neutral you may simply not vote at all.
The non-industry people reviewing Zelda have 4 options, 7/10, 8/10, 9/10, 10/10.
A 7/10 means the game was bad and you had a hard time finishing it, and won't be playing again.
8/10 means the game was also bad, but you had fun for a few minutes/hours.
9/10 means the game meet minimum expectations.
10/10 means you enjoyed the game, but there were countless flaws that took away from enjoying the game.
10/10 Greatest game of all time means, the game was above average.
Now, this same system applied outside Nintendo's curve, you knock these numbers down 2.
Its incredibly hard to figure out if a Nintendo game is good, if you treat them like other companies. Even Nintendo believes this and will yank early access/ads/etc... from gaming websites if you don't comply with the Nintendo curve.
They spend a lot of time on development, don't rush things, the trailers are honest about gameplay and what to expect.
I can understand it's not your cup of tea or arguments that their online service is shit (it is) but reviewing a video game in isolation, many of them seem to be good games objectively. Games that don't appeal to the average CoD fan sure, but that doesn't mean they are bad games.
Imagine you got rid of the Zelda skins and Zelda name, released it on Xbox. What would it get then?
Don't get me wrong, I religiously play all the zelda's and find ways to enjoy them. I am under Nintendo's spell, but I also know these are the corporate mascots I grew up with. Nintendo markets to children, we basically need therapy if we want to be free from their grip.
I do think it’s worth noting how many of the ideas from BotW have been copied in the past 6 years in other games.
I guess my point is, I can understand the 10/10s but I also find it entirely reasonable to view it closer to a 7 or 8.
We’re also not thinking about things in a vacuum in this discussion. Is the Xbox game released as if BotW never happened? Nintendo certainly uses its brand to buy marketing influence but importantly, I don’t think the company is pissed when games fail.
Skyward Sword was a good example of that actually. It’s failure literally led to BotW. Nintendo got off their laurels and reinvented their “tried and true” formula and now it’s paying off.
I am closer your position for games like 2D Mario. Zero innovation and I’ll be eagerly watching the reviews for the new game later this year.
You're right, but to be fair sort of 'reskin and re-rate' test would decimate the reviews of most sequels, remakes, adaptations, etc. Not just in video games, but movies, books, etc. Would Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy have been half as culturally relevant if it weren't standing on the shoulders of a very popular series of books?
It's important to review a game as it exists, and not a game that you imagined in your head that would be better.
> Imagine you got rid of the Zelda skins and Zelda name, released it on Xbox. What would it get then?
Well, in the case of Genshin Impact: lots and lots of money.
Seriously, though. If Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom had been released by a company other than Nintendo, people would be singing its praises to the high heavens. You'd see a lot of "Why can't Nintendo come up with this" type articles about it.
Did you mean the industry people? Plenty of user reviews are 1/10. It's the industry guys that are always rating stuff 7+
A couple examples: Lord of the Rings Gollum (a recent, high-profile, but poorly received game) has 36 critic reviews on metacritic for an average of 39, Forspoken (another similarly high-profile and poorly-received game) has 7 for an average of 63, and Tears of the Kingdom has 139 for an average of 96. Someone with more free time and motivation could pull a better spread of data to really show how the two data points relate, but I'd be shocked if there weren't a strong correlation between score and review count almost across the board.
I can't wait to compare The Pickwick Papers against The Unfolding of Language.
Constraining pairings within their genres might suffice, if possible. There are several standard ontology for books, and it's not a trivial problem.
You might as well ask the question: Who is the better Tennis player? Roger Federer or Garry Kasparov?
A system would need to draw some kind of boundary conditions so you are comparing things that have more in common than "printed on paper and bound".
There's the problem there – assuming human input makes up an important part of the rankings.
With eg movies a much greater investment is required to tell if it's terrible.
IMO the real problem with something as subjective as books or movies is that even completely honest, well-reasoned reviews are going to be all over the map. My review of a Pride and Prejudice movie is going to be maybe 3/10, but my wife would give it 7/10, while we have the opposite reactions to something like The Hunt for Red October.
I don't care about reviews from experts or the unwashed masses. I don't even really care about reviews that much -- I'm more interesting in ratings from people who like the same kind of stuff I do.
And for most people, it seems like the semantics of rating scales don't align with a normal distribution about the 50% mark, but something more like letter grades where 70% is decent/mediocre, while 50% is a failure (in the US).
IMO this makes at least as much sense as centering around 50%; if you only score 50% of the points on a test I don't think you're competent in a subject, and if your book only meets 50% of the criteria for a great book then it might be a bad book. But again, it's all arbitrary and only makes sense in the context of the particular reviewer or aggregate community.
I'm not sure it implies that. I think that if:
1. Book quality follows a normal distribution.
and
2. People are capable of accurately assessing the quality of books relative to other books.
then you'd end up with an average rating of 2.5.
It doesn't matter if people are disproportionately reading the better books and rating them highly because an increasing number of reviews on a book would only give you more confidence in its rating, not change the rating of the book relative to other books.
To illustrate this we can imagine a world with only 100 books in it and only 100 people in it.
Let's assume that a single person from that group reads all 100 books and per the two assumptions above correctly rates them on a normal distribution.
Then the other 99 people read only a single book which the first person recommends as a 5. And per the two assumptions above they all also rate it as a 5.
Now there are 99 books with only 1 rating normally distributed between 1 and 5 and there is 1 book with 100 ratings - all 5s.
Does this change the average rating of books on the platform?
Nope the average rating is still 2.5. In fact the one book could have a million ratings or a billion 5 star ratings and the average rating of books on the platform would still be a 2.5.
What we see on sites like goodreads is that either book quality doesn't follow a normal distribution and/or people are not capable of accurately assessing the quality of books relative to other books.
Terrible books likely have fewer readers, thus fewer and likely zero people would post a review.
When you go to rate a book the system asks you if it was better or worse (maybe same) then a book of you previously read closest in rating or some hidden matchmaking rating (MMR).
I think having books having both a personal and global score would be nice as well.
I don't think it would be possible for someone to change their rating but that may be a feature.
I also don't think this solves recommendation though it may be useful as a feature.
It should definitely be possible. Take films. I had a friend who would go see a film. On the day he saw it: "OMG THE BEST THING EVER". Next Week: "Yeah, that was a good film". A month later: "Yeah it was okay I guess". Six months later: "A bit ordinary really"
In 1990 if you'd asked me to rank the Alien films, I would have put ALIENS first, and ALIEN second. These days, I reverse those rankings.
People's tastes change over time. It would be inaccurate to "fix" a rating in stone.
People change their minds all the time (and it's a good thing), I agree.
While not impossible I don't think it would be particularly scalable.
Anecdotally this feels correct, the more common user rating distributions I see are an inverted bell curve - lots of 5's and 1's, not too many 3's.
But as far as the same problem that plagues every other review system goes, I would say the paid/fake reviews are the far bigger problem.
I played around with a tool for sorting through my personal photos based on that idea.
It gets interesting when you start thinking of how to optimally choose pairs to compare, to maximise signal and minimize redundant comparisons. This becomes more important as the size of the set of objects you are comparing becomes large.
It wouldn't be very helpful to read a review as to why someone thought Fundamental Calculus was better than Moby Dick. Without the star rating system, you lose the ability to filter on the reviews from people who think the product is bad.
Because of this all the review systems like IMDB are flawed by design.
Steam reviews are the most trustworthy for me. While they are not perfect, the binary choice normalizes these scoring differences, and can be read as a "probability that you will enjoy X if your are interested in this sort of thing" which is the best one can hope for.
And it is still useful. For example, from my perspective I can quickly judge a movie from an imdb score.
Anything less than 6.1 is bad. 6.1-6.3, ok, 6.3-6.8 good, 6.8+ excellent.
Apart from movies starring star trek characters, add one to all those scores.
Goodreads is similar but tighter, anything less than 3.9 is a red flag, over 4.2 and you start getting into excellent.
Though in my opinion steam seems to have got it done best with "overwhelminly positive", "very positive", "positive", "mixed", "mostly negative", etc. but occasionally gets review bombed.
We've done exactly this with Flickchart - https://www.flickchart.com - presenting the user with two movies at a time and letting them choose what, in their opinion, is the better film. We then aggregate everyone's rankings to generate a combined chart of the best films of all-time that's always in flux and changing.
We take into account each user's total number of rankings (refinement), and the total number of movies they've ranked (breadth of knowledge). We also use time as a factor - given that something that just came out has had less time to be "an all-timer" than something that has existed in the world longer and had the time to be experienced by more people.
We created this way back in 2009 and are currently building the next-generation of it on a modern web stack. This new iteration is also more modularized so we can expand more easily from just movies to other domains (books, games, music, TV, etc.).
Billy Olson’s sitting here and had the idea of putting some of these next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on who’s hotter. Yea, it’s on. I’m not gonna do the farm animals but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very “Turing” feel since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The first thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures.
That's definitely not the case. 8 is neither mean nor median for titles on imdb. If a film scores anywhere above 8.0 they are already in the top 250. Most titles average between 5 and 7.
Interestingly that seems reminiscient of data apps. What are your thoughts on their ranking philosophy?
Ended up telling the sameish stories 3 times.
They offered me a job, then covid happened, then they offered me it at a 10% decrease, then they canceled the contract, then they called me 6 months later. I already had a job at that point and they were begging me to leave.
I think you dodged a bullet. If a company doesn't have their act together enough to actually gather the people they need for a meeting that they themselves set up, it hints that there are deep management-level problems there.
Ended up getting my dream job to be a programmer instead of a (real) engineer. Now I make more money than ever, as you can imagine.
Presumably you have other interviews.
I used to be very good at logic puzzles and have steadily been getting worse. Yes I have wider perspective now, but my raw problem solving ability has deteriorated. I can understand if a company wants to maximize problem solving for certain roles.
Looking at a random book: 4.36 stars, 74 ratings, 28 reviews. Release date: 18. July 2023 (in 15 days)
No comment on that required heh.
Goodreads is semi-useful to keep track of upcoming book releases, but don't bother reading the reviews, and the score is at best a vague indicator (and definitely misleading until months after the book is actually available).
(However I might lose my mind if I did that. Even at 75 I started to feel like I was wasting my life with over consumptions.)
I've seen people on GoodReads reading 200+ a year, which sounds insane to me.
I tried to read as many non-fiction books as I could, but these were almost non-existent in the jails I was housed in. The ones I got sent in about business and languages were a god-send and I find the information I gained from those to be very useful to me; especially the books on Japanese and Arabic which gave me a great grounding in those languages, although you can't easily learn pronunciation from a book!
Averaging just 2 per week hits 3k books in 29 years which doesn’t sound far fetched to me. Call it ~14 hours a week reading, plenty of people spend more than that playing video games or watching Netflix etc.
Is this a skill you developed over time, did you learn some particular tricks, were you just born that way? How long have you been reading adult literature? Are you skimming or painting images in your mind? What kinds of books?
I have so many books I want to read but I can only get through about 10-15 per year. Some of it probably comes down to where I choose to spend my free time, but I still feel like I crawl through pages. I spend a lot of time/energy painting that mental imagery I asked about, of what is being described.
Now this is just novels, technical information is a lot more dense and it can take me weeks to read a new programming language book cover to cover because I need to set it down after a while and think about it then go back and reread sections etc.
Speed reading is an entirely different thing, but I did spend a little while learning to read faster. The average person speaks about 180 words per minute at that pace a 120,000 word novel takes 11 hours. If you want to read a little faster don’t sub vocalize individual words just hear them in your head.
I will often set YouTube videos to 2x speed which is easily understandable and about the pace I tend to read. It’s bizarre but if you change the YouTube settings from 2x/1.5x to 1.0x it suddenly feels like most people are incredibly slow but those same videos feel fine when you start at 1.0x speed.
I remember reading this and it was so uninspiring (the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature) that it took me an entire month to finish:
With all of the low quality reviews out there these days, even the idea of finding a quality review can’t get me back on the site.
According the the WaPo, Amazon's crime with Goodreads seems to be that it hasn't kept the site up with changes in censorship standards and technology, and just lets whoever say whatever about books.
edit: hopefully somebody reading the WaPo has some sort of connection to Amazon, and can really commit to making sure that people's inappropriate opinions on the quality of books, the subjects of books, or whether books should have been written at all - will be corrected promptly and repeat offenders banned in future.
You can write what you want about books elsewhere. On Amazon, product reviews and ratings should be from people who have used the product. On Goodreads, reviews should be by people who have read the book.
This isn't about fake reviews, this is
1) partially about reviews from people who haven't read the book, but object to the subject matter or something else about the book, and
2) about "review-bombing," a phrase that is used a lot in this article without an argument being made as to exactly what constitutes review bombing (do the people involved have to collude?), or whether it's illegitimate. It just assumes that it is.
You've said "fake reviews" in this comment when the word "fake" wasn't used in the article a single time. They depend on you doing that for them.
Which is a fake review in my view. Or, at least, an irrelevant review. A review is supposed to be about the particulars of that book, not about whether or not the reader thinks the subject matter is objectionable. Presumably, people who dislike the subject matter won't be reading the book anyway, so such a review is worthless.
If you haven't read the book, you cannot possibly write a legitimate review of it.
This is not that. The big example cited is a bunch of people registering their objection to a light book being written about Soviet Ukraine while there's a war on. This is a real objection that a lot of (silly, annoying) people have. The reason the book was not published is because they thought that this objection would go viral and affect the sales of the book.
That has nothing to with fake or false. That has to do with suppressing financially threatening speech.
I cannot easily exclude it from the ratings. There's a pretty widespread understanding that star ratings are meant to aggregate the opinions of people who read the book.
Maybe review scores ought to be an aggregate of the opinions of people who read the book, but that's not what they actually are. They're an aggregate of how people feel towards a book (for any reason). Such reviews might even be against the rules and guidelines set out for reviews; reviews ought to follow the rules but that doesn't mean they will.
The utility of review scores derives wholly from how they actually work, not from how they're meant to work. So devalue them accordingly.
"Fake" and "fraud" are words that you're adding to the article.
-----
edit:
I feel like it's important to mention that the only reason this "review bombing" is painted as bad is because it convinces people. This is yet another case of (calling for) censoring speech because it is convincing. It convinced the Eat, Pray, Love author not to publish at all.
Generally, I'm wary of attempts to address 'review bombing' (besides standard anti-botting measures) because it seems like accusations of review bombing have become a sort of general cope employed by creators whenever their thing gets a negative reception. It's common to de-legitimize contrary points of view by calling people dehumanizing terms like 'troll', when in fact those people probably earnestly feel that way (they aren't trolling.) If I know the earth is round but I pretend to think the earth is flat to get a rise out of people, that's trolling. But if I'm a halfwit who earnestly thinks the earth is flat, and I say so, that's not trolling. The difference between these won't necessarily be apparent from the text of the review itself; how then do you separate the trolls from the people you disagree with? On an individual basis you can go with your gut or look that person up, but that doesn't scale up to classifying thousands of reviews. What creators are really asking for is the privilege to curate the reviews themselves, but that isn't a reasonable privilege to grant because it would completely devalue reviews for consumers.
Do what needs to be done to combat botting, use captchas or account verification or whatever works. But after that? Let the reviews fall where they may. Creators will cry that the bad reviews aren't legitimate because the reviewers are [dehumanizing term], but there's nothing that can reasonably be done about this.
Goodreads acts as the tracker for me, but a recommendations engine it absolutely sucks. It has never recommended me a book ever, I have to rely on /r/fantasy to churn out new recommendations for me.
In the age of AI and LLM and whatever bullshit, how hard is it for Amazon (owner of AWS) to see my read list (which I diligently update) and recommend me something based on the things I've read before, give more weight to my latest reads, and match the sentiments with the text of other books (which they have access too, and it's just text no audio/video bullshit)?
If Youtube can do it, if god damn Twitter can do it, why can't Amazon?
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(we do have mybooklist.com, but it simply does not work properly, it just seems to be a simple and literal "list" aggregator, from other sources, like newspaper etc.)
The recommendation engine hasn't steered me wrong yet, and the roadmap/developer interaction and feedback are very good indeed.
Bookwyrm is a good example of how the fediverse architecture is more profound than social media (and definitely more profound than mastodon that is in the end of the day a twitter imitator).
People may tire of social media inanity, whether it is centralized or decentralized. But there will always be communities that want to exchange information, thoughts, feelings, whether that is about movies, books or any other creative artifact.
Its important that those conversations don't take place inside a giant automated vending machine.
My profile is here, as an example: https://bookwyrm.social/user/sidmitra
It's not FOSS, my other comment on the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36578294
"Problem": chicken-and-egg problem. Until it's actually published, there's little or no way for a review site to verify that you actually got it, let alone read it.
Once it's published, people look at the reviews to decide whether to buy it. So where are those reviews going to come from, for a self-published book?
Solution: the publisher gives advance review copies to readers. Yes, the system IS ripe for abuse. But if you're reading a review, it ought to be apparent whether the reviewer actually read the book, or whether they have anything interesting to say.
And Goodreads should remove the bad ones.
Edit: the current comment is not what I was responding to. It's clearer now after editing.
Why am I telling you this? It's a not-half-bad B2B startup one could MVP over a week or so and your first publisher could get you in the door with the review sites who would love to have verified reviews.
This started out as /s but now I just feel like all of my information and every daily habit is going to end up (sold) online anyway.
We're still hoping the owner of the New Goodreads doens't sell the ability to remove bad reviews. But what's the incentive not to? Hoping I see something better in the comments here.
A lot of Amazon's publishing-related acquisitions tend to stray from what they were intended to be.
I'm actually fine with that, because it lets me reliably know that site is affiliated with Amazon, so I know to avoid going there.
Personally, I've taken a great interest in ultimate-guitar.com, which I consider the equivalent of Goodreads for guitar and other music tabs. Networks like UG and Goodreads are the juiciest targets for corporate takeovers, and both those sites were entirely started on the contributions of non-employees. It doesn't matter if they have now started to produce the content themselves, they wouldn't have had the chance to without the work put in by others already.
I encourage you, reader, to look into the social networks you use and to think about how you can archive the data submitted by the public. UG caught my attention because I refuse to allow them to steal their users' content after the fact just because they added some lines to their ToS. I don't know that that's their plan, but based on everything I've seen it seem inevitable.
I hope someone else is looking to download all of Goodreads' data to make it available to future hobbyists and grassroots websites.
Not affiliated, just a happy user of the site.
I've recently moved to Bookwyrm.
I was able to move import my Goodreads list, although many books were missing. Any new books i'm reading, go on Bookwyrm first. I had to add the ISBN details etc. for some. It's a bit of work initially, but atleast i feel my contribution is going to a non-walled garden.
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https://joinbookwyrm.com/ - Social Reading and Reviewing, Decentralized
>BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join small, trusted communities that can connect with one another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and Pleroma.
I went and looked at the license. https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/blob/main/LICENS...
Comment from the author. https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/issues/2152
Storygraph is pretty good, the UI is a little wonky but I prefer it to Goodreads largely because it isn't Amazon. I use it mostly for tracking reading, not so much for recommendations, but I have gotten some good recs from it.
I don't know that a minority stake in a company counts as "that's Amazon" in any meaningful sense.
i wish there was a site like goodreads, but good. but goodreads was not on track to be that site before amazon took it over.
All I do is mark books 1-5 stars and record the date I read it. I recently tried to export to StoryGraph and 1/3 of my books were missing finished dates.
If youre owned by Amazon and can’t put a date in a CSV I suspect malicious intent over incompetence.
I think Goodreads is fine, I do glance at it before any book I read to see what kind of reviews it has.
The Amazon site I used all the time that sucks now is IMDb.
Did you try enabling "Show reference view" setting? (Account Settings -> Content Settings)
Seriously, reading the diarrhea vomited out by corporate PR shills nowadays seriously makes my teeth hurt.
Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're spouting to the general public?
I get why “well, journalists never critically report on the people who directly or indirectly sign their paycheck, dontcha know!” is such a popular take (particularly in cynical times with a skeptical crowd), but the history of news shows journalists reporting on things that could potentially piss off their owners pretty repeatedly, and the Washington Post reporting on things relating to Amazon doesn’t seem to be a serious exception.
Amusingly, I just did a DuckDuckGo search on “washington post reporting on amazon”, intending to see if there were critical takes on said reporting, and what came up instead was: a plethora of WaPo articles with headlines like “Bernie Sanders launches investigation into Amazon labor practices”, “Lawmakers: Amazon may have lied to Congress”, “Perspective: How Amazon shopping ads are disguised as real results”, “FTC sues Amazon over Prime enrollment without consent”, “Amazon’s OSHA data shows its workers injured at higher rates than rival companies”, and “Tour Amazon’s dream home, where every appliance is also a spy”.
Amazon spokesperson Ashely Vanicek said that "<exact quote>"
Is journalistically neutral. Amazon was asked about what we wrote. Here's what they said. You decide if you believe us, or Amazon.
I see nothing wrong with this, unless the headline of this story was "Goodreads' accelerated mission in delighting customers with the help of Amazon’s resources and technology.”
It went along the lines:
"The defence secretary said that we're fighting a righteous and humane war in Vietnam. The defense secretary is full of shit!"
Nowadays they send their spokes drones and have the spin masters cook up even more ridiculous shit.
Hunter S Thompson (RIP) must be spinning in his grave.
e: added quotes around Hunter's fictious statement
When the entire premise of the story is hyper-critical of Amazon, and Amazon's defense is half-hearted, vacuuous, and informationally background, you don't need advanced media literacy to think "Wow, that response from Amazon does NOT pass the bullshit sniff test, huh, I wonder what that means."
How much spoonfeeding do we expect to our readers?
This isn't "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him" <and we burned zero calories to validate that point>".
This isn't "99.9% of scientists think one thing. 0.1% think the opposite. But we're not going to tell you that, we'll just interview 1 scientist from each position and let you decide."
This is a super critical piece of Amazon that achieves the mandatory standards of reaching out to Amazon for comment, and the comment they got speaks for itself in contrast to the story so clearly that to editorialize on it any further insults the reader's intelligence.
The framing is what matters, and the WaPo story, the frame doesn't question whether or not Amazon's purchase was anti-competitive, just whether or not Amazon did a good job running it
No, they say “I saw that he had a weapon”, even if the reality is that some other cop said it.
> they say things like "officer-involved shooting"
That's not what the involved cops say, that’s what the department’s public affairs office says as a lead paragraph summary to discourage engagement with the details. (The details will then be whatever story the cops involved say.)
Publishing what was said is more "just the facts, please" than editorializing the response, as shitty PR-speak as it is.
Just write a script that excludes any articles which mentions that phrase for a better life.
That's been a pretty reliable indicator over the last decade.
With the kinds of salaries they make? Absolutely! I'll believe your butt makes chocolate ice cream for the kind of money those people make ^1.
^1 testing the theory on the other hand...not so much.
"While I don't like that they do X, they are the best at Y, and they need to do X for your safety"
You get what you pay for.
I don't know. but I do know that the best marketers I've worked with all had one trait in common: they believed their own bullshit. One told me outright that the first thing he has to do when taking on a new account is to convince himself that the story he needs to tell is true because that stops him from having to lie.
ask any engineer there, this is basically true in the sense that amazon drastically professionalized what had been a deeply fly by night company. the way software was written and product cycles were done pre acquisition was hilariously bad.
the reason goodreads still looks so ancient today is that even a decade of amazon engineers trying to salvage it haven't been able to climb out from under the mountain of tech debt the company accrued pre acquisition.
amazon should have just scrapped and rebuilt the entire thing after the acquisition. or just not bought it and finished building their competitor to it that was in progress. either would have been more successful what they did.
Compare that to astroturfing. Bill Hick's opinion is very relevant for them especially.
My personal theory is that this stems from many disjointed experiments where the experimentation is viewed as being more important than anything else. Their mission is to deliver revenue, or some other metric, that isn't visible to users, so perhaps they do achieve their goals.
Also, see https://www.librarything.com/privacy
> Certain content that appears in on this site comes from Amazon Services, LLC. This content is provided "as is" and is subject to change or removal at any time.
Ugh..
There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict.
I like Iain McGilchrist thesis that we seemed that have become overly left brain dominated and so are starting to exhibit an increasing inability to process nuance.
You must have the thinnest skin to imaginable to actually think this.
And the irony of this palatable considering how the Russians are acting similar to actual Nazis and mirroring some of their rhetoric.
Insulting a fascists invading force committing some of worst crimes imaginable is not the same as what the Nazis did.
Regardless of what your background is saying someone making light of fascists invaders is dehumanising requires you to have a super thin skin.
If they didn’t want to be called orcs maybe they should stop acting like them.
Yes. The Russians chose to invade, they choose to continue to occupy Ukraine and they choose to both commit terrible war crimes and act like idiots.
> Like the east Ukrainians can just choose to be autonomous?
This is a false equivalency.
Do you think it was wrong to call the Nazis monsters?, a Orc is merely a monster, calling someone a Orc is no less dehumanising than saying someones particularly heinous actions were monstrous.
What do you think of the Russian talking points that dehumanise the entire country of Ukraine and talks about them in a way that pretty much precludes that they are fake people and should be genocide'd if need be?.
Orc is non-human, it is dehumanizing. And I'm not sure we both agree what the Nazi ideology is. For me Nazi is someone who follows a race based ideology that aims to dehumanize or otherwise segegrate elements of humanity as being of a lower category.
Fake country and fake human is a false equivalency. Humans are living conscious beings of a category that we all belong to. Countries are a further category we've invented for...reasons. I've not seen evidence that the people in the area we call Russia have claimed that the humans in the area we call Ukraine are some how non-humans. But in contrast none of us are here denying that Ukriane openly refers to Russians as a non-human category.
Yes there is an always free will, regardless of the consequences.
"I was just following orders" as an excuse for doing terrible things didn't fly with the Nazis and it shouldn't fly now.
> Orc is non-human, it is dehumanizing. And I'm not sure we both agree what the Nazi ideology is. For me Nazi is someone who follows a race based ideology that aims to dehumanize or otherwise segegrate elements of humanity as being of a lower category.
Monsters are non-human, it is dehumanising.
Calling Nazi's monsters is dehumanising right?.
> I've not seen evidence that the people in the area we call Russia have claimed that the humans in the area we call Ukraine are some how non-humans. But in contrast none of us are here denying that Ukriane openly refers to Russians as a non-human category.
It has happened plenty, from government officials.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-soldiers-monsters-se...
> Russian officials claimed on Monday that Ukrainian soldiers have been turned into "monsters" in "secret experiments" in biological laboratories in Ukraine funded by the United States government.
You didn't look very hard did you?.
You also never answered the question if you think Nazi's are monsters.
I believe its worth pointing out, that both Ukraine and Russia are using conscripts. As in innocent men that get murdered by their government for "reasons". So no, dehumanizing them is not acceptable. The cognitive dissonance necessary to justify this by citing fears of fascism is quite something.
It might also be worth pointing out, that this is lesser evil logic. Which if you recall is how we got fascism in Germany, by scaring people enough with the threat of the Bolsheviks.
edit: Also, just because OP is trolling doesnt mean that dehumanization is acceptable. Especially if that is the expectable reaction.
An excellent analogy, as applies to the current Russian state having dragged its population into a senseless, expansionist war against its southern neighbor (and erstwhile "brother" nation). And its skill at turning ordinary citizens into instruments of genocide.
Thats way more dehumanising than referring them as monsters because they continually act like monsters.
Nations, culture, history etc are ideas and perceptions that it's clear we don't all agree on.
No it wouldn't, no one said the Russians don't exist.
> Nations, culture, history etc are ideas and perceptions that it's clear we don't all agree on.
Yeah and it's way more dehumanising to say they don't exist then to call someone a monster for being a monster.
Do you think the Russian army should be invading Ukraine?.
What is "dehumanizing" is the unprovoked war of racist, colonial aggression, enacted by the Russian Federation upon Ukraine - and conducted from the start with a policy of terror, directed at civilians. If you care at all about the subject, that is what you should be focusing on.
If a bunch of assholes came into your neighborhood, started raping people and shooting randomly at whoever was walking on the street - you wouldn't have the kindest words for them either.
When I find a author whose thoughts and theories I am interested in, I usually read everything from this author. Usually their most popular book is the best one.
How is this for everybody else here? Any examples of books you discovered on GoodReads where the book itself was the important discovery and not the author?
>The site has received almost no technical improvements,
Not true. Theyre under the surface or not webfacing. (Like Kindle integration)
The biggest technical issue with Goodreads is this: the site was originally built as a giant pile of Rails spaghetti with views mixed with business logic and such and then a fuck ton of weird features built and left to sit there. Like way WAY more than you'd think unless you actively hunted through the webmap.
There is an ongoing metaproject to detangle the spaghetti into an api that sits in front of the databases and deprecate the Rails hell pit (derisively called 'the monolith' internally). It's taken years. It is still in progress. It was started far too late in the game. When people talk about tech debt at Goodreads thats mainly what they mean.
Another victim of a Rails monolith, nice. And a victim of Ruby and Rails' horrific magic that sounds like it's very dangerous to refactor. Unlike Github, I'm guessing Amazon doesn't have core Ruby and Rails maintainers on staff to help keep the thing afloat.
much goodreads leadership same as when amazon bought them. i know because i work close to them before i leave amazon.
tech was outdated ruby on rails. the engineering org has very low technical bar and love inventing things that amazon already solve at scale. more energy put into resisting amazon than thinking about innovation. lots and lots of waste.
i do wonder how amazon layoffs affected goodreads. i would clean house.
I'm sure a truly critical post about Amazon's cash maker wouldn't make it past the editors.
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. This is the main reason I've never seriously used Goodreads as a source for pointed literary criticism. Like most social media, it's a bunch of self-important folks trying to be more self-important.
This isn't likely to do financial damage such that Bezos would care, and both Bezos and WaPo "win" if WaPo looks "impartial" enough to criticize Bezos - WaPo gets to show that off for journalistic credibility and Bezos gets to show off that the media org he owns is totally willing to speak truth to power, which makes him One Of The Good Billionaires.