What is this article? It doesn’t present what goodreads could have been, or what it is.<p>Editorially, it was had to read. The author references a super popular previous post but doesn’t link to it. Why is that important?<p>I tried going to the home page to get a list of articles but it asked me to sign up for a newsletter.<p>Seems light on content and just SEO blargh trying to collect subscribers.<p>The boat stuck site was neat though.
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.
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.<p>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.
Every so often, I would say like at least twice a month, someone publishes a new article regarding Goodreads and how it sucks.<p>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.<p>Yet none of these articles address the elephant in the room. Why Goodreads sucks, and why there is no alternative.<p>There is no viable business plan!<p>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.<p>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.<p>Now if someone cracks the code, and finds a way to make a social network about books profitable, they have a billion dollar idea.<p>And if you do, please notify me, because I would love to see it.
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 <a href="https://beta.readng.co" rel="nofollow">https://beta.readng.co</a>
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.<p>"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
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: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387444" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26387444</a>
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.<p>At this point I'm not so interested anymore. Didn't finish.
There are at least 2 projects I know of where the functionality of Goodreads is being reimplemented with ActivityPub support:<p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goodreads+activitypub&t=hc&va=o" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goodreads+activitypub&t=hc&va=o</a>
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].<p>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).<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://avc.com/2015/11/lists-2/" rel="nofollow">https://avc.com/2015/11/lists-2/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://trove.to/" rel="nofollow">https://trove.to/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582658" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582658</a>
Along with storygraph and readng.co and librarything, there are several other goodreads alternatives.<p>This was my recent attempt to find the best one for my purposes:<p><a href="https://bookapps.info" rel="nofollow">https://bookapps.info</a>
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Hey team,<p>Founder of Zeneca here. I think there’s so much room to deeply engage with books. From sharing a list, to discussing a technical book like SICP. Our current version solves some of the problems the author mentions. Right now, you can share lists of books you like, take notes, and discover other people with similar books: i.e <a href="https://zeneca.io/stopa" rel="nofollow">https://zeneca.io/stopa</a><p>We show hn’ed a few weeks ago and are iterating. If you get time to try it and have feedback we’re all ears