
Goodreads Is Broken - prostoalex
https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads-is-broken-662e424244d5
======
qrv3w
> The recommendations suck, the lists suck — it’s like, 100 lists telling me
> to read The Handmaid’s Tale and Harry Potter.

I had the same experience with GR and also Amazon.com which constantly peddles
the vampire romance books when I am looking for recommendations for
horror/fantasy. Both Amazon and GR strategy make sense because best-selling
books sell the best, so they should recommend them to increase profits.
However, it does suck being a reader looking for new book suggestions.

I've spent a good deal of time making my own book recommendation algorithm
which has been working well for me for the last two years. [1] Through it I've
discovered old authors I didn't know (Ted Chiang, Clive Barker) and new
authors which I wouldn't have noticed (Scott Hawkins, China Mieville). Of
course, it always helps to get recommendations from friends with similar
tastes, too. :)

[1]: [https://nowwhatdoiread.com](https://nowwhatdoiread.com)

~~~
inapis
I face this problem with Netflix, Spotify and Youtube too. These algorithmic
recommendations just need one improper dataset to throw everything out of the
window. For weeks, my spotify is overloaded with instrumental songs. Youtube
keeps on repeating the same stuff. Netflix believes that the only thing I
watch is science fiction.

I'm dying for human curation.

~~~
ztarven
I absolutely agree, algorithms are terrible for recommendations. On the media
database[0] my wife and I are building we're experimenting with community
upvotes for suggestions. Our userbase is small so the results are inconclusive
right now but hopefully time will tell if this method works.

[0] [https://rate.house](https://rate.house)

~~~
bscphil
The only good one I've ever seen was in the music business: Rdio,
specifically. (Now sadly dead.) I don't know what they were doing, but their
recommendations were consistently excellent at pushing me towards new artists
and even new genres that I didn't expect but would up enjoying.

Back when I used to use it (about a decade ago), Pandora was good at
shuffling, but their library was so small I would get the same songs over and
over.

------
mmanfrin
I read quite a bit and generally like Goodreads for what it is, but I agree
that it's essentially not grown at all in 12 years. There are parts that are
broken, there are features that are lacking, and it frustrates me to no end.

Many, many times I've thought of how I'd build a competitor, but it is
pointless because Goodread's moat is too big: the integrations with the kindle
go a very long way towards cultivating engagement (when you start a book,
kindle will update your profile by default, it'll add your rating, mark the
book as finished, all through the normal ux of the kindle).

There is no way, in my opinion, to overcome the handicap of needing users to
manually update what is automatically updated by the kindle. And I can't see
'linking' accounts working because there'd be no incentive for Amazon _not_ to
block access from a competitor. And, frankly, the kindle is the only platform
that matters, it likely has 95%+ of the ereader market.

Goodreads is bad because it is a monopoly, and that, frankly, sucks.

~~~
duncanawoods
I wouldn't be so defeatist! I used Goodreads manually for a bit. Adding books
only takes seconds which seems inconsequential compared to how long it takes
to read them.

I didn't continue with it because there just wasn't any real value. I don't
want a trophy shelf of read books or get automated recommendations by "people
who have read similar books" because those titles are very predictable.

I'd need something different e.g. something facillitating deep discussion and
Q&A organised by chapter or something. Get authors participating and I'm there
100%.

~~~
inimino
I've only ever used Goodreads manually, have never owned and have absolutely
no interest whatsoever in e-readers. (I trust physical books I can hold and
write on, thank you very much!)

I've used it a few times to show other people what I've read and help them get
book recommendations or even find a book title again.

~~~
dorchadas
I use my Kindle a lot; it's great for travel and I can use it while on an
exercise bike or while walking much easier. However, I still only ever use
Goodreads manually, and I've marked every book I've read for the past 4 years
(at 52+/year). I prefer it manual, and often keep wifi off on my Kindle unless
I need to update Scribd downloads.

------
jrochkind1
That first graphic with failed title search results reminded me of a project I
did working on a library catalog search using Solr.

We tuned the relevancy ranking to work for exactly those sorts of searches,
and put the things the OP was looking for on top (or at least under other
books with exact same title). His examples look just like some of our QA
searches for our relevancy ranking (in addition to standard tf/idf: boost
adjacent words matching higher than non-adjacent or out of order; boost match
of complete title higher than partial title; boost match before the subtitle
colon more than after; boost _title_ matches more than author more than other
fields; etc).

And this was ~5 years ago, and this was an underfunded university library IT
department where the development team consisted basically of me, just using
stock Solr for relevancy ranking (the tuning came in how we constructed and
boosted our indexed fields). No fancy machine learning, just configuring
fields and boosts deterministically.

So, this could be done, if they cared about the site at all.

[In fact, hey, i can give you actual examples from that project. Turns out
there are a lot of books called "the confession" \-- we didn't do anything
fancy to try to guess which one more readers would be looking for.

[https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?q=the+confession](https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?q=the+confession)

[https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&sear...](https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_field=all_fields&q=catch+and+kill)

(hope I don't "slashdot effect" my former employer...)]

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I build search engines for a living. While I appreciate the hacker spirit of
your project with Solr, I also see this as a huge problem that leads to bad
search experiences. Tuning boosts in Solr is not even close to a reasonable
way to solve problems like this. Arguably not even for an underfunded library,
but certainly not for a high web traffic consumer website.

For one, you need disciplined acceptance criteria in the form of both
qualitative standards (things a non-technical manager can look at and say yes
or no) as well as various relevancy measurements like mean reciprocal rank and
normalized discounted cumulative gain (via acquiring human annotated data if
needed).

When people only focus on qualitative feedback on top of boosts and hacks in
an off the shelf tool, they usually end up with some weird witches’ brew of
bizarre boosts and time-decay weighting that is extremely fragile and can’t be
robustly changed or even understood without the qualitative performance going
haywire. You need disciplined study of quantitative ranking metrics to know
the drivers of performance, fall off as you move down the ranking position,
and to make search index updates reproducible and make incremental improvement
measurable.

Meanwhile if you only focus on quantitative metrics, you might miss obvious
red flags. The relevance score used for NDCG might be biased some way. You
might surface highly relevant results to only one context or sense of the
words in a query (like only showing fruit for “apple” and never tech gadgets).
You need people who make the subjective appraisal of quality for users to be
looped in.

Here’s the point. When this is all missing, you will lose credibility with
people making the decisions. They’ll hear some engineer babble about NDCG but
then say the darn thing doesn’t work in the QA testing. Or they’ll say the
qualitative results look OK and get angry when weird counter-examples pop up
in the second or third results pages, which might have been measured with
quantitative metrics.

When this happens, executives and managers just want to punt. They want the
“nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” equivalent for search, and that’s how
you end up with Confluence still only supporting exact title matching and
having no ability for actual content relevancy search.

In this sense, the little projects showing “look what us non-specialists could
cook up by hacking some boosts in Solr!” do a lot of harm and should not be
considered as the plucky success stories they are often painted to be.

~~~
lstamour
But it works? If you measure your tuning based on which rank an item is when a
user clicks you might get feedback that would obviously help find more
examples or create some kind of self-learning system, but if you only care
about say, boosting common best sellers periodically, well, isn’t that good
for (almost) everyone? ;-) My suggestion for GoodReads would be to rank exact
title matches higher than partial or reordered titles, but that would just be
a start. Of course, evaluate what’s working and what isn’t, and maybe do test
cases where you see if lower rankings have improved. But any attempt at a fix
is likely better than doing nothing, as you’re likely to spend energy fixing
popular books folks want to find...

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “But it works?”

This is the big red flag, when non-specialists hacking on Solr boosts are
claiming something works because of a few qualitative test cases.

“It works” is a statement that only applies after you’ve done qualitative and
quantitative goodness of fit testing.

You wouldn’t have a random IT employee make a stock-trading algorithm and then
test it on a month of data and call it a success.

For a search solution to “work,” it needs to pass quantitative and qualitative
checking, and be explainable to stakeholders and be reproducible /
incrementally updateable. The training and arrival at hyperparameters all need
to be reproducible and based on the outcome criteria they are meant to solve.

Making some hacks into a demo that superficially looks good is not at all the
same as “it works.”

~~~
lstamour
I wouldn’t do this with stock trading because I’m risking everything. But I
wouldn’t call the people adjusting search engine parameters completely
untrained either, simply not using a methodology that tests their changes
against every query. I’ve found that for libraries, at least, the search
engines folks are used to are simply SO BAD, so unoptimized, that a little
hand tweaking and prioritizing of exact title matches will go a long way. And
you’re confusing manual testing with no testing—they would very carefully
watch for counter examples with a list of known good titles to search for and
get back an expected set of results and were known to rollback changes when
they had unexpected consequences. Effectively they have the risk appetite to
test in production because the cost to end users is minimal, and the
assumption when search doesn’t work is, “oh, they must not have that book” or
“oh, they need to fix this particular search” and not “oh, they broke search
completely and must be fired” (no one says that last one)

------
caiocaiocaio
1) I like about 75% of the recommendations I get, which is pretty good
compared to other recommendation sites I've used.

2) I love the fact that Goodreads has an old-fashioned feeling. Modernizing it
would mean a front-end JS framework - making it buggy and obnoxiously slow to
use on my old laptop or phone - and a lot of aesthetic features that reduce
usability. Oh, and probably light-grey text on a slightly-lighter-grey
background, making it a strain on my eyes. Modern internet is meant to look
good, pop on a resume, and have little or no functionality or substance.

I genuinely hope the people at Goodreads ignore this article.

~~~
gagege
I agree with you about the old-fashioned-ness. Disagree about the
recommendations.

------
Tharkun
I use Goodreads the way I use IMDB. To keep track of what I've read and what I
want to read. I can't say I'm missing any features in that department. Not
everything has to fancy. Search generally works well, and they have a pretty
handy way of grouping books in a series -- which has led me to discover some
that I'd missed.

------
bredren
The entire reading ecosystem at Amazon is stagnant. The kindle e-readers have
had release after release of subpar hardware with features introduced by now-
killed competitors a decade ago.

Read reviews of the brand new Oasis, a $300 product featuring a micro USB
port.

Amazon does not care about readers, probably because they drive so few dollars
and the market is won.

Reading does not drive prime subscriptions, and anyone with decent product
management ability and influence is working on something more important.

~~~
CydeWeys
At this point, Amazon is treating Kindle like Texas Instruments is treating
their graphing calculators. Both have entrenched monopolies and have no need
whatsoever to improve their product, which being able to sell them at
ridiculous margin. It's laughable how much a new Kindle costs the consumer vs
how much it actually costs to manufacture. If this were a non-monopolistic
market then many competitors would be leaping into the fray with superior
products at a fraction of the cost, but because Amazon isn't forced to grant
them access to the Kindle store, it's not even possible to compete.

This is a clear example of an area where consumers are suffering from a
monopolistic grip over the market.

~~~
StavrosK
I'm fully aware I'm the minority, but I only read DRM-free books. What's a
good ebook reader I can get these days that has good bang for buck?

~~~
CydeWeys
I only read DRM-free books, and I just use a 5-year-old Kindle Paperwhite. You
can use Calibre to convert ePub to mobi, and then view it just fine on
Kindles.

You can also get a used Kindle Paperwhite for pretty darn cheap. I wouldn't
recommend going to earlier Kindle generations prior to the Paperwhite, because
they didn't have backlights which makes reading in low light conditions (like
bed) a lot less pleasurable.

~~~
StavrosK
I already have a Paperwhite and it's quite good, but the plastic degraded and
is now sticky, the CPU is slow and doing anything takes a while, and it
doesn't have the very handy buttons earlier versions used to have. I was
wondering if there was anything available nowadays that was much better,
basically...

~~~
CydeWeys
Oh, hrm, I have no idea. My Paperwhite is in a better condition than yours and
it's good enough for me.

I really wouldn't mind having physical next/prev page buttons, though. Having
to touch or swipe the screen is kind of annoying. I feel like that's a step
back in UI from previous gen devices.

~~~
StavrosK
Yeah, I have no idea why they removed them. The swipe combined with the high
response time means I never know if it registered the swipe and always go back
and forth in an effort to change pages.

~~~
CydeWeys
They probably saved some trivial amount of money on manufacturing costs by
removing physical switches, seeing as how they were implementing touchscreens
anyway for the rest of their interface.

Smartphones initially had physical buttons that have gone by the wayside now,
but at least their screens are much more responsive!

------
xioxox
Yes - Goodreads is pretty awful when it could be so much better. The searching
is awful, the comment UI is grim and the suggested books lists are poor. The
most useful tool I've found for finding new authors is this:
[https://www.literature-map.com/](https://www.literature-map.com/)

I only use it for keeping track of what I've read and to look up negative
reviews to see whether a book is likely to be one I won't like.

The scoring system is almost useless, as certain categories of books just get
endless 5 star reviews from fans.

~~~
b0rsuk
I'm not impressed. Philip K. Dick next to Stanisław Lem. The two lived in the
same period, and there's a funny anecdote about them (Philip believed
Stanisław was invented by communists to trick him, because no single person
could be so resourceful. Consequently, Philip K. Dick refused to communicate
with Stanisław Lem). But their literature is very different.

Dick's stories are typically short and easy to digest, with fast action. Lem's
is ponderous, filled with long sentences and complex ideas. Little is
happening.

~~~
javajosh
Lem and Dick shared a penchant for framing abstract, deeply profound questions
about society in the form of concrete science fiction stories. This is not
common. Space opera has always dominated the genre, but neither of them spent
time writing "bildungsromans with lasers". So, I'd call the connection is
quite valid, having read both of them widely.

------
philsnow
> I am looking for Ronan Farrow’s ‘Catch and Kill.’ It appears, inexplicably,
> after two books not titled ‘Catch and Kill.’

This bothers me to no end in Google maps search results. It seems like every
time I'm searching for some chain> the first two results are for stores that
are hundreds of miles away and in towns that I've never visited (which Google
should _also_ know!). The one that's a couple miles away / the one that I've
been to (and mapped to) a dozen times? Third or fourth on the list. Insanity.

~~~
alexis_fr
In Google Maps, I go “Home” every second trip. Yet, when I type “Home” (or
whatever the French equivalent is), the only suggestions I get are “Home
depot” and “Homeware shops”. I went as far as setting a “place” labelled
“fghjk”. I still get other results, despite using “Fghjk” every second trip!!!

Also visible in Youtube. There’s a French guy who explained what it was to be
raped by a woman, and I often refer people to it (and half a dozen other
videos). When I search for his video’s title and his channel name, I
systematically get 2 other results first, generally videos about how many
women get raped, from the Huffington Post, often the ones with fewer views.

It really feels like Google is trying hard to dodge the correct answer.

~~~
Noumenon72
Try Google voice search; I just say "OK Google -- navigate to home".

~~~
Marsymars
I don't want my phone listening for key phrases.

This was a solved problem _years_ ago. Windows Phone let you pin nav
directions to any address you wanted directly on your home screen.

~~~
okasaki
They probably copied it from Google?

[https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291823?co=GENIE.Plat...](https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291823?co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid&hl=en)

~~~
Marsymars
I don't know which came first, but that does appear to work in the same way.
(Notwithstanding that you can't navigate to "Home" on the Android widget
without enabling location history, but inputting the address manually seems to
work fine.)

This seem like it should work around the poor "Home" search the previous
poster was referring to.

------
imgabe
Well, boo. Sounds like a terrible redesign is incoming for Goodreads.
Personally, I like that it's a list-making app with minimal social aspects.
Social networks are terrible. I don't want to "dish about the latest author
gossip". I don't want algorithmic recommendations that assume I'll want to
read another book that has 90% of the same keywords as the book I just read.
Goodreads works fine for me.

------
frabbit
[https://www.librarything.com/](https://www.librarything.com/) is always
better for finding books that I know part of the title (or sometimes even just
the full title).

I would like to be able to weight opinions (both positively and negatively) of
individuals, and also based on criteria (e.g. "completely ignore the opinions
of anyone who gave a low rating to The Good Soldier Svejk" and also "weight by
100 the opinions of anyone that rates The Silver Chair as the best of the
Narnia stories".

~~~
the_biot
Indeed a mention of librarything is missing from this article. Ironically I
joined Goodreads after fleeing librarything as it was so stagnant.

------
officemonkey
The recommendation system is broken, however the social networking features
can surmount it.

For example, my Goodreads "friends" are people who like the books I like.
There's no social obligation. FFS, I unfriended my sister. My high-school
friend who only reads YA fiction: he was unfriended years ago.

My favorite goodreads friends are a half-dozen people I've never even met, but
I agree with their reviews. When they give a book 5 stars, I check it out.

That's the key to Goodreads. If Amazon can't figure out how to make better
recommendations, they should look long and hard at how the social graph beats
the star-ratings.

~~~
romack77
Agreed. This is how I use Goodreads for recommendations as well. There's the
"Compare Books" tool to get a quick sense of whether someone reads what you
read. And then reading a couple of their reviews is usually enough to get a
sense of whether their recs will agree with you.

It's more labor intensive than a standard recommendation system, but the
results are better. Since books are a large time commitment, and people are
passionate about them, a lot of people are willing to put uncommon effort into
finding good ones.

------
jonahbenton
The artistry of writing about how Goodreads is broken, on Medium, which is
completely broken. Well done, well done.

~~~
spraak
Yeah, I can't even read the article because Medium says I've used up my free
quota already

------
wyck
I don't know what people expect , you're going to have to do some digging to
find the gems, like everything else in life. There no magical algorithm that
can't be gamed or eventually skewed to be bland, boring, sales driven, and
altogether less creatively interesting.

If you want real discussion nothing really beats the classic forum bulletin
board.

------
lejalv
Use librarything. That is an actual project by book lovers, for book lovers.

------
ryeguy_24
We set out to build a better Goodreads a while back called Helloreads (my wife
thinks we didn’t differentiate our name enough but whatever). It never seemed
to get traction probably due to the monopoly and network effect of Goodreads.
We thought and still do that Goodreads user interface is terrible, the site is
slow, the reviews are too volatile. The one thing that we truly could not
compete with them on is the data. The book data problem is insanely hard. New
books come out and there is not authoritative database of book metadata. We
had a blast building (and the iOS app) it but have put the development on
hold.

[0] [https://www.helloreads.com](https://www.helloreads.com)

[1] My books:
[https://www.helloreads.com/ryanhittner](https://www.helloreads.com/ryanhittner)

~~~
kzrdude
I guess it's a social network, but since this is hacker news — I'd love if
your front page would not be just a login screen.

The front page should say something about specific books, something that draws
you in! Something from the site itself. And put that book recommendations
button higher up (it's not visible on first view for me). :-)

Something that makes you begin browsing and using the site to get
recommendations. Then in standard style, somewhere down the line you'll hit a
snag where you have to register to use certain features, like commenting,
liking, etc.

~~~
ryeguy_24
I like your idea. This may be something you’d like (more HN style - HN was
actually the inspiration for the feature):

[https://www.helloreads.com/recommendations/new](https://www.helloreads.com/recommendations/new)

But I think your right, should open it up a bit on the main page. You don’t
need to log in but I think your right, it could be more appealing on the home
page. If enough interest, we may fire up the development again and see where
it goes now that we know people other than us are also frustratedly with
Goodreads.

~~~
kzrdude
I didn't intend to say the site should be inspired by HN, and that's not what
I mean. I just wanted to say, since this is HN, here comes the drive by well
intentioned but shallow critique. Good luck with the site. I hope it gets a
more engaging first experience, and I don't hope it ends up looking like HN ;)

------
Avamander
They haven't built any new features for years. I just keep waiting for any
meaningful privacy controls, I want to keep track of what I've read and what I
thought about the book without everyone seeing that. Seeing a cover just
doesn't do it any more if it's your 50th space Sci-Fi.

Keeping track if I've read the entire series or not is another feature I
really miss for books that trakt.tv provides for shows.

------
Insanity
from the article:

"What Goodreads is good for is keeping your own list of books you want to read
or have read this year. It’s a list-making app."

That's pretty much all I want from it, so it works great for me. The
recommendations are often (but not always) good enough. I usually don't read
based on recommendations from GR but occassionaly something good does come
out.

Websites don't need to keep adding features, it's fine to look the same 12
years down the road. I think this website (HN) is a pretty good example of
that.

------
lazyant
I don't know about the quality of Goodreads but I don't see a big problem with
her two search examples.

In the first one she searches for "the confession" and another "the
confession" title is shown, together with other way more popular titles with
"confession" in their titles. I'm guessing most people want fuzzy google-like
searches but sure, exact matches of more obscure books can be given more
relevance or search options can be given.

The second example is even worse; she searches for "title" and complaints that
a book with "title" and one with "title:subtitle" are ranked higher than her
"title:some other subtitle"

~~~
brown9-2
The problem with Goodreads’ search is definitely that it mostly only works
with full titles. It’s aggravating to have to type in the full title of a
popular book for it to have to be the top result; it seems like a really basic
search implementation.

------
lordgrenville
The article doesn't mention my biggest pet peeve about Goodreads: it makes you
type reviews in HTML. It's 2019, how hard is a WYSIWYG editor? Or at least
accept Markdown!

One more complex feature I'd love from an ideal-world Goodreads is ephemeral
book clubs. Find people who want to read _this specific book_ , read it
together with them, and then disband.

~~~
ryacko
Ephemeral clubs happens on reddit, in many subreddits, involving many types of
media.

~~~
lordgrenville
I mean yeah you can do it on GR with a group as well, but I'm talking about a
built-in book club feature with a timetable, chat, status updates, etc. Say
I'm looking to read War and Peace this winter. I find a bunch of other like-
minded people, and we set a timetable, read it together, then disband.

~~~
ryacko
A timetable? On reddit the thread starter mentions when the next discussion is
going to take place. The timetable reduces friction, but it doesn’t provide
that much additional value.

~~~
lordgrenville
Fair point. But I looked on Reddit and couldn't find the kind of thing I'm
talking about (r/bookclub chooses one book a month by vote, and r/ReadingGroup
seems like an overwhelming sea of random posts). I think also the fact that it
contains clubs for many different media is a bit of a handicap, since the book
content gets swamped, and there's a searchability problem. (Reddit's UI isn't
great at the best of times, anyway.) GR has a built-in audience of a wide
range of readers, so they're better positioned to do this kind of thing.

------
monkeypizza
A feature I want on goodreads is "for me and a friend, show me the rarest book
we have read in common". It would be great to find connections between people
that would be hard to discover otherwise.

Same thing for groups - it's fun to try to find the "rarest common
denominator" in the books, movies, or places visited domain.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Amazon has something somewhat related long ago called "Someone like you" that
would show you books purchased by people who had similar previous reading
purchases. It was odd to see someone had purchased the same combination of
OpenGL books, cookbooks, and sociopolitical books as me. The recommendations
that resulted were pretty good but I suspect privacy concerns ended it.

------
mhb
On a related note - what happened to the Netflix recommendation engine after
they awarded the $1M prize for a 10% improvement to their already pretty good
recommender? Did they just throw the whole thing out the window?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I cannot believe they have any kind of recommendation engine? I just see
offered more seasons the same shows I watched, or shows with _similar words in
the title_ regardless of topic. I cannot believe they have even 10% success
rate recommending movies, much less improved it by that much.

~~~
mhb
I guess this is ancient history (2009), but you can read about it at:
[https://www.netflixprize.com/](https://www.netflixprize.com/)

------
kqr2
I mainly use goodreads as a sanity check on Amazon reviews.

------
davidy123
What sites aren't badly broken? I just spent 30 minutes wrestling with
Booking.com. I have many issues with Amazon, and Google keep changing their
services under my feet.

Not to mention all the ways they want to shape the experience that I don't
want, with their useless and biased suggestions being one that sticks out for
me, as well as their user communities that I'm pretty sure exist to denigrate
individual perspectives, since they aren't designed to let people organize and
be critical, just a noisy crowd with grossly aggregated ratings.

But these big companies don't care. They dominate in their areas. Their best,
only reasonable option is to drag their feet on consumer oriented features as
much as possible, to save money and spread out behind the scenes. If a
competitor comes along with a unique feature, they can just add it and destroy
them. It's impossible for the consumer and innovation.

As we go to very high levels of integration, where our activities, connections
and other personal data are involved in every decision, the only solution is
to separate data and services, so I can access the data I want, process it in
my own system that for any activity can be more comprehensive than they can
reasonably provide — unless they all, either via backend "cooperation" or
duplication have an incredibly privacy invading profile of me — and finally
process it with their service. This is what Solid proposes. It's a long-term,
multi perspective, standards based project, and I don't know any reasonable
alternative.

~~~
dyarosla

        they can just add it 
        and destroy them
    

Or buy them out and sunset them

------
paxys
Goodreads has possibly the worst search algorithm in existence today. Typing a
character or two will sometimes show the book I am looking for right on top,
and then typing a few more _reduces_ the relevance of the results and hides
it. I don't get it.

------
_pmf_
Cannot confirm. Getting pretty good recommendations for Japanese crime novels,
which is probably reasonably niche.

~~~
kpozin
Keigo Higashino's novels, or something else?

~~~
_pmf_
Exactly. (Somehow, these have an extremely calming/relaxing kind of
suspension.)

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TillE
It astounds me that after 20+ years of Amazon, nobody's come close to creating
a good way to discover books. Amazon.com is particularly bad at it, but
browsing the shelves of a library is still a better experience than what I can
get from Goodreads.

~~~
r00fus
Could it be that there is a moneyed interest in keeping things undiscovered?

~~~
Finnucane
Not exactly. The moneyed interest is in driving dollars to the things that
they invested heavily in, and need to get that money back. They paid big bucks
for a book they expect to be a bestseller, they want attention on that book.
So there’s no incentive to drive attention to the little books.

------
bobcostas55
If you're looking for recs, check out librarything. In general it's worse than
goodreads on almost all dimensions, but their recommendations algorithms are
great. You can import your goodreads list, so it's no big ordeal.

~~~
abeyer
I actually always thought librarything was strictly better than good reads as
a list building/management tool. It has suffered from a similar lack of
improvements recently, and I was never impressed with their "social" features,
but personally wouldn't agree on the "all dimensions" part.

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ztarven
My wife and I experienced the same disappointments on goodreads, and many of
the same flaws exist in other media rating/cataloging sites. We're attempting
to solve this problem by creating a centralized collaborative media database
that we always wished existed. Without any marketing yet,
[https://rate.house](https://rate.house) currently only has ~100 users, but
we'd love to hear HN's input and know if we're heading in the right direction.

~~~
bscphil
I think you've got a really nice design going on already, and basic features
seem to work without JS, so that's nice. I also like that you haven't polluted
it with ads (I'm far more likely to donate to sites that don't have ads).

Two thoughts:

1\. I think I would find a 5 star rating system too constraining. My opinions
in most areas have more gradations than just 0-5. 0-100 would be entirely too
many. I think IMDB's 10 point scale is really the main reason why I've stuck
with that for movies. On the other hand I prefer to only thumbs up / thumbs
down books, so I'm really not sure you can do anything about this in a way
that would make everyone happy.

2\. I think there's either a bug with your weighted average or else you're
ranking using something like "we're 90% confident the true rating is at least
x". But this confidence level seems entirely too high for the number of users
you have on your site. For example _Avengers: Endgame_ appears on #13 on this
page: [https://rate.house/chart/movie](https://rate.house/chart/movie) despite
the fact that it has a rating of only 3.64. I would probably lower the
confidence required for now, and if you 10x or 100x your users you can raise
it again.

3\. Would be nice to know a bit more about what features it has on the home
page before signing up. Can I import my ratings from other sites? Can I export
my data in some usable format like CSV? Can the information database the users
create for media entries be downloaded by users? (Even IMDB offers this.) Can
I get recommendations from the site once I've rated enough items? Can I get
music recommendations based on my movie ratings? (That would be cool.)

------
datguacdoh
Barnes and Noble launched Browsery a little while back, that helped me find a
litany of new recommendations. I now use that service in tandem with
Goodreads, but GR is just my tracking list at this point since it integrates
with my Kindle and migrating to something else would be a pain.

------
ernesth
I have been using Goodreads for years. I remember when Amazon turned off API
access to goodreads and how all books lost their covers and most of their
data. And the shocking turn of event of Amazon taking control of Goodreads.
And I am pretty happy that it hasn't evolved that much from the website it
used to be.

Concerning custom shelves exclusive from read/want-to-read etc. I do have
created such shelves. Not for "Did not finish" list but to have 2 kinds of
want to read: books on my wishlist and books I own but have not yet read.

Features goodreads has that most competitors lack: I can have two different
editions of the same book. I can store more than one date I read a book. I can
export most of my data in csv.

------
parliament32
Like the article suggests, I've been using Goodreads strictly as a list-
keeping app -- the recommendations are pretty useless. The star ratings,
however, are somewhat useful if you know how to read them.

------
gamesbrainiac
The only major complaint that I have against GR is that it is quite slow.

I don't really care much for recommendations right now, because the user-
created lists will often get you what you want faster.

Furthermore, I think GR does a good job of classifying the books, or rather
letting their readers classify their books for them.

All in all, I think the site should be more responsive, but there are tonnes
of places to have long discussions on books, genres, plots and other things
over at reddit.

------
hammock
My list of books I want to read is way too big that I'll never catch up with
it. So my problem is not finding new recommendations, it's deciding which book
from the list I want to read next. That's what attracted me to Goodreads,
because I can download a cab of the list and sort by different fields, etc.

Anyone else like me, what solutions do you use?

------
capedape
This author and book are in almost every quote category last time I checked “
Criss Jami, Killosophy.” Often multiple times in the same category. He has
some ok quotes, but rarely are they the same caliber of others, especially not
in every category. Seems the quote area has been gamed too. I contacted
goodreads and they didn’t seem to care.

------
myth_drannon
When they had recommendations based on bookshelves it was amazing since I have
a bunch of very niche topic bookshelves. Once they removed it and left only
recommendations based on genres it is useless now. Kindle book recommendation
based on similar books are a bit better, but that's only for kindle books

------
convivialdingo
I just want to be able to find books with keywords. I often forget the title
of books, but I can rattle off a summary.

Google books has gotten worse also - to the point of useless unless you have a
quote or are looking for common titles.

------
track_me_now
Anyone else remember CD Now? Human-curated lists based on "if you like this
you might like". Because they were actual people who loved and knew music they
worked. Amazon wrecked that too.

------
roadbeats
GoodReads and Craigslist are similar. They serve their original functions
sufficiently and that's all. Personally, I like GoodReads a lot, it's the only
social site I use in fact.

------
rdl
Yeah, 100% agree. I love the idea of the service and would happily pay for
something 50% as good today which is improving vs stagnating.

------
smcl
I had no idea it was supposed to be a social network, I'm just using it to
keep track of some books I want to read

------
ga-vu
I disagree with everything written in that article. Goodreads has been the
best books discovery site for years.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/JCotP](http://archive.is/JCotP)

------
SomeOldThrow
...compared to what?

------
wenning
douban.com is much better than it.

~~~
thundergolfer
Seems like English language isn’t supported?

------
jwr
I wonder if people posting on Medium realize that for many of us the articles
are inaccessible ("Sign up for a free Medium account, and you’ll get one more
story in your member preview this month"). It seems that people missed the
change in Medium's business model and still think that it's a site for posting
publicly accessible articles.

~~~
mottosso
Without JavaScript, they load quickly and without popups or membership
requirement on my end.

~~~
inimino
If you set up a non-standard browsing environment you can get around it, but
it's still a trash experience for the rest of us. I no longer follow Medium
links at all.

~~~
munmaek
All you need is one plugin, uMatrix, to solve it. Prevent medium from loading
cookies and javascript, and you're good. You do need to enable the github gist
javascript though to see gists.

~~~
inimino
I already solved it, by not following the links. I don't need to complicate my
life to work around some user-hostile business model.

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dlphn___xyz
‘medium is broken’

~~~
slenk
Agree whole-heartedly. Used to be ok as an aggregator, but now with their
repeated force attempts to make you sign in, I just avoid it.

~~~
dlphn___xyz
its not even that - the content on medium is largely spam

~~~
slenk
I haven't actually browsed medium in a while, so I didn't know how bad it was.

I do know that most stories I am linked to on there are barely a single
paragraph of meat

------
scoobyyabbadoo
Unless Goodreads is returning 50x errors then it is not "broken", what a
misleading title.

------
B1FF_PSUVM
(Off-topic, flameable material)

\- Is there a female majority in goodreads users/commenters?

\- Is book/novel reading now a predominantly female activity?

