[HN Gopher] What Goodreads could have been
___________________________________________________________________
What Goodreads could have been
Author : tomjohnneill
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-04-06 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notfunatparties.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (notfunatparties.substack.com)
| newbie578 wrote:
| Every so often, I would say like at least twice a month, someone
| publishes a new article regarding Goodreads and how it sucks.
|
| And I really enjoy reading these articles, they are not wrong in
| any way, Goodreads sucks, yet people (including me) keep using it
| because I want to have all my read and to-read books in one
| place.
|
| Yet none of these articles address the elephant in the room. Why
| Goodreads sucks, and why there is no alternative.
|
| There is no viable business plan!
|
| Simple as that, we can love reading, we can love making a better
| product, want something better, but truth of the matter is books
| are not really such a hot commodity in financial terms.
|
| I personally have been tempted numerous times to build my own
| alternative, but as soon as I start planning, I see that it has
| no viable future.
|
| Now if someone cracks the code, and finds a way to make a social
| network about books profitable, they have a billion dollar idea.
|
| And if you do, please notify me, because I would love to see it.
| tomjohnneill wrote:
| Yeah I don't think anyone is ever going to build a better
| Goodreads from a bookmarking & automated recommendations
| perspective for exactly that reason. I think there is scope for
| some nice little niche tools for individuals to recommend books
| though. Whether that's the one I made in a weekend, seems
| doubtful, but I think there is a path there.
| davidw wrote:
| I ended up deleting my Goodreads account. I don't want to share
| the for-fun books I read and it was kind of a hassle to deal with
| settings and 'friends' and whatnot.
| lancesells wrote:
| I really hate to generalize but seeing the Substack domain in the
| url is becoming the new Medium for me.
| prepend wrote:
| What is this article? It doesn't present what goodreads could
| have been, or what it is.
|
| Editorially, it was had to read. The author references a super
| popular previous post but doesn't link to it. Why is that
| important?
|
| I tried going to the home page to get a list of articles but it
| asked me to sign up for a newsletter.
|
| Seems light on content and just SEO blargh trying to collect
| subscribers.
|
| The boat stuck site was neat though.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| The HN submission of their one and only previous post:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26645813
|
| It's not really directly pertinent to whatever this post is
| about. They did one post. It did well. Now they are struggling
| to relate to this blog that had runaway success on the first
| post when they may not have some clear idea of what they are
| doing with this blog.
|
| BTDT, got the t-shirt.
|
| Runaway success on a first post to a new blog that's only kind
| of a half-baked idea can make it hard to sort out what you are
| doing and it can feel like other people have big expectations
| and yadda.
|
| I would chalk up that first paragraph to "free therapy
| masquerading as PR by someone who probably has a poor grasp of
| PR."
|
| The state of the internet today means it's inevitable you see
| weird mash-ups of odd things at times like that.
| whatgoodisaroad wrote:
| My experience of Goodreads is that it used to be weird and
| unpolished, but basically on a trajectory towards being a solid
| niche social network for book readers.
|
| But then, Amazon spent a lot of money to buy it, so they did the
| sensible thing and turned it into a big clunky funnel for book
| sales.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| My only gripe with it is that being Amazon, it has no excuse
| for being so slow. The revenue it must bring should justify
| better servers.
| Paul_S wrote:
| Goodreads is dead to me but for different reasons. I don't care
| about social networks or affiliate links. I just want a working
| website. I've moved to LibraryThing. Much better. It's even got a
| better recommendation engine that isn't trying to push an agenda.
| Although I prefer to pick up books semi randomly instead of based
| on recommendations. But maybe that's a self defence mechanism
| from years of biased recommendations.
| xqyf wrote:
| Is "I don't even like _Infinite Jest_ " the new "I don't even own
| a TV?"
| riffic wrote:
| There are at least 2 projects I know of where the functionality
| of Goodreads is being reimplemented with ActivityPub support:
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goodreads+activitypub&t=hc&va=o
| janjones wrote:
| Everyone seems to be building "recommendation list" apps
| nowadays. Similar projects I just recently stumbled upon:
|
| - https://reclist.me/
|
| - https://www.zeneca.io/
|
| - https://getcatalist.com/
|
| - https://trove.to/
|
| - https://beta.readng.co/
|
| - https://bookshlf.com/
| dorchadas wrote:
| I want to add
|
| https://beta.thestorygraph.com/
|
| I've recently been using that along with Goodreads to track,
| and I enjoy it. Not huge into the social aspect of Goodreads,
| though there's a few I follow with similar proclivities but I
| can (and do) easily live without that.
| breck wrote:
| Before Goodreads there was no Goodreads. Goodreads was a great
| Goodreads. There will always be room for another new and improved
| Goodreads. People have been reading for thousands of years, and
| ain't going to stop now.
|
| "In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad
| subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero."
| -- Charlie Munger
| Swizec wrote:
| A podcast idea everyone tells me is good but I'm not sure I
| have time for:
|
| The Good Shit Stays -- book reviews done 1 month after reading.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I'm not sure how the title relates to this article. I had to
| scroll through a bunch of stuff not related to Goodreads
| (supabase? istheshipstillsunk?, burying something called a
| lede?). Eventually, I found a section called "GOODREADS" that
| seems to be about the title of this submission. But then more
| stuff about a sunken or stuck ship, including screenshots that
| are not goodreads.
|
| At this point I'm not so interested anymore. Didn't finish.
| [deleted]
| ian196 wrote:
| In case you never end up going back to read it, I did read the
| beginning and there was a good bit of background on why the
| author wishes Goodreads was better.
|
| TLDR: The author made istheshipstillsunk.com and was hoping to
| add affiliate links for purchasing related books to help with
| hosting costs, but found that Goodreads's integrations were
| severely lacking.
| slibhb wrote:
| The article is right that Goodreads is used as "an organizational
| tool to keep track of what you've read" (or what you're planning
| to read). But that's actually a bad thing. Selecting books should
| have an element of randomness to it. You should buy the books in
| a bookstore, by browsing, and you should read them in a haphazard
| way. If you don't want to use bookstores, you can simulate this
| by buying lots of books online and reading them in a disorganized
| way.
|
| Books are much better this way. Worrying about efficiency, must-
| reads, and creating lists are bad ideas. It takes the fun out of
| it and you won't enjoy reading as much.
|
| Also the presentationalism of Goodreads is a huge negative. If
| you have to make lists, keep them private. By publishing your
| lists, you're going to end up worrying about what other people
| think or even censoring yourself. E.g. not listing A Sport and a
| Pastime because you don't want people judging you for reading
| "erotic fiction" or lying about having read Jordan Peterson
| because you don't want people to think you're a wingnut.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _The article is right that Goodreads is used as "an
| organizational tool to keep track of what you've read" (or what
| you're planning to read). But that's actually a bad thing.
| Selecting books should have an element of randomness to it._
|
| I think that would have to be at least part of the reason why
| they didn't call it "a selection tool to keep track of what you
| want to buy."
| buttscicles wrote:
| I do like the approach of personal recommendations over
| algorithmic. It's just inherently more meaningful if it's from a
| person you trust or somebody that knows what you're into. We're
| trying to lean more that way with https://beta.readng.co
| loosetypes wrote:
| Very cool! Can I ask what data source you're using for book
| metadata?
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I'm intrigued. Care to elaborate on your service? I'm not
| certain exactly what it is after visiting the page, although
| there were some snippets I enjoyed[1] and the site performance
| is unusually good. It's social media for book lovers?
|
| [1] > Your data is your business, not ours. We'll never sell it
| to somebody else and we don't use invasive tracking that
| advertisers rely on. And since you're in charge, you're free to
| export your data and take it with you.
| buttscicles wrote:
| I mean it's relatively simple still, mainly book
| tracking/collecting/reviewing with a slick UI & activity
| feed. But we have a lot of plans and fostering something more
| meaningful than clicking a heart button is pretty important
| to us. Personal (1-1) recommendations could be a good example
| of that, wouldn't you want to put your friend onto their new
| favourite book?
|
| Side projects are slow going though so we do what we can,
| prioritization can be rough!
| ryannevius wrote:
| This article is all over the place. Actually on the topic of
| Goodreads, there was a recent Show HN for Zeneca, a new place to
| share/discuss books:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387444
| wdencker wrote:
| While it's a very difficult problem to crack, I do think there's
| a way to serve both the bookmarking ("single player") and
| recommendation ("multiplayer") use cases with one product. Fred
| Wilson has a good article from 2015 on this dilemma [1].
|
| My personal opinion is that Goodreads and other similar services
| have failed to do this because they don't make their user-
| generated content a first-class citizen. The focus is on rating
| and making lists of books, not their users' thoughts and
| annotations on those books (which would tie content creation and
| consumption into a much tighter feedback loop).
|
| I'm working on Trove [2] because I think this is a problem worth
| solving -- we recently did a Show HN [3] you may have seen. Would
| love to hear if anyone has more ideas on how to tackle this.
|
| [1] https://avc.com/2015/11/lists-2/
|
| [2] https://trove.to/
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582658
| fellInchoate wrote:
| Interesting that you see things that way. I think the biggest
| hurdle to any Goodreads competitor for me is that it would be
| without GR's massive amount of user-content.
|
| My reading loop is like this:
|
| I start a book on my kindle ; it's automatically added to my GR
| collection.
|
| I highlight as I read, on my kindle ; those highlights are
| transferred automatically to my GR account.
|
| I finish the book, give it a lame 5-star rating ; its status
| and rating updated automatically on my GR account.
|
| I write my own notes & thoughts about the book (pen and paper
| style in my own journal).
|
| I go to GR to read what others have thought about the book.
| There are always a couple decent commentaries (and I read a lot
| of somewhat obscure translated fiction, sometimes only 100 or
| so other readers of it).
|
| I just don't see any other service pulling me away, no matter
| how slick the interface.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-04-06 23:01 UTC)