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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

If anyone at Goodreads or Amazon cares about the platform at all they have a funny way of showing it. It’s been stagnant and shoddy for years.

Goodreads really has only one thing going for it: a pristine data set of books, authors, cover images, etc. There are so many other reading apps with a better UX but they are frustrating to use because the data is spotty or low quality.

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> Goodreads really has only one thing going for it: a pristine data set of books, authors, cover images, etc. There are so many other reading apps with a better UX but they are frustrating to use because the data is spotty or low quality.

And spoilers in book titles (the goodread ones, not the physical books)

Just a quick search for "a shocking twist" on goodreads finds many many books:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/198614844-the-perfect-fa...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/137436113-1800198272-978... (i have no idea who/what inputed the title here...) and how "unputdownable" is a word...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30514112-the-sister?from... ... i'll see the twist coming, you just told me about it!

...

Great, now I know that the killer (or whatever) they catch right before the end isn't the real one, and that there will be a twist in the last few pages.

The spoiler text is right there on the book cover?

All the books have the twist mentioned on their cover image.

For The Sister I googled to see its cover images.

I would argue they have the users, which is probably more important than pristine data.

I recently moved over to StoryGraph. There are a few much better competitors at this point.

It depends on what you use it for. I use it as a database of books I've read, and would liek to read, and sort them with tags. I could not give less of a shit about other users on the site.

Obviously there are important network effects but the behavior of some Goodreads users is often a negative at this point (as the article talks about).

OpenLibrary offers that kind of dataset as a public service, on a non-profit basis. (Note: this has zilch to do with the whole controversy over them lending in-copyright books. The book metadata is an entirely separate thing and quite legal.)

There's no motivation for amazon to improve Goodreads. Why would they? The audience isn't going anywhere.

I am currently migrating to a Bookwyrm instance (a federated equivalent). It's not too bad, and can ingest your Goodreads export.

Eh, I have definitely used it less and less after A bought them/they sold out to A.

I think it had already been going downhill before the acquisition

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