The gamification of reading is changing how we approach books

"People forcing themselves to excessively partake in an activity in order to impress strangers find they're having a miserable time". A very shocking discovery

Meanwhile those of us doing things because we enjoy them haven't even heard of these "influencers" or their games. "We" is a lot smaller than those in a bubble think

Though perhaps I'm being a bit disingenuous, since people who are more interested in being visibly "A Book Person" than actually reading have been a phenomenon since way before the internet, and is obviously part of a much broader category of posturing that's presumably existed as long as language has. As with most things, the internet has just amplified basic human flaws in a feedback loop

I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns out this article isn't so much about books as it is social media. Turns out, if you interview people who are obsessive about social media, you end up interviewing some pretty strange people:

> Internet culture reporter Kelsey Weekman was inspired by bloggers like Emma to “become a book person.” She’d read a few dozen buzzy books between 2017 and 2021. But in 2022, she tore through 390. By mid-May, she’d already made it to 200. She achieves such numbers by reading some six hours daily — before work, on her lunch break, as soon as she clocks out. “I’m a binge reader. Very obsessive, very intense. The same mindset that I used to have towards scrolling on the internet, I’ve replaced with books,” Weekman says.

> I don’t want to lose the experience of reading a book I’d never heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it doesn’t count toward an annual goal. I don’t want every book I read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and what other things I might like (to buy).

> Perhaps I should try something: read a good, random book and tell no one.

Writing an essay about how you are disenchanted with your habit of using social media for performative reading, and ending by declaring you're going to read a book non-performatively, well, seems seems a little superfluous to the stated goal. You can just skip writing the essay and just read a book.

I don't doubt this person's experience, and perhaps this essay will give other people with similar feelings a useful nudge towards introspection towards the conflict between stated and unstated reasons for reading books, but reading this made me feel sympathethically icky.

And if someone wants a non-gamified source of inspiration for books to read, I cannot recommend highly enough a subscription to a literary review, like the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books.

I don't find it hard to ignore all the social and gamified aspects of Goodreads. I use it solely for keeping track of what I've read and want to read, and for finding similar books to ones I've liked. And nothing else.

I'm older than the article's author, though. They mention they've been using Goodreads since their teens, whereas it didn't even exist until my mid-late twenties. I wonder if that has something to do with it? Perhaps if you start using it when younger, you get taken in by the social and gamified aspects?

It seems like the entire point of online communities are to gameify whatever the community is about. I noticed it around 2008 and its only been getting worse.

Creating Internet points (likes, shares, retweets, karma, w/e the system) was a huge mistake for humanity. I'm starting to appreciate forums and chatrooms again where everything doesn't have to be a competition and people aren't trying to min/max everything they come across.

I find it weird how we live in such a centralized world now. All the forums and blogs and fan sites I grew up with are gone, buried under seo spam, so we turn to a few mega-centralized sites/apps now to connect with other humans. Everything else seems to be content marketing, or soon-to-be ai spam (coming soon)

What if you don't like Goodreads? I mean, almost every book on there has between a 3.5 and a 4.1 rating anyway, whether it's some fanfic or a 200 year old classic, the ratings don't really help you pick a book. Where else would you even go to get aggregated ratings and rankings, amazon? Not an actual alternative, they're the same company. Indigo/book seller sites? Most books have zero ratings. Blogs? Bloggers can only read so many books.

I like discord and substack lately, it's where I'm discovering new things, eg, reading clubs. They won't stay good forever. Substack Notes is a bit of a bummer for me, and what does the future hold for discord? Which tech giant will acquire it and shape it into something else? How long until everything you type into discord gets sold to train ai for example?

Pretty soon I'm going to have to, like, leave the house and arrange in-person events to connect with anybody without a weirdo tech company getting in the way. What would that world even look like?

> I don’t want to lose the experience of reading a book I’d never heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it doesn’t count toward an annual goal. I don’t want every book I read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and what other things I might like (to buy).

Somewhat OT but this is maybe my biggest gripe with digital game stores as well. It’s anathema to what I look for when reading as well as playing. Alas on Nintendo Switch at least there are still physical games to be found and not everything is a damn metric by now.. (“82.2% of players have this achievement”).

> Prettier than Goodreads, it repeats the strange effects of reading for pleasure in an age of digital surveillance, while claiming that it isn’t.

The cat has been out of the bag for a while now. We have amplified the baked in (and notoriously unchecked) in/voluntary surveillance aspects of our modern information systems by continually trying to map them to well proven social concepts. The result being the sheer pervasiveness of this post privacy world, now also clearly affecting the people who were and are still claiming to not having “anything to hide”.

Amplified and scaled up functions of this (“surveillance / software at scale eating the world”) partially at play now everywhere with much increased and lamented acts of the performative, loss of substance and depth, loss of connection, etc.

I’m of course trying not to think of a pink elephant nor any potential upvotes at all right now…

Maybe going increasingly / pragmatically “organic” is a good way forward (backward)? Ironically that’s one of the very few things Elon Musk has helped me with so far as I have only really started to question / lose interest in “social media” in general since his strange quest for the destruction of Twitter.

Hyperbolic edit: maybe that was Elon’s plan all along (!?)

Just read paper books, without involving devices, apps or social networks.

Analog books are a much-needed antidote to our hyper-accelerated digital world. They cheap (or free), portable and can be life-changing.

> The Jeff Bezos-owned site can be an ugly place to be.

Jeff Bezos doesn't own Goodreads. Sorry to be pedantic, but this has come up a couple times recently, so it's becoming a pet peeve. He stepped down as CEO two years ago, and does not own a majority of Amazon stock. He is executive chairman of the board, but there is no factual sense in which you can say that he owns (or even exerts direct control over) Goodreads or any other Amazon company.

Even gamers hate gamification. External rewards often decrease activity, as the convert anything into a chore.

I largely stopped caring about anything on Goodreads as a signal when I learned how much harassment of authors it enables, in particular fake-review-bombing of books that haven't even been released yet. Amazon doesn't seem to care much, if at all.

Who is "we"? People addicted to this lunatic method of social book consumption like the author? I don't use Goodreads. Nobody I know has ever mentioned Goodreads in conversation. I learn about new books and authors from the websites of authors and publishers I already like and word of mouth. I have zero interest in knowing what strangers are reading or in having them know what I'm reading. If I have an extraordinarily strong opinion about a book I might post in a subreddit to see if anybody else thinks the same. I don't have the slightest damn idea how many books I read last year and I'll keep it that way, thanks.

Yet another reason why I have a great deal of respect for the deeply practical approach of efforts like Library Genesis.

I've been doing the "goodreads challenge" since 2018 -- really I just use goodreads to keep track of books I've read, so the site is an adjunct to an activity I'd probably do anyway. I read 20-30 books a year and it's a sobering thought that the number of books I'll get to with the rest of my life is probably less than a thousand.

The toxic gamification is probably where booktok or goodreads become the primary activity and book reading is what you do to achieve goals on those sites. I guess I never had to deal with that since I'm middle aged and these sites weren't around when I was a teenager.

Disagree with the negative outlook of this article on "Gameification". Like in industry, fighting new technology for the old is a losing battle. Think about the value proposition of reading against tiktok or youtube or videogames from the perspective an average child: why should they pick up a book? We need to find new ways to have them engage with reading in a way which competes with the computer on it's own terms. Feel indignant about the state of reading as much as you like, but I'm looking for a solution which puts books in the hands of more readers.

Even much earlier in Goodreads, I could already feel social pressure.

For example, back then, the great woman I'd recently started dating tried to get me to join Goodreads. But I avoided it, specifically because she seemed to think I was smarter than I was, and I didn't want to disillusion her with my post-Web abysmal literary activity.

Now it sounds like Goodreads social pressure is being leveraged by a megacorp, both to promote product consumption, and to sell the attention of its users.

Speed reading a good book is a tragic loss. Read it slowly and work your imagination. Speed reading formulaic novels, though, is about on par with binge watching a TV series.

Same with strava, even Mountainproject ticks. We're being programmed to be achievement machines.

When I was a kid we had readathons. You would compete to read the most books and gain sponsors to raise money for the school. This gamification totally worked. Kids ended up reading way more books than they would have. I assume this type of thing still exists.

I think it's awesome we live in an age where people are, for the most part, able to free their minds from the banal realities of survival, and fret about reading too much or 'for the wrong reasons'.

You really have to be far gone to care that much about your goodreads score.

i hate "gamification" with a burning passion, the CEO of my company can't STFU "gamification" of our healthcare staff scheduling software and it drives me up the gd wall

People don't scale. Every human endeavor tends toward a Tower of Babel.

This is both universally true and surprisingly surprising to people.

Why should an internet site defy social gravity?

A complete aside, but:

> The Jeff Bezos-owned site

Jeff Bezos owns ~13% of Amazon.

As I read this article I breathed several sighs of relief that Rateyourmusic.com isn't like this.