Craig Mod built his own Good Reads
craigmod.com
craigmod.com
(I don't know how many people are using BookWyrm, but Goodreads itself seems half-abandoned. Maybe most of the publisher attention is on TikTok influencing now?)
I've been tracking with bibliocommons through my local library, but it has it's flaws. I can add books that any bibliocommons library has indexed, but there's no convenient way to search outside my library.
Interesting choice by BookWyrm to hide review ratings by default. I like it — I always felt that on Goodreads literature that's a little more challenging to tackle is reviewed very unfairly compared to easy-to-digest-but-content-light popular books or pulp fantasy. Making the default to have users read the contents of a review instead of glancing at an aggregate number seems like the right answer.
I find goodreads sucks at book recommendations, but excluding the books that some random twitter replacement didnt read doesnt seem like its going to make it good at book recommendations either.
Goodreads however remains fun for keeping me accountable with my reading goals, and nothing else has replaced that.
DCC - Yeah this isnt great. Yeah the litrpg genre was infested from the beginning with 20booksto50K people, and then LLM people.
The platform Craig Mod built looks like the equivalent of getting book recommendations exclusively from your mutual follows on Twitter.
It’s like making the point that a cookout you saw while driving past a private event venue on the other side of town is not a good solution for everybody else wanting a restaurant to eat at - so what?
Context here is that this is being explicitly marketed as a goodreads replacement.
One of the features of goodreads is... a recommendation engine.
Once analysed you can see that this website does not contain a recommendation engine, but its just a static list of books people on the guys twitter replacement liked.
Your analogy is flawed, this is like getting food recommendations based on complaints posted to the community notice board.
The only way this is a goodreads replacement is if your entire understanding of goodreads comes from the name.
Goodreads is flawed but the fix isnt to deliver it without any features.
The Goodreads reference is also valid as many (like myself) use it primarily for its friend feeds. I’ve never looked at its recommendation engine. It’s just one feature, as you say.
I know of a small regional community that I have occasional involvement in and maintain an interest in their socials.
A person who started an Escape Room in that community recently posted about how much money he has lost supporting that business.
I explained to him that Escape Rooms are a niche but intense interest and that you need a large population size to support them.
He was appealing to the wider community, of 9000 people, to come in and support his business, but realistically, there's maybe 40-50 people in that community who will actually engage with an escape room. Probably less, the community skews very old.
A "Community" is not a monolith. The only thing you can guarantee the community has in common is whatever forged them together. For a physical community its geography. For an online community its whatever brought them together.
Unless "Craig Mod" built his community around a specific set of shared reading interests, theres no way in hell that its a good general book recommendation engine for the participants.
Goodreads/Kindle/Amazon have shot their categories to hell and are barely more effective than a keyword author search, but for all its failings thats still going to have better book discovery than a random blob of people on a random twitter clone.
I mean the first LLMs targeted at authors were built as rpg simulators. NovelAI was founded by the AI Dungeon guys splitting off and doing their own thing. If I looked I am betting I could find community training modules to closely mimic DCC's style and they would be well supported.
https://craigmod.com/roden/102/#the-good-place
Craig Mod is an interesting example of someone who makes a living online through "ethical" content production.
This website can be incredibly hostile to creatives having an income, at times.