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Comment by comrade1234 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting history but what's going on now is so crazy as a reader. Amazon kindle publishes 7500 new books daily. There's no longer gatekeepers like in the article.

About two years ago I was searching for a new sci-fi book to read - I routinely rotate genres. I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.

I've since just started reading older stuff, before the 2000s. I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt - even the Hugo awards gets scammed by influence campaigns.

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> I did my research in goodreads and started reading a trilogy that was highly rated. Holy crap it was so bad a quit about halfway through the second book. I went back to goodreads and the rating since my last visit had dropped drastically. A bot campaign or something fooled me, I guess.

Sites like Goodreads and Rotten Tomatoes are targeted by marketing firms.

Every popular outlet that become a proxy for reviews gets targeted. The New York Times best seller list has been gamed for decades by publishers who will mass-purchase their own books to get on to the list.

When getting a high score on Product Hunt was viewed as impressive it was standard practice for startups to have all of their friends and family register accounts and then have everyone spam their LinkedIn to beg for Product Hunt upvotes in a coordinated campaign. Now you can just buy Product Hunt upvotes for negligible prices from people in other countries who maintain hoards of sock puppet accounts. Anyone who posts to Product Hunt gets DMs from these companies offering their services. Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now.

> Nobody takes Product Hunt seriously now.

That's putting it mildly. I'm not normally about doing this sort of thing, but I went out of my way to find and install an extension to block google results for producthunt and alternative.to specifically.

Was Product Hunt ever taken seriously by anyone? Since day1 it was an obvious target for influence hacking

In some domains a big Product Hunt launch was a serious achievement. VCs would look at it, journalists would take notice, and you’d get a little burst of signups from a user base known to have a lot of influencers.

Everyone knew it was gamed a little, but there was some organic traffic.

Then it steadily got worse and worse until the front page was just random products that nobody actually used.

I am mainly a code monkey but I have done enough to know that Product Hunt is not a marketing plan and was never a marketing plan unless your product is something that will get you a #1 day on Product Hunt.

Influencers, and people with zero talent, but who have a public audience, are the new target for publishers, so expect a fuck-tonne more rubbish to be pushed by the usual channels and algorithms.

This is not a good time to be an indie author (I should know) writing the book is only the start of the journey, if you want people to now read it you have to fight a system dead set against your success. Word of mouth eventually gets you a few readers, or sales (thankfully) but there are plenty of really good indie authors out there, and you will never find them in the normal algorithms or book recommendation sites.

What about finding indie authors on traditional recommendation systems such as Gnod?[0] The less utilized and forgotten parts of the internet are probably a good set of places to push.

[0] https://www.gnod.com/

Pushing by any chance your own project? And forgetting to mention gnod is yet another midwit AI recommendation system for bland averaged out taste for the masses?

I have no idea I barely use it but has been around for ages, just figured it was a forgotten part of the net.

If you read my comments you will see I am skeptical towards AI and for the record I beleive that Gnod is algorithmic not necessarily the AI of “today”.

I wish gnod was a project I could pimp but the truth is that I got nothing. Go after the nerds who post their start up in comments. Me, I have never done so and I am too young to be the gnod creator.

I'm always on the hunt for good reads (hah). I just tried gnod with K. J. Parker, Ishiguro and Iain M. Banks. The recommendations were Alighieri (Dante), Cervantes, some more 17th century authors and Tom Holt, who is K. J. Parker and the last rec was K. J. Parker. Complete fail.

My initial interpretation was that it was user contributed. But it seems like a rather defunct operation now and nothing informing of some type of curation going on. Even the discussion board is closed. My bad.

All good, it's not your fault. It would have been absolutely great if it worked.

I used to (years ago) find new sci-fi and other fiction by going to the library and looking inside at the cards and seeing which had been checked out the most, and grabbing one.

Unfortunately that's all digital now and so you kind of have to go by how worn the copy is.

Not that this is the perfect fix, but at least for sci-fi books you can usually look the Hugo Award winners[0] for ones that are solid. Not all of them are my cup of tea, but I have found that I definitely love some of the series that are found there. I'm sure there are other award types per genre that could help point you to some as well. Not that these can't be gamed, or sponsored or whatever, but at least it is a good starting point that is (¿maybe?) less prone to bot bias campaigns.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

That was true until 10 or 15 years ago. They have been riddled with (accusations of) bias and fraud since then

The Hugo and Nebula winners (and shortlists, do not forget those) aren't perfect, but they're almost always worth a look. Pretending that they're total garbage is doing yourself a disservice.

Wow, I hadn't heard about the fraud in 2024, which I looked up in response to your comment. That's troubling to say the least.

Bias, though, is going to be inevitable and the Hugos are going to represent the taste of the Worldcon voters. It seems like overall there's been a happy confluence for awhile now between their taste and general sf taste.

I've discovered three of my favorite contemporary sf authors through recent Hugos: Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine, and Tamsyn Muir. I've read other recent nominees where I was unmoved or even questioned their inclusion.

I've also read a decent selection of historical winners, by no means exhaustive or even the majority, and the worst was without a doubt Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer.

I strongly support this! For the last few years, I've been signing up as a Hugo voter, and read a bunch of great stuff that I otherwise would have missed. Sometimes the best books are a bit divisive, but still make the shortlist. (Saint of Bright Doors, for example...)

I don't think he's talking about "gatekeepers" per se, I think he's talking about the publishing model being incomprehensible if you're in it.

I think the old publishing model is dying. self-publishing is routing around it.

As a reader, it is sort of amazing. I've been reading more than I ever have before in my life.

If I like a book, I can read the next in the series, and there's a good chance there are 8 other books in the series. When I was younger, scifi novels would rarely have follow-on books, and if they did, maybe max 3 at that.

The hard one for me is continuing a book after I see a typo.

I recommend actual human reviewers who you can stick with over time and who do not just say that a book is good or bad but something about why. Those don’t have to be professional reviewers, they can just be people you know or follow who talk about what they read.

Looking at award shortlists and nomination lists is also a good filter providing you know a little about the award (I wouldn’t go to the Clarke Award shortlist for mil sf stuff, for example).

People who don't see any issue with writing novels with LLMs probably correlate heavily with those that also don't see any issue using a botnet of them to promote it. So it's always the worst slop that ends up being pushed the most. We could call this "the Openclaw effect".

What I am surprised is the fact that people expect everything to be an exception to Goodhart's law, by default.

Publishers served a really valuable purpose of curation and keeping good authors productive.

Now we have the double whammy of a consolidated publishing system pumping out whatever James Patterson’s assistants churn out and and a long tail of drivel, both AI and regular slop.

And to make this worse: these days even the blurb are written by LLMs, some of them pure word salad. Just last week I left comments with two authors to see to it that the blurb at least resembles English even if the content still doesn't make sense. We're being completely dehumanised and treated like NPCs, just a lubricant to keep the machine going.

> I'd try to find a gatekeeper to filter newer stuff for me but everything seems corrupt

Word of mouth is the best way to do this, among friends who read similar things to you.

Even if you're recommended something you end up not liking, it's not because they're malicious, their tastes are just not the same as yours - and after awhile, you learn to adapt. Friend A recommends a space opera? Great, you have very similar tastes. They recommend a horror novel? Eh, you know that what they consider to be good horror isn't what you do, so you skip that one.

Yeah... for new stuff, I follow authors I already like on social media and see what they recommend from other folks (and why). I've had a miss or two, but that's generally a good start.

I actually do do that and we all recommend each other older stuff we read years ago. :)

These are some of my most recent conversations: "try Raymond Feist's Magician series" "I'm reading the Book of the New Sun series now" "I read the Pendragon Cycle (she's English and obsessed with King Arthur stories) in high school and liked it but now it's a weird right-wing tv show"

These are all old books but still super enjoyable. (Except maybe book of the new sun - kind if a bummer)

7500 books a day… what percentage are AI slop? Half the non-fiction and children’s books I see are clearly just free tier ChatGPT with poorly generated AI imagery.

true, but what percentage a ghost-written fodder?, what percentage are best-sellers milking their fan=base with derivatives of the same slop? It has always been the problem for the reader to sort out the good stuff from the rubbish, it has just gotten a hundred times harder as the bar for writing is now a lot lower. When I meet a new person who I get on with I ask them what are their favourite books and why, it has opened my eyes to some great books I would not otherwise have found, I really wish I had kept a proper book/reading diary so I could pass these on myself, hindsight it great!

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