[HN Gopher] The Wrath of Goodreads
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The Wrath of Goodreads
Author : fortran77
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-07-28 01:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| thenerdhead wrote:
| As someone who loves Goodreads, I've largely ignored the "bad
| parts" such as what this article is describing.
|
| I've seen these review bombs on plenty of titles once certain
| authors or books become heavily politicized. Sometimes decades
| after the fact of their published book.
|
| You also see a general sentiment of people who want to voice
| their opinion on how bad books are to the point where they say
| "DNF" and thus leave a scathing review over a single chapter.
|
| I don't know if there is a fix to this problem, but I do wish
| more people read the entire book instead of judging it by its
| metaphorical cover.
| [deleted]
| extragood wrote:
| I don't know if it's _the_ answer, but proving basic knowledge
| of a text could help e.g. a short multiple choice quiz. Anyone
| determined enough could defeat those measures of course, but it
| 'd probably cut down on the volume of insincere reviews and
| lend credibility to those that pass.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Who is going to pay for the creation of those quizzes? Amazon
| bought Goodreads to minimize its own liabilities, but
| otherwise it doesn't want to invest any more money in the
| site.
|
| Morever, Goodreads doesn't just cover a few popular fiction
| or non-fiction works for which a short multiple-choice quiz
| could be realistically created. It allows you to catalogue
| and review any book that has an ISBN. As someone involved in
| an academic field, my Goodreads activity is mainly obscure
| works of scholarship from university presses.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/OUVFq
| mycologos wrote:
| Goodreads is a mountain of evidence against the idea that simply
| reading makes you a better person.
| tarsinge wrote:
| TFA is about Goodreads users not bothering reading before
| leaving a review, not much evidence to use here.
| johndhi wrote:
| This is cute and funny - but imo it really just points out that
| social media attracts anger.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Or we mostly surface anger. In any case it's a net negative.
| mycologos wrote:
| Thank you, I appreciate being cute and funny!
|
| But I guess I can add more context. Yeah, Goodreads is like
| other websites in that people get _a certain something_ out
| of joining a chorus of criticizing voices. But I 'm also
| talking about the sheer volume of reviewers who essentially
| read the same book over and over again, or who try to
| shoehorn every new book into a rigid (and unimaginative)
| notion of what a book is supposed to be. I think we valorize
| reading because, at its best, it's a uniquely immersive way
| of being exposed to new ideas; I think the preceding ways of
| reading thwart that. I don't begrudge people who just want to
| read fantasy novels forever, it's your life, but I don't
| think it's what we have in mind when we tell kindergarteners
| that reading is power.
| gdulli wrote:
| What's the right number of times to read a book, and what's
| the right notion of what a book's supposed to be, and what
| degree of flexibility to it is required? We're all eager to
| start reading correctly but can't until you tell us more
| specifically how.
| cwmoore wrote:
| The classic is "How to Read a Book":
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21956990-how-to-read-
| a-b...
| gdulli wrote:
| Great, now I have to figure out whether to go by the
| standards of mycologos or Mortimer J. Adler.
| omgmajk wrote:
| Technically if you read this article it kinda implies that a
| lot of people doesn't read the books at all. At least on the
| examples given.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 30 years in & it feels like the internet hasn't taken a single
| step to moderating the moderators. The web has almost nothing
| here & that's kept us locked in this sad holding pattern.
|
| I love the Web Annotation specification. Comment on anything on
| the web! Share those annotations! And it will let you
| select/target content in the page. But actually being able to
| annotate something like the discrete comments within the page,
| that feels missing.
|
| Maybe good reads lets us view a specific comment by a specific
| author: there's a page for it. That we can annotate & mark up, in
| a way we can aggregate against that comment or that author. But
| if we're just browsing a list of reviews, there's a missing link
| in figuring out semantically what it is on the page we're trying
| to markup.
| crtified wrote:
| Perhaps the whole notion of getting our (e.g. user review)
| information from the same source that sells the product, is
| flawed.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't think Goodreads has any terrible power as I don't think
| people rely on it for reviews or recommendations.
|
| I'm sure this author is unhappy someone rated her low, but I
| don't think it affects sales. Although it's hard to know. I
| expect Amazon ratings are more important.
| smcleod wrote:
| I absolutely do, similar to IMDB/RT where it doesn't mean I'll
| agree with the review / score but it's a good indicator.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I don't think people rely on it for reviews or
| recommendations_
|
| Not sure why you think that, since that's literally the entire
| purpose of the site.
|
| And it's the 175th most popular site in the US [1], so clearly
| lots of people use it for that.
|
| So it's definitely going to affect sales. How much, or whether
| Goodreads or Amazon reviews affect sales _more_ , is hard to
| say. But the idea that it has no effect isn't plausible.
|
| [1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/goodreads.com/#ranking
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > that's literally the entire purpose of the site.
|
| It's not the entire purpose of the site. The site also serves
| to simply keep track of the books that one has read - you can
| export your activity as a CSV file, so (at least for the time
| being) you still own your own data. Quite a few of the users
| listed under books that I read, simply catalogued the book as
| "Read" without giving it a star rating or writing a review.
| 101011 wrote:
| I know this is completely anecdotal, but I've been a Goodreads
| user since before Amazon purchased them, and I have found that
| Goodreads reviews are way more accurate...or, more accurately,
| they don't have as high of a degree of skew towards very low or
| very high ratings.
|
| It's definitely changed my buying behavior on more than 1
| occasion. I have to imagine it's a big driver of sales,
| otherwise, as the article mentioned, Amazon would have made
| much larger UX changes post acquisition.
| prepend wrote:
| I guess I just have a different experience.
|
| I've been using Goodreads for a long time, I think since just
| after they launched. And I've read a bunch of books logged
| there and I've never made a reading decision based on
| reviews.
|
| I don't think I've ever used it to "discover" a book other
| than notice a friend is reading something and to check out
| the book.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| No clue what other people do, but I certainly _do_ rely on
| Goodreads for that stuff.
|
| That said, if it has a low number of recommendations, like in
| many of the examples, then I won't give it much mind.
| fortran77 wrote:
| This is also the "Wrath of Hacker News" (on a lesser scale)
| because nobody clicks on the link and reads the article before
| commenting.
| mparnisari wrote:
| The solution is to never read those reviews.
| thefurdrake wrote:
| I feel like sometimes gatekeeping is acceptable. The end of the
| article provides the perfect solution:
|
| "Do not review a book you haven't read."
|
| People who leave reviews with strong opinions for books they
| haven't read should feel ashamed of themselves. Bad, receive the
| bonk stick.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Goodreads, like any social network, attracts a lot of
| perpetually-online people involved in activism, the sort where
| it is acceptable and even encouraged to shout down authors whom
| one's community regards as detrimental to society. No need to
| read the book first, because judgment has already been cast.
| Therefore, those users can't be expected to feel ashamed for
| their behavior, rather their behaviour might even serve as a
| form of social currency with their in-group.
| hammock wrote:
| Potential solve: Amazon owns Goodreads. Amazon has a way of
| tagging reviews with "certified purchaser," and they could
| start filtering for only these reviews, rather than just
| flagging and boosting them (as the article says they are doing
| now). Of course this means you must buy the book from Amazon
|
| Edit: don't downvote me just because you hate this idea, haha.
| Obviously there are tradeoffs
| nerdponx wrote:
| "Solution" is a fine word. And no, I don't want Goodreads to
| invalidate my review on the grounds that I didn't buy it on
| Amazon.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| The irony to make this suggestion on this article about
| people commenting on things they didn't read.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Goodreads is much more international than Amazon, foreign
| users won't realistically order from Amazon.com and might not
| have a local Amazon.xy site. For a time, one of the most
| active demographics on Goodreads was young female Iranians.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| As noted in the article they already do this.
| brightstep wrote:
| The solution is trust. Crowd sourced reviews are junk because
| you don't know who wrote them, what their intentions are, or if
| they are in any way qualified (whatever that means to you) to
| review a book. With well known and trusted reviewer, you
| understand their biases and can adjust accordingly.
| cafard wrote:
| That sounds optimistic. I write as someone who wish that people
| in my book club wouldn't pick books they haven't read.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I write as someone who wish that people in my book club
| wouldn't pick books they haven't read.
|
| That is weird expectation to me. At my book club we decide on
| what books we are interested in reading by voting. That of
| course means that sometimes what we end up reading something
| which turns out to be a dud, and then we discuss why or how
| it felt short of our expectations. Would you expect someone
| to pre-vet the books you embark on reading?
|
| In my opinion picking a book for book club is not
| endorsement, but just an expression that it interests the
| book club.
| thefurdrake wrote:
| Which part sounds optimistic?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Unlike picking a book you haven't read for book group, there
| is literally nothing to gain from reviewing a book you
| haven't read.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Presumably many individuals do this to engage in the
| culture wars.
| omgmajk wrote:
| Except engagement, likes and fake internet points on social
| media - it seems.
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(page generated 2023-07-29 23:00 UTC)