I think the "Topics" list really needs some curation [1] and some more layers of taxonomy. Right now the "topic" breakdown seems 100% isomorphic to the "recommender" breakdown - the links literally go to the exact same URLs - which isn't sustainable. Bookshops don't have separate shelves for each member of staff.
[1] Do we really need both "Anglo-Saxon England" and "Anglo-Saxon Britain"? Or three different "Norse Mythology" topics and two different "Norse Myths" topics and a "Norse Mythology and Polytheism" topic?
Totally, this is launching on Monday into beta and there is a lot of work to do here.
The cool thing is that those recommendations are vastly different depending on the person making them. So I do want the same topic from different angles and then I am going to change how they are viewed to make that more useful. As this scales I will be drastically changing how that is displayed on the homepage and topic pages.
I dunno. It's all well and good having multiple "angles" on a given topic, but if a new user has no meaningful way of distinguishing between those angles then it's just going to be confusing and noisy for them.
Self-written mini-bios are not the answer here; the question "what makes this recommender different from the others?" is not something the recommender can answer in isolation, even if they're being maximally honest.
I'd love to hear your thoughts if you have a few minutes, my email is ben@shepherd.com. Can you tell me what you would do and how you would approach it? I'd love to chat if you have a few minutes :)
[1] Do we really need both "Anglo-Saxon England" and "Anglo-Saxon Britain"? Or three different "Norse Mythology" topics and two different "Norse Myths" topics and a "Norse Mythology and Polytheism" topic?