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Comment by cyrusradfar | Hacker News Reader

I think this is cool and super fast -- kudos on whatever tech you needed to tackle to make it so.

I don't see anyone saying safety or ethics, so I'll just put it out there that it has some safety and ethical considerations you should consider.

Consider "inflammatory" books and how they could be used to harm a group of people. Although I recognize folks post this "publicly", I think the intersection feature provides more than Goodreads.

Let's say, people who have read "Mein Kampf" & "The Anarchists Cookbook" or some other combination that say "Antifa" to the current regime.

I'd recommend you have a list that you consider private, always and allow Users to add to that list so it's more scalable. If folks try to intersect with anything in that list, you can warn that you don't allow intersection with private books.

Anyway, super fun demo!

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Thank you for the kind remarks. I would say your request is reasonable and it’s something I thought about but it’s worth noting that if you scroll down on a Goodreads book page you can see all of the users who gave it 1 star, 2 stars, etc (not just reviews, ratings too). And in fact Goodreads does not tell people this but these lists include private users. So someone looking to cause controversy would probably just find an incendiary book and look for everyone who gave it 5 stars. My data does not include people who marked their account as private or only visible to those who are signed in and also does not give information on stars. It is also very easy to remove your data if you are so inclined. I only log request URLs but I can tell that many thousands of people visited the site and less than 10 opted out despite “Remove My Data” being prominently displayed and referenced in the attached text to my post.

Also, I don’t use them but based on forum posts I read I think other services like LibraryThing or Storygraph do expose similar information about book readers.

It always baffled me how we censor "Mein Kampf" but we - as a society - are super fine with either Alex Jones shouting about lasers and lizard people or Joe Rogan leaving an open mic to people claiming there are nuclear plants and space stations buried under pyramids [1].

Mein Kampf is absolutely terrible piece of literature not by it's message but by it's quality. It's exactly something I would expect to find in Alex Jones cell if we would sentence him to a year of solitary confinement.

[1] just a tiny exaggeration

I don't want "safety" or "ethics" if the requirements for them are banning or hiding books based on somebody's ideology whether or not it agrees with mine.

I'm not asking him to hide the book recommendations, I'm talking about the "intersect" user feature not doxxing people reading them.

I mean if that's the case a person not wanting other people to know they're reading something probably shouldn't put that on a tool designed to share what you're reading for other people (Goodreads).

I don't think anybody needs to be protected from themselves sharing things intentionally.

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