I don't use it at all. Social media is terrible, why can't we quit it? I include HN in there.
The two big social media apps I use are HN and Youtube. (Reddit used to be up there but a lot less now because I don't get recommended anything good. They really upped their reliance on the "algorithm" so after I clicked a "drama" link once my recommendations got destroyed with trash.)
HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time. Youtube is either very high value content or very low value content. No in between. Sometimes I find myself getting recommended garbage and I click into it and get mind trapped for a few minutes but catch myself and get myself out of it. I don't want to have to navigate these "dopamine traps" every time I want to watch an interesting lecture or video on a topic I actually care about.
edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless but I still click in a semi autonomous way.
Agreed. Discovery is a big problem with youtube. There seems to be a pattern. Like I've been researching hardware designs for real time image processing lately. Over time the same search terms reveal more and more relevant links. Overall youtube search is completely useless.
And one wrong click and you're inundated with garbage. Same for all social media really. At least hn doesn't have a per user "feed" (yet).
One thing I've noticed about goodreads is there are two distinct types of users. One type gives thoughtful reviews that are all text. The other type give shallow vapid reviews replete with emojis and memes and usually end with "didn't finish the book".
I've had a similar problem with YouTube. What helped me was a) disabling the history; b) heavily curating my subscriptions. I only try to consume content that comes from either my specific searches (e.g. "how to change oil in a motorcycle") or from the channels I follow. You still get occasionally sucked into "recommended" videos, but it is much better than having to rely on the front page of my account feeding all kinds of garbage.
You can achieve close to the same thing using uBlock element zapper, without installing extra plugins. I use the same trick for SO ('Hot Network Questions' darkpattern) and other sites.
Well, yes, but only assuming that YouTube does not change anything. If they do, then your uBlock rules won’t work, but RYS will presumably be updated to still work.
As well as with their parent Google. Did you know the minus sign is meaningless in the search now? Man, Google search is so useless now I'd actually pay a monthly fee (up to $10) for them to give me a bloody regex based search.
Please pay Kagi then, it would be a better world online and offline if we started rewarding the good-faith actors for once. That you're already willing to cough up for it is encouraging, just take that last step. Their browser is sick too (Orion) if you're of the Apple persuasion.
I tried multiple times and it hasn't worked for me in years. I tried again now and it seems it "sometimes" works. Specifically it seems that it works for some keywords and not others.
youtube is for long-shot the best discovery(maybe tiktok) is not uncommon now that you get high quality videos for channel whith sigle video and dont show trash content from known creators,the new problem is maybe that the high quality content require high quality teams means more money and more pressure to monetize but youtube video quality is leagues ahead from what it was 10 years ago, now you have science, philosophy, history content than produce consistent research by various people content, such as Asianometry.
use instagram reel or twitter and most content is trash, the latter rquiring you to follow the correct people, thats virality.
discovery is hard that why you use more netlfix than hbomax, tiktok than instagram
I tried to navigate youtube search by simply sorting by view count, since I figure that's at least moderately more difficult to game, and not subject to the algorithim.
But it turns out that for more general search terms youtube will simply not show lots of high view count videos, and which ones specifically can change with each search. (It does always does show a large amount of music videos, Indian media, disturbingly repetitive gaming/meme stuff, children's videos, etc...)
So even a ranked list of which video has the most views apparently is algorithmic to some extent.
That would seem like a way to deliberately cream off the most algorithmically pushed videos!
I wonder what might be a good anti-algorithm indicator - maybe a mismatch between two metrics that normally correlate with highly pushed content. View count over time might be interesting. Big spikes might be bad sign indicating external push. Playlist inclusion might be good to pick up on some human curation. Some measurement of link sharing on other social sites might be helpful... like what google used to do. Sigh.
Well that's of course the case but I meant it in the sense of algorithms used to pick what shows up on my screen as opposed to others entering the same search query.
Ideally there would be such a facility to allow for the removal of at least one layer of algorithmic suggestions.
PageRank for videos is a neat idea though, maybe call it VideoRank?
Youtube recommendations are really good if you exercise self-control over what you watch, conscious of your view history shaping your recommendations. Never click on any video that uses a clickbait thumbnail or title, even if it seems relevant to your interests. The algo will pick up that you enjoy clickbait slop and give you more of that. Ideally, don't even use an account in the first place; use a browser cookie with no account, and delete that browser cookie to start over if your recommendations ever stray too far from your desires. Seed the recommendation system by searching for specific videos that are relevant to your interests. And again, never click on crap, even out of momentary curiosity.
Learn to recognize signals for slop. Slick well-produced video channels with multiple people working for them will tend to become slop even if they don't start that way; having a cameraman/producer/editor on payroll pressures a channel to perform well to pay for those people, so such channels will tend to pump out shallow content to keep revenue steady if not growing. As soon as a one-man channel hires a cameraman, that's usually a good time to tap out. Particularly if the host is chummy friends with the cameraman; the pressure to perform by compromising quality will be greater when the channel creator is paying his friends to help. This is why I had to stop watching NileBlue; as soon as he got a chummy cameraman his video quality took a steep nose dive with sensational gimmicks taking precedence over substance.
> Learn to recognize signals for slop. Slick well-produced video channels with multiple people working for them will tend to become slop
Right. I really wish there was some “average joe” filter. The noise/signal ratio would surely still be high, but a hell of a lot more manageable than the inauthentic and affiliate nonsense that gets gamed for the algorithm.
Obviously anecdotal but my favorite review videos all r ones by someone recording off their laptop, all with a noticeable noise floor. It’s unfortunate that the very well produced vids seem to be negatively correlated with quality of substance, so I’ll keep sticking with my annoying noise floor videos
I've gone so far as to only go to YT with a browser that clears everything on close. I don't log in to YT, all I do is keep a local file that I use as my home page where I keep the link to the video tab of content creators I enjoy.
When you go in "fresh", the world is your oyster for approximately three videos, maybe four, then the algorithm has completely made it useless. So, I either go through a link to a creator and see what they've been up to lately or I go to a fresh YT homepage and search for what I'm looking for. The first search is probably still heavily curated, but it seems to give me more interesting options. When I find a video I like, I go to the creators page and add the link to my home page.
I don't log in mainly for privacy reasons, but it also causes me to only be able to search my particular bubble, pretty much. Going in from the outside gives me much better results, at least before I've watched too many videos in a chain. I'm a patron on patreon for a few my favorite creators, which I generally swap around every now and then for those who have Patreon accounts. I don't think I've ever bought anything from a creator's sponsor. It weirds me out that randos on the internet are now expected to be commercial shills and personal brand curators as well as video creators.
I consider the fact that people use it like TV to be a problem. YouTube (at least the way I perceived and used it) was a thing where your friends tipped you off for what to watch or look for or you needed a visual demonstration or explanation from a "real person" where it would otherwise be much harder to get up to speed by yourself. And it was a lot more of a bona fide social experience because of that (you were not NOT going to totally reminisce with your buddy that told you about it later), just not within the confines of the direct interface/site itself.
They also completely broken the search functionality. If I look for a topic I get 10 videos the algorithm decides are relevant and after that I only get random stuff.
So many times I remember to have seen a video about something and I just can't find it even with the right keywords. If I'm lucky I find it on...bing search filtered by videos.
Someone explained magazines to me a decade ago as discovering stuff you don't know you don't know about. That's the value of HN.
I also find that keeping up with the news on the regular basis is a waste of time and it's mostly regurgitations of the same, but when I tried cutting it completely, I find that in a couple of months I am completely out of the loop and it takes quite some time to catch up.
This is not a useful example, but it's a funny one. I was out of the country and away from tech for 3 months and when I opened my door on returning to the US, the delivery guy was a teenager, and says "Man, you have so many good Pokemon in your yard!". I had NO idea what he was talking about and said "Oh, cool". Found out Pokemon Go was a thing a few weeks later.
I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram. Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section. Points aren't even shown next to the nickname so people are more or less equal in comments. Personally I don't have "friends/followers" on this site nor I seek them (which seems the main drive on sites like facebook/Instagram/twitter).
Does HN meet the definition of "social media"? Yes it does, but is it the same kind of social media as these others? I don't think so. I don't see many negatives of sites like HN. Even Reddit could be a nice experience if certain things were tweaked there (atrocious user interface, showing up/down votes next to posts, showing account age, probably a better algorithm etc)
>I don't include HN in the same "social media" as twitter/facebook/Instagram
I don't either -- HN is the same category as Reddit which is much worse to me.
>Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section
There are plenty of people taking things personally here, all the time, and if you stick around you'll notice that a good number of them either use their real names as a handle or have it in their profile. And there are "celebrities" here just like there are on Reddit, except here it's usually tied to some high-ranking position at a company. For instance, the CEO of Matrix has many comments under the username Arathorn in almost every single post about Matrix.
>I don't see many negatives of sites like HN
Tree-style nearly-endless commentary combined with an algorithmic ranking of "top" stories that may have a big payoff if I just press refresh one more time turns out to be way, way more addictive than "traditional" social media, at least for me. Twitter never hooked me, and I kicked Facebook a decade ago, but even after forcing myself to use a privacy frontend for Reddit and never, ever logging in, I'm still addicted. I spend hours a day scrolling, and resolve to quit, and then go back.
I do the same thing here. It's so bad that I consider HN and Reddit to be as addictive as video poker.
I don't include HN as 'social media' either mostly because it doesn't constantly ping me when I get a reply. I have to check manually. It also don't change much so checking it once or twice a day for ten minutes isn't a big deal.
I feel if we include things like HN as social media then we need to include Newsgroups/BBS, Forums of the late 90s, etc. and literally every site online where a person can post a comment.
Perhaps technically they are all social media but to me when someone says 'social media' I think of the never ending feed of content that is manipulated to keep you coming back like a drug along with notifications about every "like" or comment or retweet (or whatever we call them now), etc.
There isn't any clear definition out there of what "social media" is I'm aware of, but I'd say the basic criteria include some combination of:
- User-submitted content
- Individualized experience based on algorithmic curation, follows/subscriptions, or both
- Ability to directly interact with other users, whether publishing to some kind of profile or "wall" of theirs or sending direct messages
- Users have some kind of durable persona (at minimum a human-readable, memorable account name, but usually a multimedia profile of some sort)
Hacker News mostly has none of these things. A very small proportion of top-level content is user-created and there is algorithmic curation, but not individualized. This is really more of a newspaper without writers or editors. The stories come from other platforms instead and every reader's letter gets published automatically.
Reddit isn't social media, either. It's a discussion board. There has to be something that made MySpace and Facebook different from phpBB and Usenet or why'd we come up with a new word at all? People seem to be using "social media" as a general derogatory name for any potentially addictive, high-noise, low-signal time sink that encourages mindless consumption of undifferentiated "content" and creates bad incentives to creators of such content to abandon truth and artistic integrity in favor of flashy gimmicks and trend surfing.
A lot of the main subs you see on the homepage are not explicitly political subs, but they end up having almost nothing but political content (/r/whitepeopletwitter, /r/facepalm, /r/therewasanattempt) and Reddit seems to ignore me when I block subreddits. So, even though I WAS a reddit addict for 10 years, they changed the formula and now I'm just not hooked anymore. Thanks Reddit!
The one I got recommended once (despite not being subscribed) was AITA. Which is cheap (and I'm certain 99% fake) reality tv content. I clicked it once and now that's it, that's all I get.
Yeah, it is really terrible. Any sub with user submitted drama stories were terrible. Many are fake or ragebait, or at the least extremely one sided accounts meant to garner sympathy. You click on one and it starts feeding you more. The comment sections are really terrible in those subs as well, there is no reasoned discussion going on.
Reddit and the subs themselves may not be explicitly political, but the site leans incredibly heavily to one side and seemingly can not shut up about politics for even a moment. I honestly think it might be one of the most toxic, worst for your mental health social media sites that exists.
As someone who did this for years, it’s like methadone or a nicotine patch. Harm reduction, but you really are better off quitting. There really is nothing of value left on r/all, and outside of some small niche or highly moderated exceptions, almost nothing of value left on the site.
> edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless
I don't much care for the upvotes (nor the occasional down) but the responses are not always worthless. In fact a count of responses (in total or since last visit) would be more useful to me in the top right of the page where the vote count currently sits.
Someone might be correcting or refining what I've said in a way the I'll find useful, or someone could be asking for clarity on what I've said which, assuming I have time to respond back, might be useful to others too, or might highlight that I'm not as sure as I thought I was originally which again may help my understanding.
This isn't true elsewhere of course, HN is one of the few places online, other than private groups, where responses have a reasonable chance of being useful.
I agree, in addition, it's recommendation engine has rapidly devolved into "suggest only the most popular books in this genre" type recommendations.
Say, if I want to read grimdark fantasy novels, and I've already read all of Joe Abercrombie and Mark Larwence books and didn't like Glenn Cook, good luck getting anything else out of the algorithms. There's no discovery, just regurgitation of whatever has been blessed by the masses.
And that's when things aren't manipulated. Take any popular category and it's all gamified. Someone is manipulating the most recent book to the top of the "best of all times" list, even recent self published crap gets into the top recommendations for popular categories. It's all manipulated garbage and Amazon doesn't seem to have any interest in changing it since it gets them sells or Kindle Unlimited subscriptions for that self publisher.
I've fallen back on critics and awards to curate my read lists. It's not as specific, but looking back on what I've enjoyed reading most recently, almost all of them have been awarded a hugo award. So now I just go through the award winner lists and pick something that looks interesting. I recently discovered the Imperial Radch series this way and really enjoyed it.
You don't have to visit the youtube website. People recommend videos here and I sometimes use a search engine to find them. To watch them I use youtube-dl or VLC. It's marginally less convenient but I avoid a world of nonsense.
I do agree that "social media is uniformly bad" is too broad a stroke. That said, humans aren't exactly the best at discriminating something that feels good from being unhealthy or at least unproductive.
Yeah I agree. It's easy to list some negatives of social media (doomscrolling, bullying, building unrealistic expectations for your life), but the simple ability to connect many people all over the world is pretty hard to argue against. Social media companies push shallow, easy to digest content, but that doesn't mean that there aren't thousands of meaningful interactions happening every day.
That is the most sane way to consume YouTube content. I’m doing the same on reeder. I have all the channels I care about in a folder and that’s it. Only thing that bothers me is that the RSS feed has both videos and shorts mixed together and I really dislike shorts.
> HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time.
Wonder how we could make it more effective. I’d love a keyword filter. Or an algorithm I can train myself to teach it what I like and don’t like. ChatGPT summaries of the comments to filter the wheat from the chaff would be helpful too.
HN works well because the top stories are same the top stories for everyone. Having the #1 story be unique and algorithm-driven for every user would be detrimental to the site and the sense of community.
In what sense would it be detrimental? If the top news for the day is a new Google product, and I don’t care about Google, why would it be detrimental to anyone if I didn’t see that?
I think you are conflating externally driven, top down algorithms, with users expressing their own preferences over what they see.
I disagree, HN is like a broadsheet newspaper, it encourages a sense of discovery and often learning that things you didn't initially have an interest in, can be interesting or perhaps a parallel to something with which you are engaged.
Further, no personal preferences means the site isn't expected to be tailored to you specifically, this promotes a certain sense of deference where people are exposed to lots of ideas, concepts, industries, experiences and viewpoints -- nobody is an "expert" here and on any particular day, there may be multiple things for you to weigh in on, or none, and that's ok. Along with fair, objective moderation, the discussions here are mostly well-behaved, non-partisan and civil, which all the sites you can personally customize fail to achieve.
I've been thinking of this for a while - something like an advanced keyword filter that would work across most webpages, using a smaller LLM maybe?
Personally I'd love to put in the names of some American cult of personality figures - Musk, Trump, the Kardashians etc.
Ideally it would filter out all posts and comment trees on HN or reddit that are about these people and a handful of other topics. Even if it only worked on those two sites it would be a huge improvement to the internet for me.
Not the first time I see a post here about how terrible Goodreads is. I, for my part have always found it doing exactly its job. I am not an avid reader - around one book a month - and I use it to manage my bookshelves, review the comments before acquiring a book, share my reading progress with some of my friends who also use it, which gives me motivation to start the next book every once in a while. I leave comments from time to time too, mostly for professional books, not fiction.
I don't understand what is missing? Old-school UI? Come on, this is not Twitter, you are not supposed to be hooked to it 24/7. I spend 10-15 minutes on this website once a month, I can live with old-school. Ratings not realistic? This is a joke compared to Amazon. There are authors on the website? All the better, I can connect with the author (actually sounds amazing to me!). Lack of content moderation, although I didn't encounter any serious issues myself, is a problem I agree with if this is the case.
Anyway, maybe the fact that there is no popular alternative speaks for itself. I know there are some alternatives but nothing as known as Goodreads as far as I can tell.
My issue is that they don’t have good recommendations. And they shut down their api and don’t share their data with users who want to calculate their own recommendations.
Their UI is fine. Their ratings are as good as any other ratings.
I would hate a “modern” Goodreads and am glad Amazon bought it and abandoned it rather than Meta who tried to make book readers live stream their reading or whatever stupid stuff they’d try.
There's other places to get recommendations. This site has had some great book recommendation threads. Then there's lots of great threads on various subreddits.
Sure, there are other places to get recommendations - but what is the point of Goodreads, my collected reading library and my ratings if I can't get recommendations from the site?
Totally agree. I have a list of to-read books that will last more than my lifetime and I keep adding to it - with stuff I know I want to read. What possible value would recommendations be for me?
I have found that I learn a lot about the books I've read from other reader's reviews, which I tend to read after I've read a book and not before.
I entirely agree, and that is how I use it as well. Really it is just a log of the books I've read and my progress against my annual challenge. I appreciate that I can see the opinions of others, and I ignore 100% of their recommendations.
Agreed, the only "social" aspect of it that I use is when people insist on getting me gifts I tell them books are always a good option and point them to my goodreads to see what I've already read, and get an idea of what I like.
Not exactly what you want, but i would recommend checking this (https://recommendmeabook.com/) one out. It give you first page to read without revealing book name or author name.
If anyone is looking for a better alternative, I can highly recommend Library Thing (https://www.librarything.com). It connects with various library databases around the world for metadata and the forum discussions can yield great recommendations.
The only downside is that it is a bit dated in its UI.
I also use LibraryThing, and I switched over when GoodReads was acquired by Amazon. I love LibraryThing, and they do monthly giveaways of new books by indie authors. I try to recommend it to everyone I know, so thanks for plugging it in this thread.
I’ve used LT since 2006. I like its interface which presents a lot of information on one page instead of lots of white space. And I like its features, groups, discussions etc. Though my use has dropped off now.
I have both LibraryThing and Goodreads and usually use the latter because the integration with Kindle makes it easier to keep my library updated. There isn't much difference between them if don't use the social features of Goodreads.
Agreed. I use it in the same way and it allows discovery of "similar" books. I love it for that. I comment occasionally on the author's I follow. For example, Boris does a lot of reading and review of horror genre books, so I comment on his reviews letting him know if his review helped me to get the book in question or not. That way he knows "someone" is reading his reviews. That's about the extent.
It's used for sea-lion ideological attacks against authors and works, a specific outcome of the general review-spam issue.
The data is terrible and badly governed. There was a recent thread here, I believe, about an author who couldn't get AI-written books out of her name because they simply won't correct their data.
> There was a recent thread here, I believe, about an author who couldn't get AI-written books out of her name because they simply won't correct their data.
Because of the kindle integration. That's it. It's too frictionless that when you finish a book on kindle, you press 1 button to rate it and it updates the book on your shelves to read, adds your rating, and then will set the next book you start as 'currently reading'.
IMO this is an insurmountable moat for any service that would try to challenge it.
This is 100% the correct answer. I've spent a lot of time brainstorming ways to take on Goodreads, and this is the moat that I can never seem to cross.
Yes. Kindle is around 65% the ebook reader market in the US. Nook is about 25%. Apple and Kobo make up the rest. Kobo is more popular in Canada and in other international territories.
But, you just have to approach it from different angles. Don't attempt to compete with Goodreads, but rather build something better that works in a new way around people's desires around books.
Goodreads is just a review database, easy to innovate around that barrier.
Fair enough, but that is just ebooks. Isn't goodreads also useful for dead tree readers? Although I guess the bibliophiles on goodreads are more likely to have an ebook reader.
I read a ton of books, but I’ve never used Goodreads. What is it about Goodreads that makes people want to use it? If you can identify why you want to use it, then you might have identified why you can’t quit it. For me, it is like smoking. I never started smoking, so I don’t need to quit it and feel no desire to start (or start again for those who did quit in the past and are tempted to start again).
Goodreads scratches an itch in my stupid monkey brain by tracking everything I've read. I gain some satisfaction/sense of accomplishment looking back at stuff I've read. I should probably find a better way to track my reading
I remember that the Google books API didn't return page or word counts. That was the only thing missing so that I could create a book database of things I want to read ordered by size/length/reading time.
That, and I also get value out of tracking books I might want to read.
Whenever a book references another book I may want to read later, or there is a HN comment recommending a book which sounds interesting, I'll add it to my "to-read" list. Then when I finish my current book, I can sort this list by average rating to decide where to go next.
I do most of my reading via library books, either physical or digital - a bookshelf wouldn't help me there, nor would it help me organize books by multiple categories, or remember what I rated them as, or let me easily leave and search notes about them.
I don't use GoodReads' social aspect at all, but I do use it as a book database, and will continue to do so until they remove the ability to exfiltrate my data.
My library's (Brooklyn Public Library) website shows me all the books I've checked out and even lets me keep public and private reading lists. No place for me to write reviews though, last time I checked. Since I almost exclusively get my books first through this library, then buy the books I really really liked, the checkout history functions as a good enough database for me.
It would be awesome if it were federated with other libraries somehow, since I also use the NYPL.
This sounds jokey but it's a serious question: what would you lose by not doing any of that?
I read a lot, and used to use goodreads for this, and now I don't use anything for this. I have a messy little notebook where I write down books I want to read so I don't forget they exist.
I inconsistently cross them off as I read them, and all together it's enough to usually remember what I read and often remember how I felt about it. It turns out my reading life isn't improved by any more than this.
I like keeping a journal as I read and find that valuable. But goodreads isn't well suited for that and I never look back through it anyway. Writing it is useful, indexing it isn't.
IDK my reading isn't your reading but you might be surprised how little of the goodreads feature set is actually valuable if you stop using it.
- I read a lot and so friends not-infrequently come do me for recommendations. Having rated a big chunk of the things I've read, I can sort by rating and scroll for things they'd like. Often I go "holy shit I forgot all about that one, but it's perfect for Bob."
- I'm always looking for the next thing to read, and it's really nice to be able to quickly scroll through my (long) 'want to read' list for something that piques my interest for the mood I'm in.
1. Keeping track of where I am in a series. Goodreads has a handy feature where you can see the list of books in a given series. I maintain a reading list with (way too many) different series and it has my next book in each one.
2. Remembering which books I've read. (Kind of related to #1.) More than once I've gotten more than a few pages into a book and realized, "hey I'm pretty sure I read this before".
Either of these would work in a notebook or spreadsheet but that would require changing my workflow (and "importing" a long list of books).
Not much, all things considered. But I have a pretty bad memory, and it can be hard to remember which books by an author I've read, and which ones I haven't.
I guess I could just store all this in a spreadsheet, or email myself reviews, but this is convenient enough that I don't do that.
Low-value answer. I'm in my 50s, I've lost track of how many times I've moved and culled books. (About to do that again, cull anyway...) There's also ebooks, library books, etc.
After, oh, ten years, I'm likely to forget whether I even read a book or not. And unlikely to have a physical copy unless I really liked it. So "bookshelf" is a pretty flip and un-useful answer.
I'm not sure if this helps but I started a blog and while I don't create many posts I do have a section for "What I've read" and simply post the book title + author under a certain year and that's it. It's been useful and gratifying to see it build. It also serves as a reference when I'm forgetting a book, helping me kick start the memories of it.
> What is it about Goodreads that makes people want to use it?
I dive deep into a number of long-running series. Cosmere/Sanderverse, Star Wars, Dresden Files as examples. Once you step away from a series/topic for a bit, it's hard to walk back and see "What did I read? What's next?" - especially when you're doing it via (multiple) libraries.
GoodReads is the best I've found for tracking so far. I also have a private-notebook for some series - but goodreads is just easier. If you feel negative value in a feature (following authors/communities seems like line noise?) - just don't use That feature. I have ~300 books on my 'Read' shelf - That's valuable information moving forward I use when deciding What's Next.
I use it purely for the Groups. In particular, one group called "The Evolution of Sci Fi" which I've been a member of for some years now. They have a monthly read which I rarely have time to acquire and get through, but have sometimes read recently enough to contribute. Plus various interesting discussions about sci fi past and present.
The UI is especially bad for browsing and discovering Groups. However it's almost the only aspect I interact with. I've set up email digest notifications for new messages so that I can instantly click through to active discussions.
Goodreads lets me get a list of books I've read, share recommendations with my retired father, and once in a blue moon it makes a good recommendation to me. My biggest issue with books is discoverability. That being said, I must report two or three spammers a day.
I have a modest library, and I used to use it to track things I want to read, but that has been replaced by the "save for later" button in amazon's store.
I've used it but I forget it exists. I wish smoking was like that! I'm not sure what the addictive element is meant to be.
The reviews are poor enough to just be a waste of time I regret looking at. I mostly read non-fiction history, science, health, politics and something I have only noticed recently is that so many Amazon and GR reviews are just political takes - using the review section to advance or attack some position instead of actually discussing the book. Pretty tiresome.
I think I remember every single book I have read that's worth reading, and that list is in the hundreds. Not because my memory is so good, but how do you forget if you actually thoroughly enjoyed it / got something out of it?
edit: I don't have a goodreads acct and don't fully remember what it is, but I think the value there is finding people who like books you like, especially less famous ones, and then finding what else is on their list.
It’s easier than keeping my own cloud doc and looking up titles and authors.
That’s it. I like a list of all books I’ve read and if I liked them. And I like a list of books I want to read.
I’m happy that I can see what my friends read, but that’s not a determining factor of using the site. And way less since no one I know uses facebook any more.
I use it (sparingly) for tracking which books I've read/want to read, getting recommendations and seeing what people say about certain books as (partial) information to check if they're worth the time
this is awesome! As soon as I saw this thread pop up, I thought, "this could be a fediverse app..."
It speaks to the value of fediverse that so many services are becoming fedi-ized. Not just Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, blogs, 4chan, reddit, but even GoodReads.
I have been using Bookwyrm for my personal reading list. Would recommend! Easy to set up.
I hear there are some issues with its licensing. They seem to use some sort of 'anti-capitalist' license which is non-OSI. But I think that its ok, we need to start experimenting again, and clearly the OSI model isn't working.
Do you recommend the instance you are on? I am looking to join, but the English speaking instance list was smallish, and I was having trouble choosing.
to be honest, I have not tried hard to use any of the social features. But hopefully soon I will try them and have more to say. But for now, all I need is the list of books I want to read, a way to track my progress, and also some light organization. This works great, and it's guilt-free compared to Goodreads!
Goodreads is functionality and user-experience wise not amazing, but I think for a majority of the population it "works just fine". As someone who reads almost everyday, I end up using it roughly once a week to post updates or add to my to-read list. Given this frequency, I'm willing to overlook a lot of the poor UX.
Goodreads was acquired and is kept on life support to funnel traffic to Amazon and keep competition for online book reviews from impacting the Amazon sales. It’s not clear that anyone even works on the site anymore, it’s a zombie.
The site is built on outdated technological infrastructure, which made the cost of overhauling and updating it a challenge that was ultimately not worth it for the e-commerce giant, according to former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Meanwhile, limited manual content moderation and a lack of protective features allow users to engage in targeted harassment known as “review bombing” — behavior that has resulted in the cancellation of books and their authors.
... Former employees said Amazon seemed happy to mine Goodreads for its user-generated data and otherwise let it limp along with limited resources. In Amazon’s more than 20-year history, the company has made dozens of acquisitions, and it is not unusual for it to try to cheaply acquire properties in markets that it wants to dominate, only to let them languish. ...
Goodreads “hasn’t been all that well maintained, or updated, or kept up with what you would expect from social communities or apps in 2023,” said Jane Friedman, a publishing industry consultant. “It does feel like Amazon bought it and then abandoned it.”
This sentence in the article made me laugh. "The awfulness of the user experience is surprising, given Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads in 2013." No, no, it's not a surprise at all. Both Amazon's general track record with acquisitions and then their specific reasons for buying Goodreads.
Don't get all this constant bashing of Goodreads. Not that I am an active user: I tried but decided that the books space is way too big for a working recommendation algorithm. The website's design is a bit old and could use some improvements, but it basically does the job. If anything, it feels like a relic of a better past, more careless, less monetised and less gamed. I sometimes use it to check reviews and I usually find good content.
same reason people don’t quit LinkedIn. It’s a self updated list of books, just like LinkedIn is a self updating Rolodex of people.
They are very reliable for these core functions, and quite unreliable for any other. when someone figures out how to disrupt them, Microsoft/Amazon will crush them or buy them.
This is why we have regulations against monopolies, but there are far bigger fish to fry these days.
For me this is the only place where I can find all the books I read — that includes a lot of Hindi and Urdu and also English books published in India. GoodReads have them all! Other places? Of course not.
So I just use it to track and the yearly reading challenge. I like seeing that achievement :)
There’s ZERO other activity from me on GoodReads. By no means it’s a social network for me.
I use Goodreads almost every day and it's a great way to keep track of what I've read, how I liked it, and my notes about it.
Occasionally it's interesting to see what my friends are reading.
That's it.
I certainly have complaints about the site but I think the author's hyperbole here is a bit much.
And as for the ratings and reviews which the author seems hyper focused on - I've generally observed the opposite, ratings on pretty much everything are suspiciously high. I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the books on the platform have a rating above 3 / 5.
Yes, but inflation simply means you re-set expectations. I admit that, if I'm looking for a new book and I see that it's rating average is under about 3.8, I start to wonder what's wrong with it.
Of course, I like plenty of books with a lower average rating, but that does give me my first impression.
(It reminds me of when I was requesting a house on Airbnb and the owner writes "what's with the 4.9/5 rating you have? There's got to be a story about that." It turned out anything below a 5 set off his red flags.)
Last night, I was trying to figure out what the art was on a paperback book cover from the 70s (Destroyer #2, Death Check). Only have bad, low-res scans of it. Good Reads was the only site that had anything like substantive summaries of it (more than one, mixed in with reviews). Eventually figured out that it was supposed to be a chess piece (the villain plays chess, from the summaries).
Where else was I supposed to go?
Same thing with Google. I really want to quit it, but when you plug the keywords into DDG and it doesn't seem to have a fucking clue what you're searching for, what's your next move?
Librarything has more features, better recommendations, better admins, and a better community overall. It's good for books. I have no idea why you'd use Goodreads at this point.
Edit: I just checked, and Librarything has a scavenger hunt going on right now to celebrate their anniversary. The founders wrote the clues themselves. Each clue refers to a specific page on the site, and if you go to that page you get a point. They do this a few times a year. How adorable is that? The Goodreads equivalent would probably be an ad for a Kindle.
The interface is good, the plots provided are useful, I like their transparency on upcoming features, and the fact that the premium version is not needed and mostly a way to support them financially.
On the minus side, their search engine and recommendation system could be improved and it does not seem to be able to sort the books I want to read by most recommended.
It's pretty good, I think it's the most credible competitor to GoodReads. But it suffers from the usual social network problem; you go where your friends are.
I love Goodreads. I use it to rate and review books I've read. I use it to read reviews of books I have (or might want to) read. And I follow people who write interesting reviews.
I never look at whatever Goodreads recommends. The people I follow usually come across interesting books I would have never heard of. If they review a book, and it sounds interesting, I add it to the top of my list of things to read. This is a giant semi-sorted text file. If I feel the urge to read some book, and it's already in my list, I will put it to the top of the text file. A bit like a splay tree. I don't care that my stuff is not perfectly categorised and systematised because reading habits are not like that.
I pay no attention to the actual star rating of books on Goodreads. There are a lot of bad reviews on Goodreads. You usually know within 2 seconds whether a review will be worth reading. Sometimes I will filter books by lowest star. I often found the people I follow because I saw them write an intelligent, detailed, dissenting review of a book.
The social side of Goodreads isn't for readers. It's for people who want to be seen to be reading. It's the kind of people who badly want to be seen as intelligent, and well-read. Read the reviews of books. They're terribly pretentious, and packed with the same kind of faux-insite Quora is. I'd be embarrassed to be a regular user.
The social side of Hacker News isn't for hackers. It's for people who want to be seen to be hackers. It's the kind of people who badly want to be seen as intelligent, and well-informed. Read the posts here. They're terribly pretentious, and packed with the same kind of faux-insite Quora is. I'd be embarrassed to be a regular user.
Sure, that's entirely fair. I was trying to delineate tool usage from social usage with my first sentence, but maybe I failed to do that. I appreciate the feedback.
Meta comment that is probably borderline HN guidelines, but I think different because I'm honestly looking for information rather than just bitching.
I can't stand when websites pop up those near full-screen things like that asking me to subscribe or put my email in or something. I haven't even finished the article! I couldn't because you blocked it. I could click the X and finish reading, but lately I won't, I just hit Ctrl+W.
Has anybody seen the data behind those? Do they actually work? Given how often I see them used and how nearly every marketing site on the planet includes them (and generally marketing is a very data-driven field), I would think they must be effective, but it's just so counter-intuitive to me that interrupting somebody's flow would make them more likely to subscribe to you.
I quite like it for finding books in the same series. For example, this finds all the ringworld[0] books, but the other site mentioned in this thread does not [1].
EDIT, but looks like LibraryThing, also mentioned here, does![2]
I only use it to track what I am reading and my progress. I don't use it for recommendations from others or to see what the authors I read are doing. Maybe as a social network around books it sucks but as a way for me to track my reading it's fine.
It's because of SEO. SEO is why you can't quit it.
I run a similar platform and google has basically broken the internet over the past five years with SEO. Wordpress garbage is everywhere. Oh well, the correction is coming but who knows when.
BTW, if you're into kpop check out kpopping.com for your kpop needs (Of course, there's a shitty wordpress that outranks us on every single* page -- here's a funny thread from some SEO guy about it https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 )
All I want is a book review aggregator like IMDb, metacritic or opencritic.
Finding a way to search Goodreads for top 100 sci-fi novels with certain tags shouldn't be an abject navigational nightmare or, in some cases, completely impossible.
It's fascinating how many simple-idea websites are dominated by user-hostile dark-pattern infested players: Linkedin for professional networking, glassdoor for job reviews and goodread for book reviews.
I mean, just add "...except it's profitable" to the end of all of your simple-ideas and you'll probably end up in the same place they did. There's not a lot of profit in simple ideas executed cleanly.
Why not? If you have simple idea that organically has lots of demand I would imagine executing cleanly is an advantage.
There are plenty of examples: craiglist for classified ads, plentyoffish for dating (or at least used to), gandi for domain registration, github (as opposed to sourceforge which was filled with dark patterns)...
I got a few friends invited me on Goodreads to read books together, but it never really worked out besides knowing what books they are reading or interested. Everyone's reading habit and interest are different. On one hand it's good to know what your friends' interests are, and may read those books so you have a common topic to discuss during gathering. On the other hand, it also creates a psychological procrastination something similar to hoarding a whole bunch of books and never actually reading them.
I've always felt one of the main points of books was to read something just for yourself, and detox from anything online+social. So Goodreads always seemed to cheapen whatever book I read.
For me, I don't love Goodreads and I don't use it, but I was very excited for it during the initial few years. I don't think Amazon knows what they are doing with it beyond controlling real estate and data.
Why did I get excited about Goodreads?
I want to know what people are reading and what they love and why.
I love hearing that from my friends, and I want that on a wider level from humans. I love knowing what someone else loved to read and why, it helps me explore books and ideas and this weird world.
I am an avid reader. Never found goodreads interesting. I don’t want to transform reading books in a gamified, cheap experience that all too easily can devolve into status seeking.
I dumped it even pre Amazon purchase .. The killer feature I still want is to see highly rated books I haven't read from people who highly rate books I rate also rate high .. Recommendations are far too often it is always just genre/author/popularity recs .. Honestly, I'd be happy with a SQL interface where I could do my own searching :)
Yuuuup. A lot of people have a very different idea of “good” than I do, and then there’s the tendency to rate anything that wasn’t terrible a 5 (on everything with ratings, not just good reads). The ratings distribution gets smashed against the top of the range, making it almost useless.
Like… lots of OK books that plenty of people enjoy are a 3, even judged only against their peers. That’s fine. I want the actual 5s, though. I’ve got too much to read as it is, if I’m going to add something to the list I don’t want to factor in the ratings from someone who rated the worst Harry Potter book a 4 or 5.
I had the exact same feeling several years ago so I made a graph-based app that does that! ablf.io/?q & ablf.io/goodreads (the latter lets you upload your existing goodreads lib if u want)
I have seen many people mention using goodreads, and other web apps to track their reading list. I don't understand using a webapp for this simple use-case. I have always used a simple org file, with the author's name as the first-level heading, and the books I have read from them as second-level headings below it. Am i missing something here? Why do people want to use an online-only service for this simple thing?
Because I read a lot of books with various editions, alternate covers, etc. I want to track that metadata and if I'm going to just go copy/paste it from Goodreads anyway, I might as well just log it there then periodically export that list.
When I discovered Goodreads, I wasn’t a proponent of plain text yet. And it was great for discovering books and authors. I barely used the social aspect, treating it as a database of books instead.
Why quit Goodreads completely if you can just use the good parts of it? I use it to:
- manage my "read" and "to-read" books,
- glance through a couple of top reviews for the book that I'm intending to read
Goodreads is super useful for these features. I don't know how many times I saw a mention of a book, added it to my to-read list only to finally read it years later.
Cheers! It looks to be slightly more limited compared to Goodreads (e.g. no expanded series/universes, no different reading orders, etc.) but its the best alternative so far.
I just use Goodreads to keep track of what I read so I can go back and see some highlights from certain kindle books that I've semi-forgotten. I dislike their goals in terms of "books/month" and "books/year" - which IMO emphasizes entirely the wrong aspect of reading and makes a meaningless quantitative assessment! Reddit for recommendations works way better.
I did quit it. The reason I quit it was that after trying it a bit, reading reviews, writing a couple, I noticed that it didn't help me find good books to read (which was what I hoped it would do I signed up), or do anything else to improve my life in any way.
In other words, it sucked, so I quit it. I do not believe I am the only person who was able to do this.
> The awfulness of the user experience is surprising, given Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads in 2013.
I see the author doesn't use Amazon very much. The instant checkout flow is a mathematically frictionless surface; literally every other interface is somewhere between a bannister full of splinters or landing in a copse of pines without a parachute.
I only use it as a light tracker of what I've read, but I'm moving to Obsidian for this purpose. The main thing it does for me is be a relatively good way to search up metadata about a book (author, year published, etc). Is there something more open? (Looked at LibraryThings, but its API does not seem to be available currently).
The deeper problem here is that review sites don't work well for things as personal as books. I've read many books based on excellent reviews in amazon, and hated many of them. Most people don't have the same taste as me. Likewise many people hate the books I love, and give one star reviews to them.
Having a good circle of friends or being part of a serious book club. You form personal connections with people of similar taste. You get goos recommendations from such people.
There are books mentioned inside books and movies that you like. Try those.
Search for a book in particular topic, append reddit. Go to reddit thread, and try books that appear in many comments are the most upvoted.
Search "books" on HN. You will get ~10 years worth of reading in about ~30 mins browsing.
You must have people that you look up to- professionally, among relatives, etc. There must be some people that are bookish? Take recommendations from them.
You must have a niche area of interest? Follow forums/groups of that group. What books come up more often? Read those.
There are a lot of such advice that I can continue with. Probably a whole blog post. But, that's for another time.
All advices above are practised by me. None are theoretical.
I am an occasional user of the site and basically get value out of it two ways
1) check if any FB friends/acquaintances have read the same books that I have
2) use the ratings to rank-order the books of a particular author. E.g., if I know I want to read another Balzac or Mishima novel, I check the ratings to see which one I might try next
I built myself https://www.candlapp.com/ which runs the fifth year already. Specifically because as a book worm, I have an urge to track what I read and plan, follow favorite authors, etc., but have zero interest in social stuff.
All of these sites are basically "aggregators" for individual content that can be submitted by official sources or users.
RSS.
Instead of bespoke walled gardens that require some centralized control and teams, why not a standard to aggregate content and just put it in place on an html site.
All this handwringing over GoodReads in recent weeks seems to miss the point. It's actually useful to users? People who like books are attracted to it, for all its ills. I don't think that adds up to "terrible for books."
> It is, in fact, possible to have a decent time on Goodreads. [...] I still use the site daily
Why can't you quit it? Because you lack self-control to act on your convictions and desires. Worry less about why other people "can't quit" it, because other people may not even want to quit it in the first place. Worry more about why you lack the self-control to act on your stated desire to quit it.
I don't use Goodreads, I use LibraryThing. What you are experiencing is a 'you problem', not a 'we problem'. I guess you are trying to frame it as a 'we problem' to make yourself feel better about your lack of self control. Stop doing this, this is a mental crutch to shield your ego from acknowledging the you problem. Framing it as a 'we problem' prevents you from fixing the problem you have with yourself.
I discover new books by looking at the websites of publishers of books I already like or by word of mouth. Goodreads seems like a place that doesn't make anyone's life better.
This argument is puzzling in that I really struggled to understand what it is that the author thinks is so terrible about Goodreads. If the conclusion of the argument is supposed to be that we (Goodreads users) should all feel the desire to quit it, then presumably the problems with the platform will be applicable to all users, not just a handful.
On the one hand, she complains that Goodreads is not just a space for readers, it's also a space for authors. On the other hand, she takes the perspective of authors (and is one herself), and complains that Goodreads hasn't done enough to stop review bombing. It's somehow both a problem that authors and readers can interact on the site (as pointed up by the fact that she received a thank you from an author for her early positive review), and that the site doesn't focus enough on the author experience. Even if the problem is supposed to be that the site is unfocused, not really prioritizing any one's needs in particular, that's not likely to cause a typical user to want to leave unless the problems become much more concrete than that. And it's really not clear that a typical user would be upset about interacting with an author on the platform, or attending a Q/A session, etc.
While I readily admit that Goodreads has a bunch of issues (amateur reviewers taking themselves much too seriously, interface problems), I'm not sure my complaints are even salient for this author. To me, in fact, statements like the following suggests that her problems with the site might be more personal:
> My to-read list ballooned alarmingly, not from titles I felt drawn to out of genuine desire but ones the algorithm pushed on me. The thrill of discovery, too, felt compromised: every time my feed told me a friend had added a book that I’d found first, I felt a frisson of annoyance. Have some imagination.
> I use it to get a rough and ready sense of how a book might be selling based on the number of ratings and the speed at which they accrue. I use it to drop five stars on upcoming books by friends, giving their work a tiny boost in a landscape where a book can live or die based on hype.
As a Goodreads user, I find it perfectly passable at what it does - allow users to catalogue books they have read and books they want to read, find potential new books to read, and view a feed of books read by their friends. Unlike the author, I'm glad Amazon has more or less abandoned it. It's not a perfect site, or even a great one (their recent UI update made it so that adding a "read date" to a book you've just finished now takes 10 steps instead of 2), but the flaws are minor enough that I'm not strongly compelled to look for an alternative. I suspect this experience is generalizable enough that this is why "we" can't quit it.
Power users do keep the internet running but they complain so much. I guess they believe idealistically in the projects so it hurts them when it's not as good as it could be.
The two big social media apps I use are HN and Youtube. (Reddit used to be up there but a lot less now because I don't get recommended anything good. They really upped their reliance on the "algorithm" so after I clicked a "drama" link once my recommendations got destroyed with trash.)
HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time. Youtube is either very high value content or very low value content. No in between. Sometimes I find myself getting recommended garbage and I click into it and get mind trapped for a few minutes but catch myself and get myself out of it. I don't want to have to navigate these "dopamine traps" every time I want to watch an interesting lecture or video on a topic I actually care about.
edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless but I still click in a semi autonomous way.