The Wrath of Goodreads | Hacker News Reader

The Wrath of Goodreads

theatlantic.com

68 pointsfortran7789 comments

Goodreads is so bad it allows reviews of books that don't even exist.

There exist pages for books that are "presumed" to exist based on author expectations, but have not been even conceived of yet, much less written, edited, titled, covered, published and read to be reviewed.

For example, Brandon Sanderson thinks that his current big hit series (Stormlight) will have ~10 books, he's currently half way writing the 5th book, so the 10th is a LONG way coming.

It's entirely possible he will change his plans, after all he did so for his other series Mistborn, he put four more books in between book 3 and what was originally going to be book 4 (now possibly book 8), if he doesn't change the plan again, or cancel the book series entirely and re-write the entire multiverse setup he has in his brain.

Yet a page for this hypothetical Stormlight book 10 exist:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17250985-untitled

There is no harm in pre-emptively creating a page bookmarking purposes, I supposed, but it already has 22 written reviews and 94 ratings giving it 4.68 stars.

WHY? why allow such things for non-existent books? How hard is it lock star ratings and comment box until the book is, you know, actually existant and read?

Pretty hard. There is no centralized book registry.

All you need to publish a book is a valid ISBN10/EAN13. You can buy those online in bulk. And technically you don't need one, but generally if you want to sell it enmasse you want one.

Given its owned by Amazon you'd think they'd limit it to known ASINs but then I guess they can't account for rare or old books that predate the isbn system.

Not long ago, I was in charge of a lending library at church. A very small lending library, like we started with one bookcase and grew to two.

At first, the most important task was sorting the donations, and determining which books were good for our shelves, and which to discard/recycle. So I was studying a lot of publication houses and authors and reputations. And at that time, I was sorting the books more or less by size and shape, or randomly.

So I had no catalog of books; each had a little library-style pocket with a library-style checkout card, and on the honor system, the parishioners would choose a book, remove the card, and keep the book for a few weeks. But we didn't know what was on the shelves in the first place.

So I decided I would find a book cataloging app for Android. You know, something that a small-time librarian could use. Ahahaha! That was a pointless exercise at the Play Store! Perhaps I gave up far too early. I also looked for a barcode scanning app, so that I could just zap each book and immediately know its ISBN and other details. At that point, I started noticing whether a book had a barcode or ISBN, and guess what, a lot of them had neither. More ISBNs than barcodes, that's for sure. What did I expect? These books were donated from parishioners who passed away, and represented 50 years or more of collecting tomes.

Eventually I just started taking photos of the bookshelves after I was done organizing them all. Oh, and there was at least one unknown person whose mission in life was to purposely mess up all the organized books, and put them in weird arrangements. Far more than someone who's innocently browsing the shelves, this was some kind of deliberate messing with my mind. It came to a point where I had to decide whether I would spend volunteer hours re-re-re-arranging and organizing, or just do a 10-minute tidy on it and stop worrying about this living Catholic troll.

There was a “personal library” tool for MacOS back in the 2000s that supported quite a bit, including scanning barcodes and getting data.

But as you found, there are tons of books without isbns or barcodes, especially if you go back far enough.

But even today there can be major press runs with neither - they’re only needed if you’re selling through bookstores basically.

For example, everything here is self-published with no ISBN: https://johntreed.com/collections/all

I’ve seen small libraries that gave up and organized everything by size or by color; if it’s a browsing type library it can work decently wel.

But the author is alive and active on Goodreads!

Why not give Authors/Publishers control on adding books and flipping the "book is released" switch?

If Amazon just put a little bit of effort, they could make this into a "goodreads premium" thing and earn money to boot.

Imagine selling input codes for ARC reviewers to be able to input reviews before the book is released for the public; publishers would gladly pay for the privilege, so that when the book is actually available, the top reviews are those of ARC reviewers.

There could be other things Amazon could do, this is just something I thought could earn them money and thus align their incentives with readers. They just need to "care"

Outside of a few niche scenarios with large authors, I don’t see the upside. And those authors have to care in the first place to keep Goodreads updated else Goodreads has a new problem of being stale since now it’s relying on author activity.

I don’t think this is as trivial as you suggest. Training users to not take “reviews” too seriously seems like a sensible trade off.

As someone who loves Goodreads, I've largely ignored the "bad parts" such as what this article is describing.

I've seen these review bombs on plenty of titles once certain authors or books become heavily politicized. Sometimes decades after the fact of their published book.

You also see a general sentiment of people who want to voice their opinion on how bad books are to the point where they say "DNF" and thus leave a scathing review over a single chapter.

I don't know if there is a fix to this problem, but I do wish more people read the entire book instead of judging it by its metaphorical cover.

I'm kind of torn on the DNF reviews as I have left a couple myself. Usually after several chapters at least though.

On the one hand, if I'm leaving the review because I disagree with the author of a nonfiction book, that's obviously not cool. But (this usually applies to novels but sometimes nonfiction too) if the book is badly written trash and I want to save other people from the wasted hours I just put in, a DNF review seems reasonable.

I don't know if it's the answer, but proving basic knowledge of a text could help e.g. a short multiple choice quiz. Anyone determined enough could defeat those measures of course, but it'd probably cut down on the volume of insincere reviews and lend credibility to those that pass.

Who is going to pay for the creation of those quizzes? Amazon bought Goodreads to minimize its own liabilities, but otherwise it doesn’t want to invest any more money in the site.

Morever, Goodreads doesn’t just cover a few popular fiction or non-fiction works for which a short multiple-choice quiz could be realistically created. It allows you to catalogue and review any book that has an ISBN. As someone involved in an academic field, my Goodreads activity is mainly obscure works of scholarship from university presses.

I was imagining that would be crowd sourced as well, assuming no publisher input. But I have to admit it has its flaws, and I don't have a great answer for academic texts.

As far as Amazon investment goes, it seems like a missed opportunity if they're not putting at least some more money into it. That's got to be the best possible marketing platform for their ebook/kindle and wider book sales.

The best possible marketing platform for their ebook sales is when they send you a notification through the kindle app that says "an author you've purchased from in the past has just published _this_ new book".

I'm always happy to get those if I liked the earlier purchase. Unfortunately, I've bought some kindle books that turned out to be not so great, and there doesn't appear to be any way to exclude them from this feature.

Creating that kind of quiz feels like it's within the reach of today's better LLMs.

.... and the potential spammer can use a LLM to pass the quiz

If the goal is to prevent brigading then works that have very few reviews wouldn't need to be protected. That combined with restrictions on reviews before publication might be a viable approach.

I feel like sometimes gatekeeping is acceptable. The end of the article provides the perfect solution:

"Do not review a book you haven’t read."

People who leave reviews with strong opinions for books they haven't read should feel ashamed of themselves. Bad, receive the bonk stick.

Goodreads, like any social network, attracts a lot of perpetually-online people involved in activism, the sort where it is acceptable and even encouraged to shout down authors whom one’s community regards as detrimental to society. No need to read the book first, because judgment has already been cast. Therefore, those users can’t be expected to feel ashamed for their behavior, rather their behaviour might even serve as a form of social currency with their in-group.

Book bannings seem pretty popular in the offline-world of the US as well, not sure it's an online-only thing.

The level of effort is lower online.

In real life this stuff is usually limited to more backwards places more vulnerable to phony political and “religious” figures fanning flames.

Every book I don’t like should be banned.

Worse, every book from people that someone told me not to like.

The solution is trust. Crowd sourced reviews are junk because you don’t know who wrote them, what their intentions are, or if they are in any way qualified (whatever that means to you) to review a book. With well known and trusted reviewer, you understand their biases and can adjust accordingly.

I don't think the issue here is about mmm individual being able to trust reviews. It's more about authors being pressured to write along certain lines due to hordes of basically bots upvoting/downvoting.

Almost as bad are folks who only read one chapter and leave a review. Would you review a 2 hour film after watching just 10 minutes? It’s been a learning experience for me as an author. The first chapter should not be special, it should be like the rest of the book.

> Almost as bad are folks who only read one chapter and leave a review. Would you review a 2 hour film after watching just 10 minutes?

Just to provide an alternative point of view from a reader, this is fine behavior. So long as you mention this in your review.

I’ve DNFed both movies and books in 10% or less. And that’s ok. There’s a ton of excellent books and movies to justify pushing yourself through content you don’t like. As someone put it, we’re not looking for needles in haystacks, we’re looking for needles in mountains of needles.

So, it’s not personal, but a review at 10% is still a valid review, if it’s honest about the slice read.

Sure, as long as it doesn't assume the other 90% is the same as the first 10%.

> Sure, as long as it doesn't assume the other 90% is the same as the first 10%.

Is the author writing badly just for fun, then? Is this potboiler going to turn into something thought-provoking after the first chapter of cardboard characters and cliché exposition? That wouldn't be a bad idea, like an updating of "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" with riffs on modern fiction styles, but I doubt "The <Greek Letter> <Ominous Noun>" ("The Omega Directive" "The Alpha Sanction") is going to turn into into a parody of airline novels after starting out as merely a poor example of same.

We're not talking about "for fun" or "style" as much as content. Does the content get better? Does the film improve as it progresses? If the review is only based on style, then I guess, sure. But as far as content, well how would one know unless they read the rest of it?

There are plenty of novels that change quite significantly in character partway through. There are plenty of films with a weird first act before you get into it.

If a book is popular and has thousands of people reviewing it, why not let the people with enough context (i.e. those who actually read all of it or at least the majority of it) review it? Is one so smart that their review based on only partial information is necessary and needs to add to the chorus of all of the other reviews?

Would you trust the review of a professional movie critic if they said well they didn't like the first 15 minutes so they just quit. Well today because we all have a megaphone through review sites, we are all on the level of professional critics to more of an extent than anyone would be in 1990 so we all have some responsibility to write informed reviews.

I see absolutely nothing wrong with this. “I hated the writing and couldn’t finish” is a perfectly fine review.

Sure, if you hate the writing style and explain that, that's fair. The problem is if you assume what the rest of the content, that you didn't read, is about. Suppose you picked up the novel Jane Eyre not knowing anything about it, and gave up after the first chapter because you thought it was just a book about children and that didn't appeal to you. That's fine, but then don't leave a review assuming the whole book is about children. You didn't read the book, you read a tiny subset, so you're not qualified to review all of its content. But you could certainly say, "I read the first chapter and hated the writing style."

If the first chapter it first ten minutes are bad, then yeah, you should review it. Especially if, as you say, the first chapter should be like the rest of the book... And the first chapter is bad, then how do you think the rest of the book is going to be?

> "Do not review a book you haven’t read."

> People who leave reviews with strong opinions for books they haven't read should feel ashamed of themselves. Bad, receive the bonk stick.

Replace books with games and the whole gaming community will be in pitchforks after you.

> The end of the article provides the perfect solution:

> "Do not review a book you haven’t read."

No, that isn't the perfect solution. Andrew Gelman stated the issue better here ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/07/02/the_moral_... ):

> I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. After all, I think the autobiography of Uri Geller and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are almost certainly full of crap, but I haven’t ever read a page of either.

I’m not at all convinced. How would you review a book you haven’t read? At least you could point out some specifics to maybe convince some people

Why would it be necessary to read the autobiography of Uri Geller before pointing out that it's full of crap? That's a waste of everyone's time.

Here is a proud "I haven't read the book review" from a highly ranked reviewer on Goodreads :

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2325928726

He's #6 in Australia.

If hundreds of people like a review which clearly states that the reviewer hasn't read the book what are you meant to do.

I once felt driven to leave a review of a book that I hadn't read.

I had purchased and read several books from a particular author - all reasonably enjoyable, but extremely badly written pulp sci-fi, and I was desperately trying to find some way to stop Amazon repeatedly promoting this garbage to me through notifications 2-3 times a week...

So not even a review as such, just a fruitless attempt to influence Amazon's algorithms!

That sounds optimistic. I write as someone who wish that people in my book club wouldn't pick books they haven't read.

> I write as someone who wish that people in my book club wouldn't pick books they haven't read.

That is weird expectation to me. At my book club we decide on what books we are interested in reading by voting. That of course means that sometimes what we end up reading something which turns out to be a dud, and then we discuss why or how it felt short of our expectations. Would you expect someone to pre-vet the books you embark on reading?

In my opinion picking a book for book club is not endorsement, but just an expression that it interests the book club.

I thought that was how book clubs worked: they picked a book, the members then read it over a reasonable period, then reconvened to discuss it and pick the next.

Unlike picking a book you haven't read for book group, there is literally nothing to gain from reviewing a book you haven't read.

Presumably many individuals do this to engage in the culture wars.

Except engagement, likes and fake internet points on social media - it seems.

Which part sounds optimistic?

People suck, so this is a non-solution. Review sites that accept fraudulent reviews are worthless so this should be seen as an existential crisis. I think should delete any reviews that were found to come out before a book could have been read, delete any other reviews they've written, and permaban their accounts.

Potential solve: Amazon owns Goodreads. Amazon has a way of tagging reviews with “certified purchaser,” and they could start filtering for only these reviews, rather than just flagging and boosting them (as the article says they are doing now). Of course this means you must buy the book from Amazon

Edit: don’t downvote me just because you hate this idea, haha. Obviously there are tradeoffs

Not only might you not have purchased from Amazon and instead bought it some other way, but

* Most early reviews are via ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) which you get through netgalley and similar sites, or directly from the author/publisher

* It is quite likely that you're reading something (legally) without having bought it because libraries exist

* Just because you bought it, doesn't mean you read it, and you might be tempted to leave a one-star review based on the fact that it shipped slowly and arrived late

Goodreads is much more international than Amazon, foreign users won’t realistically order from Amazon.com and might not have a local Amazon.xy site. For a time, one of the most active demographics on Goodreads was young female Iranians.

"Solution" is a fine word. And no, I don't want Goodreads to invalidate my review on the grounds that I didn't buy it on Amazon.

As noted in the article they already do this.

The irony to make this suggestion on this article about people commenting on things they didn't read.

I don’t think Goodreads has any terrible power as I don’t think people rely on it for reviews or recommendations.

I’m sure this author is unhappy someone rated her low, but I don’t think it affects sales. Although it’s hard to know. I expect Amazon ratings are more important.

> I don’t think people rely on it for reviews or recommendations

Not sure why you think that, since that's literally the entire purpose of the site.

And it's the 175th most popular site in the US [1], so clearly lots of people use it for that.

So it's definitely going to affect sales. How much, or whether Goodreads or Amazon reviews affect sales more, is hard to say. But the idea that it has no effect isn't plausible.

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/goodreads.com/#ranking

> that's literally the entire purpose of the site.

It’s not the entire purpose of the site. The site also serves to simply keep track of the books that one has read – you can export your activity as a CSV file, so (at least for the time being) you still own your own data. Quite a few of the users listed under books that I read, simply catalogued the book as "Read" without giving it a star rating or writing a review.

Yeah I use it primarily for tracking a TBR and the books I've read and when.

I also like reading reviews after I've finished reading a book. I rarely read reviews beforehand anymore.

But also, once, I almost didn't read what is now my favorite book ever - Battle of the Linguist Mages (definitely not for everyone, but I loved it) - based on a lot of negative Goodreads reviews.

I went to check that book out and noticed that the Amazon product page lists the publisher as "Tordotcom".

By contrast, The Eye of the World is published by "Tor Books".

Tor Books' web site, tor.com, definitely endorses the idea that they are responsible for Battle of the Linguist Mages, but they also note that that book is coming out of "Tordotcom Publishing", not Tor Books.

These all seem to be a part of the umbrella "Tor Publishing Group", but... what's the difference? I stopped reading self-published books because the quality was so, so low. Is that a risk with Tordotcom books?

(If you are interested in linguistics yourself, Katharine Kerr's Deverry series makes the author's interest in linguistics plain, though it's not plot-relevant or anything.)

> I stopped reading self-published books because the quality was so, so low.

I hate to say this but the assertion on quality is, from my experience, 98-99% true. And yet at the same time 1-2% false.

Finding the quality among the chaff is what sites like Goodreads are supposed to help readers do. My personal view is that the site stopped being that place a long time ago. The gamification required to get a book noticed, reviewed and discussed was, the last time I looked, intense and - frankly - not worth the effort for me. Life is too short!

> what's the difference?

afaik, tordotcom is basically an imprint of Tor. They publish mostly novellas, and I'm not entirely sure why Battle of the Linguist Mages is tordotcom and not Tor.

> Is that a risk with Tordotcom books?

No, tordotcom is an actual publisher with actual editors. Some books of course turn out better than others, but you can trust it was properly copyedited etc.

Battle of the linguist mages is rocking, and you should definitely read it.

I know this is completely anecdotal, but I've been a Goodreads user since before Amazon purchased them, and I have found that Goodreads reviews are way more accurate...or, more accurately, they don't have as high of a degree of skew towards very low or very high ratings.

It's definitely changed my buying behavior on more than 1 occasion. I have to imagine it's a big driver of sales, otherwise, as the article mentioned, Amazon would have made much larger UX changes post acquisition.

I guess I just have a different experience.

I’ve been using Goodreads for a long time, I think since just after they launched. And I’ve read a bunch of books logged there and I’ve never made a reading decision based on reviews.

I don’t think I’ve ever used it to “discover” a book other than notice a friend is reading something and to check out the book.

I'm surprised to hear this because I think Goodreads reviews are pretty useful. I like to explore used book stores and if I find a book that looks interesting, but I don't know much about, I'll typically look it up on Goodreads and skim the reviews. Reading why people did or didn't like the book has proven to be a pretty useful guide for me.

I usually stay far away from current political or social war titles which might explain why it's more useful for me than some others.

No clue what other people do, but I certainly do rely on Goodreads for that stuff.

That said, if it has a low number of recommendations, like in many of the examples, then I won't give it much mind.

I used to rely on Goodreads for making a buying decision if I was in a bookstore, weighing up two books.

It quickly became apparent relying on this was useless, and Goodreads is vulnerable to all the polarization and all-or-nothing thinking that plagues social media (and society in general).

I absolutely do, similar to IMDB/RT where it doesn’t mean I’ll agree with the review / score but it’s a good indicator.

Due to how books work, Goodreads could require reviewers to put the book on the "currently reading" list X amount of time before a review could be written, or it could at least display the "read time" on the review, similar to how Steam does with reviews.

I stopped trusting Goodreads when I read a review for "The Mythical Man Month" which gave it 1 star because the author used "He" pronouns when referring to software engineers. Remember that this was a book written in 1975.

At least this person gave a reason for their bad rating. Most just leave 1 star with no comment...

Almost every book on goodreads has between 3.5 and 4.2 rating and it seems unrelated to the quality of the book or it’s sales stats. Anything above 4, theoretically, stands out, but often not, often it’s just a rating shortage or something in the zeitgeist leading to high ratings that year, which may not apply to next year. I only use the site myself to look for 3-4 star reviews, hoping somebody with this middle of the road rating said the good and the bad, but also, there’s a ton of spoilers in those reviews, so even then, I avoid them…

Perhaps the whole notion of getting our (e.g. user review) information from the same source that sells the product, is flawed.

I remember feeling very naive learning from a friend who used to work in a large chain bookshop that the reviews (handwritten on small cards signed with staff names) scattered around shelves were only for books which were shortlisted by management.

Goodreads is a mountain of evidence against the idea that simply reading makes you a better person.

This is cute and funny - but imo it really just points out that social media attracts anger.

Thank you, I appreciate being cute and funny!

But I guess I can add more context. Yeah, Goodreads is like other websites in that people get a certain something out of joining a chorus of criticizing voices. But I'm also talking about the sheer volume of reviewers who essentially read the same book over and over again, or who try to shoehorn every new book into a rigid (and unimaginative) notion of what a book is supposed to be. I think we valorize reading because, at its best, it's a uniquely immersive way of being exposed to new ideas; I think the preceding ways of reading thwart that. I don't begrudge people who just want to read fantasy novels forever, it's your life, but I don't think it's what we have in mind when we tell kindergarteners that reading is power.

What's the right number of times to read a book, and what's the right notion of what a book's supposed to be, and what degree of flexibility to it is required? We're all eager to start reading correctly but can't until you tell us more specifically how.

The classic is "How to Read a Book":

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21956990-how-to-read-a-b...

Great, now I have to figure out whether to go by the standards of mycologos or Mortimer J. Adler.

Are you not aware that there are some genres that have effectively unlimited volume, and low variation? A certain kind of romance novel and a certain kind of fantasy novel are the genres that I am familiar with. Reading these can be enjoyable, clearly, but the person you are responding to is noting that this kind of reading is not the mind expanding kind though it is referred to in the same way.

I thought I should explain that because it was the only reason I could see for you to respond so defensively to a pretty uncontroversial opinion.

Or we mostly surface anger. In any case it’s a net negative.

Technically if you read this article it kinda implies that a lot of people doesn't read the books at all. At least on the examples given.

TFA is about Goodreads users not bothering reading before leaving a review, not much evidence to use here.

I don't understand giving pre-release books to TikTok influencers for promotion - do TikTok aficionados really read books? I don't think the publisher's attitude of just getting buzz is sincere towards readers and authors.

Publishers give no shits about whether people read the books.

They just need them to buy them.

And that’s been a staple for years, any trip to Goodwill will find you volumes and volumes of books featured on Oprah, etc, where the spines show zero evidence of having ever been opened.

The solution is to never read those reviews.

This is also the "Wrath of Hacker News" (on a lesser scale) because nobody clicks on the link and reads the article before commenting.

30 years in & it feels like the internet hasn't taken a single step to moderating the moderators. The web has almost nothing here & that's kept us locked in this sad holding pattern.

I love the Web Annotation specification. Comment on anything on the web! Share those annotations! And it will let you select/target content in the page. But actually being able to annotate something like the discrete comments within the page, that feels missing.

Maybe good reads lets us view a specific comment by a specific author: there's a page for it. That we can annotate & mark up, in a way we can aggregate against that comment or that author. But if we're just browsing a list of reviews, there's a missing link in figuring out semantically what it is on the page we're trying to markup.

Community Notes?

I know very little about how the different voices there are moderated/synthesized I to what's shown. It's just an anonymous black box machine to me. But tes, it is a recent example of crowdharvesting some opinion!!

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