📚 Time to switch to BookWyrm
EDIT: Fairly incredible that this article should appear on WaPo, which is owned by amazon.
It doesn’t do algorithmic recommendations like GoodReads or Storygraph. Its much more of a feed-based system of finding books via observing what others are reading. It takes some work to curate a following list that fits your tastes, but if you go to your favorite books and actually follow the people who feel similar to you, then over time you will start to get some wild recommendations by seeing the stuff they are picking up or marking as “to read”. I much prefer it to algorithmic recommendations because it adds a human level of complexity - for instance, an algo isnt going to recommend a book that was published 40 years ago that has almost 0 online data about itself, but a person I really respect could say its one of their all-time favorites and now I have a new book that I literally never would have heard about anywhere else except for that one person.
My only problem with that is that what people read is, for many at least, all over the place. So me finding a person that likes a few of the same books as me (no small feat, by the way) is no guarantee that they’ll read anything else that I’ll be interested in.
I get the concept, just wouldn’t mind some educated guessing by an algorithm as a supplement.
