Goodreads is perhaps the best example of enshittification imo. It’s only good now as a way to track your reading lists.
I tried bookwyrm today and it feels quite polished already, like giving you a guided tour of it’s features. Hopefully it takes off as well similar to mastodon and lemmy.
I like BoomWyrm, but they are so many duplicate books because there are so many different published versions of a book. I think these need to be combined somehow. If people really want to choose the cover of the exact book they read maybe you could be able to choose your cover.
That’s true, duplicate copies of the same book is perhaps the main pain on bookwyrm right now. On the other hand it also feels like a problem that devs must be aware of and are actively trying to figure out a solution for.
Ooh, I love a good book app.
I’ve been using Storygraph more than GoodReads lately, but I’ll have to check this out too.
I’ve only ever used Goodreads to track books I’ve read. What was good about it in the past?
Once upon a time it held a lot promise for book recommendations. You wouldn’t simply look for books that had high star ratings, you’d be shown books that other people who had the same profile of likes/dislikes had enjoyed. They had all the data necessary to build an awesome recommendation engine.
discussion and recommendations.
but now it’s mostly shit, like anything that is remotely social media. crazy power users and bad faith actors are all over the place.
I stopped using it a few years ago because people who harass me based on my reviews, esp if it was a critical review of a popular book.
I read that in 2012 a bunch of authors (names included Anne Rice, Kiera Cass and Carroll Bryant) made this website called Stop the Goodreads Bullies, a harassment site disguised as an anti-bullying campaign. Goodreads failure to protect its users/ bowing down to them by changing its policy to say that reviews about author’s behaviour was off-topic caused people to migrate to booklikes. Were you part of that migration?
Never liked Goodreads. I always got much better results on LibraryThing.
I don’t really know what the dev’s roadmap is, but I do think that reccomendations shouldn’t even be a part of the instance beyond recommendations from your “community” or people who you follow. I think it should be a seperate service/website that imports your goodreads/bookwyrm data and algorithms it while serving ads(meaning their revenue will come from publishers/authors). It can then push recommendations over to your bookwyrm home instance with activitypub. Otherwise each instance will need the data from every other instance just to give you recommendations based on what other people like you enjoyed. It also allows the service to be easily replaced once it starts to go to shit, since there’s not a single “this is the recommendation engine”.
