Comment by barbariangrunge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barbariangrunge | Hacker News Reader

barbariangrunge

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 know it's weird, but go to your local library. Walk the stacks of a subjects/section that appeals to you and then just pick books up and check them out a little, maybe even take one home!

Slight snark aside, I think you have the the idea right, to go for the person, human, connection.

If you want every book to have a rating, then the site needs to have a ton of users, and if there are a ton of users then most books will converge to 3.5-4.1 "most people like it but some people don't", as you've observed.

Other than talking to people in real life, you can also look for curated lists. https://shepherd.com/ is a good site for this.

I think lists like these are better than numeric ratings and stack rankings, which don't really make sense for books and other art. The only useful ratings are "don't recommend", "recommend", and "essential, you have to read this".

Yeah, in looking at ratings I think you have to keep in mind that people don't randomly select books. People pick things that they think they will like, and they are generally pretty good at it.

This is especially true for authors of series. The great bulk of people reading volume 7 are going to have read books 1-6, so the rating will tell you almost nothing about the objective quality of the book, and a lot about how it comes across to people who liked the first 6 enough to get through them.

Personal anecdote: In order to find interesting books for my children, I tried everything online but to no avail. In the end, the solution that worked best was to get recommendations from the local bookstore owner. It goes without saying that she is an excellent bookseller. But all it took was telling her, my son likes such and such book series for her to say: in that case, I think he will like this series. As a result, he read three books in three weeks. Ten more to go.

> What if you don't like Goodreads?

Do things the way people did before the Internet, perhaps?

Happy user of Librarythings, BTW. I don't use it for recommendations, though

It's similar for movie review sites. The audience reviews are so wide ranging they provide almost zero value. It would be amazing if you could filter a site with a sort of prompt: "Hey Goodreads, pretend I'm a stay at home mom with 3 kids and born in 1980, show me what I would likely think of this movie"

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