BobQuasit

I reread great books frequently, good books occasionally, and mediocre to poor books not at all. But I’m lucky: although I have a great memory, I can reread a book and get as much enjoyment or more from it as the first time.

Wouldn’t that be stealing?

Reddit’s enshittification was delayed by COVID, but it happened nonetheless.

Aaaannnddd…autodeleted by bot. Links to other sites are forbidden.

Good idea! I just posted a link to r/politicalhumor.

Except communities on Discord aren’t search-engine-facing, so they’re a complete dead end. Nobody can discover useful information there unless they are already members of that particular community. It’s the “walled garden” effect.

But aren’t Squabbles and Tilde both not federated, and therefore potentially subject to changes or even an IPO by the owners?

I don’t really track my reading. Maybe I should have, but I never really saw the point. Besides, most of my reading predates the web. I’ve been reading since 1966. That said, I did a TON of book recommendations on Reddit at r/booksuggestions and r/SuggestMeABook. I ended up creating a Google doc to store the recommendations I wrote for re-use. That turned out to be a good idea; I separated the recs into genres, and polished them as I noticed mistakes or areas for improvement.

Eventually someone asked me to make that Google doc public, so I did.

Meanwhile I’m on BookWyrm. I was part of a group that left GoodReads when Amazon took over; we set up a community on Google Plus (RIP) to search for alternatives to GoodReads and Amazon (see what I mean about greedy corporations destroying one community after another?). We set up a research project to find and test replacement services. If BookWyrm had existed back then, it would have been far and away the best choice. It needs more development, but I’m willing to wait for that to happen. Meanwhile I’m having fun with it.

One thing for sure: I will NEVER trust a service owned by a plutocrat or corporation ever again.

I’m on StoryGraph too (and BookWyrm), but I’ve been burned WAY too often by profiteers. GoodReads in particular is seared into my memory; their owners lied to users to get tens of thousands of free hours of labor out of us (to “save GoodReads from Amazon”), all while they were negotiating to sell out to Amazon! And then Amazon immediately started censoring and shadowbanning reviews to suit their corporate bottom line.

I’ve seen far too many great digital communities destroyed by greedy vulture capitalists. I’m done. If a service has a single owner - plutocrat or corporation - it automatically goes to the bottom of the list. I’ll stick with BookWyrm, thanks! It may be a little light on features so far, but I’d rather put my work in there and wait for improvements.

There is a mobile app for kbin, though. It’s not great, but it exists. I’m using it right now!