What Goodreads could have been(notfunatparties.substack.com) |
What Goodreads could have been(notfunatparties.substack.com) |
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.
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.
ALSO HN: WHY IS THIS NOT EDITORIALISED. I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU.
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.
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.
Pretty basic to start, and then going to be adding topics, search, and so on.
[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.
Side projects are slow going though so we do what we can, prioritization can be rough!
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.
"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
The Good Shit Stays — book reviews done 1 month after reading.
At this point I'm not so interested anymore. Didn't finish.
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.
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.
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.
This was my recent attempt to find the best one for my purposes:
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.
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."
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 https://zeneca.io/stopa
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
As the Fred Wilson piece I linked above notes:
> I wonder if listmaking is really a vertical thing instead of a horizontal thing. That would suggest that there will be successes in verticals like food, travel, shopping, reading, film, music, etc but that each will be its own thing and not part of some meta listmaking community.
With Trove we're trying to build something closer to the "horizontal" thing, but I suspect power users of a particular vertical (e.g. "power readers" like yourself) will still flock to vertically focused and integrated solutions (like Goodreads for books).