[HN Gopher] Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables exist...
___________________________________________________________________
Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys
Author : buttscicles
Score : 623 points
Date : 2020-12-13 11:07 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joealcorn.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (joealcorn.co.uk)
| banach wrote:
| Time to support another reading community! Anyone got any
| suggestions?
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| I've been working on a related product (never going to be a
| complete set of books, but you can read them through the site
| because they are public domain) that you can check out in my
| profile if interested
| soft_dev_person wrote:
| I have been considering making one. Goodreads is so awful, and
| the alternatives I have found are all quite quirky or broken in
| one way or another.
|
| But having a database of "all books" is not necessarily
| trivial. Even though OpenLibrary really does provide a great
| start, the contents seem to come from Goodreads/Amazon in a lot
| of cases, and I'm concerned about the legality of making a
| commercial competitor based on it.
|
| Also, it would take a lot of time and data to get a good
| recommendation engine going. Amazon really is in the best
| position to do this. Just a shame that Goodreads get so little
| love from them.
| chucktorres wrote:
| If you embark on such a project, I would help. Drawing
| inspiration from https://www.themoviedb.org/
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Wouldn't Wikipedia have a database like that?
| gjreda wrote:
| Recently wrote some code to scrape a friend's reviews and ratings
| from Goodreads. Maybe it'll be useful to folks here:
| https://gregreda.com/2020/11/17/scraping-pages-behind-login-...
| kashyapc wrote:
| I recently discovered the https://openlibrary.org/ by The
| Internet Archive. On the face of it, their "about" page[1] sounds
| appealing (not least because it resonates with my open source
| values):
|
| _One web page for every book ever published. It 's a lofty but
| achievable goal._
|
| _To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book
| records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to
| contribute their time and effort to building the site._
|
| _To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a
| variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with
| more on the way._
|
| _Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data
| are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your
| contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a
| widget--it 's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic
| programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it
| alone!_
|
| ---
|
| They also seem to provide an API[2].
|
| [1] https://openlibrary.org/about
|
| [2] https://openlibrary.org/developers/api
| gravitas wrote:
| Sadly, the Goodreads importer appears broken - a fresh export
| just now of my Goodreads data (<100k) is failing to import with
| a generic "oops it failed" error almost immediately. :(
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/import (export)
|
| [2] https://openlibrary.org/account/import/goodreads
| simonklitj wrote:
| Not just you, gives me the same error :(
| cdrini wrote:
| Hi! I work on Open Library; sorry about that! We had a
| Python 3 migration that stirred the pot a little. We
| deployed a fix, so it should be working now!
|
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/pull/4259
| gwern wrote:
| The GR CSV export worked for me just now. Possibly an
| overload problem. Regardless, the writing is now on the wall
| for GR - get out while you still can.
| cdrini wrote:
| Hello! I work on Open Library; sorry for the bug! We recently
| deployed a big Python 3 migration that stirred the pot a
| little. The import issue should now be fixed:
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/pull/4259
| kradeelav wrote:
| Thank you so much for work you do with OL! I'm a goodreads
| librarian and would love to import my data/lists/etc over,
| but whenever I try to access
| (https://openlibrary.org/account/import/goodreads), it
| gives me a 'method not allowed' error.
|
| (granted, running on older versions of firefox, but still
| thought it might be a bug you would like to be aware of.)
| mekarpeles wrote:
| <3 Also, Open Library has a librarian program.
|
| If you use the https://openlibrary.org/volunteer page and
| click the Librarian link, this will send an email to
| Lisa, our head community librarian and we can help you
| access our slack channel and request access to our
| librarian features. We also have an optional weekly call
| for folks to raise issues and questions (e.g. "I want
| book series!")
|
| More about librarianship @ Open Library:
| https://openlibrary.org/about/lib
|
| If you hit any issues with this process, feel invited to
| send me an email to mek@archive.org.
| gravitas wrote:
| Hi! Thanks for fixing that up - I had an 18% failure rate
| (368/444) and lost the list of failures when I clicked
| away, so given this I'm now trying to flush/reset my
| library. I'd recommend (a) logging the import task to a
| logfile for the user to review failures, and (b) providing
| editing at scale (list view with checkboxes -> action), as
| I'm sitting here clicking "remove" hundreds of times to
| reset book by book. :-/
| cdrini wrote:
| Hi! I work on Open Library. Yep, Open Library has public APIs,
| and data dumps (updated monthly) of all our books/authors if
| anyone needs them.
|
| https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps
|
| The project is also open source, and you can find the code (and
| contribute!) on GitHub:
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary
| [deleted]
| fm4d wrote:
| Its nice that its opensource, backed by Internet Archive and
| the Controled Digital Lending program is cool too, but how is
| it possible that a project 14 years in development is such a
| mess? Just try and search for some popular books and see for
| yourself, the most important feature - search for books well,
| is not present. Basic features are missing, book data is often
| wrong, etc... honestly why would I join such a project instead
| of starting a new one?
| traverseda wrote:
| This book is actually a candle, I'm pretty sure:
| https://openlibrary.org/books/OL28314296M/Harry_Potter
|
| How do you even get an ISBN for a candle?
| vidarh wrote:
| You buy ISBNs in blocks or individual numbers, and then
| submit whatever data you want.
|
| There's very little control. E.g I just published a
| novel,and Amazon did not in any way validate that the ISBN
| I have them actually belonged to me - I had not yet
| registered the book data, so what I told them would not
| have matched anything they might have looked up.
|
| In this case, based on the reviews on Amazon, it looks like
| someone changed the description of an existing product, and
| that the ISBN probably actually belongs to a book.
| niea_11 wrote:
| Goodreads also has something similar :
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43056033-harry-potter
|
| There is an explanation under "About the author" section :
|
| _This "author" was created to segregate those items which
| have ISBNs but are not actually books. For more
| information, see the manual and/or start a thread in the
| Librarians Group.
|
| When an item which is not a book is imported via ISBN into
| Goodreads, it does no good to delete it: the item will only
| be re-imported as long as it remains on the feeder site.
| (Often these are book-related items which are assigned
| ISBNs by book publishers so that they can be tracked
| through their book systems.)_
| elliekelly wrote:
| I wonder who the executive was who decided to start
| assigning International Standard _Book_ Numbers to non-
| books.
|
| "Why not? What's the big deal?" said someone who has
| never worked with garbage data.
| rozab wrote:
| Big booksellers whose whole systems are built around
| ISBNs as a primary key
| factotvm wrote:
| When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a
| nail.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| "And hammer marks start to mysteriously appear
| everywhere."
| smokelegend wrote:
| "Not a bug, but a feature"
| Throwaway1771 wrote:
| Not an executive, but a middle manager etc that said:
|
| "paying $2-10k+ to add an International Standard Book
| _Accessory_ Number field to their software will never get
| approved for a bookmark that works as a compass, or a
| promotional Harry Potter bookend set. "
|
| Tough to disagree.
| ORioN63 wrote:
| History section is clear:
|
| ImportBot scrapes Amazon.com, matches product id with
| ISBN10 (which can be converted into ISBN13 without anything
| else IIRC), imports product as book.
|
| Candle: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/168298494X
| tialaramex wrote:
| > ISBN10 (which can be converted into ISBN13 without
| anything else IIRC)
|
| Yes. There clearly only needs to be one way to identify
| things, so commonly larger systems just incorporate the
| smaller ones wholesale. The 13-digit system just
| incorporates the prior 10-digit system for International
| Standard Book Numbers with a 978 prefix called "bookland"
| (most prefixes in this system are geographic, but of
| course books aren't really from one single geographic
| region, so they're from "bookland") and adds a new set of
| possible codes. It also incorporates the entire 12-digit
| American "UPC" system.
|
| Several other (less well known) systems were gobbled up
| the same way as "bookland", just allocating them
| imaginary geographic regions in the 13-digit system.
|
| There's actually a fourteen digit system, but the lead
| digit tells you about how many of something are bundled
| e.g. so a distributor can distinguish a truck full of
| Pepsi cans from just one case or a single can in terms of
| things you can order. Lead digit 0 means "single" so if
| you know the 10 digit ISBN you can not only make a
| 13-digit EAN for that, you can make the 14-digit GTIN
| that means "just one of this book" which in most cases
| would be what you want.
| [deleted]
| cdrini wrote:
| Hi! I work on Open Library. The project is entirely open
| source, with an active community, so anyone can contribute
| fixes/features on GitHub:
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary
|
| And yeah, searching needs some work! That's on my task list
| for this month. Just this Friday I spent most of my day
| working on updating our search engine, Solr, from 3.6 to 8.7
| (wip!). But search is a _BIG_ pain point. We're a small team
| with a big long list of things to do, but we are making
| progress! This year we updated to Python 3, switched most of
| our production environments to docker-based for easier
| deploys and to give open source contributors more control of
| production infra, added reading history stats for users,
| added a new interface for exploring books, worked on a novel
| recommendation system, added text selection to the online
| BookReader for public domain books, added GoodReads
| importing, grew our community, added the ability to search by
| classification, and much, much more (you can see highlights
| from our year here:
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/3891 ).
|
| There is still _definitely_ a lot to do, but I think the
| biggest reason worth using/contributing to Open Library is
| likely its open source community. Anyone can jump in and help
| make improvements to the system (as they very often do!).
| Personally, I think it's more likely that a system with a
| community will survive/flourish than one maintained by a
| single person (I also wondered whether I should just create
| my own before contributing to and now working on Open
| Library!). And there are also loads of different tasks
| associated with a site like OL, which would be impossible for
| me to do if I was going it alone.
|
| If you would be interested, checkout the GitHub repo:
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary . It's very
| active, and you can get an idea of how we work :)
| Funes- wrote:
| Upon visiting the Open Library, I'm greeted by a banner
| covering the top half of the screen, asking me for a donation
| to keep up with bandwidth costs. Isn't this platform, as well
| as the Internet Archive or Wikipedia, _exactly_ of the kind
| that would benefit from being built on top of some kind of P2P
| network? Content is generated and maintained collectively; why
| isn 't infrastructure treated the same way?
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Hi Funes,
|
| Great points here
|
| 1. The banner happens last month of the year (Wikipedia being
| the perfect analog). Yes, there are mixed feelings and it's
| not the world's best experience :P
|
| 2. Our entire data set is available to download as in bulk
| https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps because we'd love to
| see a decentralized p2p version
|
| 3. https://github.com/mouse-reeve/bookwyrm Mouse who used to
| work @ Internet Archive has a decentralized version of Open
| Library (Bookwyrm) and it's worth checking out.
|
| 4. For the last 5 or so years the Internet Archive has been
| cultivating a dweb/dapp community and integrating with IIIF,
| Dat, IPFS, gun, bittorent, webtorrents, and others and
| hosting regular summits and meetups
| https://blog.archive.org/2018/07/21/decentralized-web-faq/
|
| 5. The wayback machine is an interesting case study: it turns
| out, incentive structures (even things like FIL/filecoin)
| haven't been able to perfectly crack the nut on getting folks
| interested _enough_ to preserve the whole wayback machine.
| There 's petabytes of material and there's a powerlaw about
| what people care about today. Internet Archive realized what
| we care about today may not be the same as tomorrow, and so
| there's a cost eaten (the incentive comes from economies of
| scale generated by intrinsic desire rather than $). And in a
| way, this centralized solution (economies of scale) IS the
| solution a community came up with. It has flaws and
| advantages (tradeoffs), such as centralized points of
| failure, and I think the archive would be (and has been)
| ecstatic to explore improving these opportunities.
| philipn wrote:
| Aaron Swartz actually built the original version of the Open
| Library site.
| khalilravanna wrote:
| Anyone know of a project like this for video games? I got a
| spreadsheet I use to organize games I've played/am going to
| play and always looking for an easier way to get metadata. I
| was also looking at building something like Goodreads for video
| games and similarly that data would have been great.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| What about https://videogamegeek.com/ ?
| Cyph0n wrote:
| I'm surprised I've never heard of this. Thanks for sharing.
| jacobobryant wrote:
| also rawg.io's api. I've used them in the past.
| desertcroc wrote:
| Have a look at grouvee. I've been using it for quite a while
| now and I believe is basically donationware.
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| https://www.igdb.com/ is the one! I do the same thing. I've
| got a great process built on Airtable + IGDB.
| khalilravanna wrote:
| Operated by Twitch nice. Interesting they have a "Time To
| Beat" field but it's not really populated. I also use
| Airtable and was thinking of writing a Zapier hook to
| scrape HowLongToBeat.com for this info. It's one of my
| favorite stats to help prioritize what game to play next. I
| can't be dumping 100 hours into JRPGs back to back lol.
| corobo wrote:
| Depends on your use case but yes:
| https://www.giantbomb.com/api/
| activatedgeek wrote:
| Since the past few months I have been searching for a Goodreads
| alternative. Something that only keeps my books. I don't care
| about the social features that much. And I think this is it. I
| am going to donate a tiny bit right away!
|
| Although, I just tried importing my Goodreads export into Open
| Library and I get the following "Internal Error":
|
| > Hmm... > Sorry. There seems to be a problem with what you
| were just looking at. > We've noted the error xxxx-xx-xx/yyyyyy
| and will look into it as soon as possible. Head for home?
|
| Anyone else facing this issue?
| cdrini wrote:
| Hi! I work on Open Library; sorry for the issue! We recently
| had a big python 3 migration. Chris/Aaron just fixed + tested
| it, and I just deployed it to production, so it should be
| working now!
|
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/pull/4259
| activatedgeek wrote:
| Appreciate it!
|
| I can confirm it works with at least my import.
|
| Edit: Alas, some errors regarding "Book not in collection"
| and "No ISBN". But I think I can probably see if there is a
| way to contribute those books to the repository.
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Even opening an issue for this would be a massive help:
|
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new
| /ch...
|
| The importer is a new project (as of August this year)
| and I think there's a lot of opportunity for improving it
| (including importing missing records on demand).
|
| Other hat tips: I also want to call out the great work of
| https://inventaire.io, another great project in the space
| which uses wikidata, as they also have a goodreads import
| which we're learning from. Another project I'm excited
| about (which has goodreads import) is
| beta.thestorygraph.com. Not sure the status of its source
| code but I heard an interview from the founder and she
| and her work so far seems great.
| sdoering wrote:
| As one can for example add Audible podcasts as books in
| GR I can imagine this leading to importer errors as well
| as they necessarily don't need to have an ISBN.
| mekarpeles wrote:
| This is right.
|
| Books pre ~1973 don't have ISBN. And goodreads covers far
| more material than just modern material.
|
| The current Goodreads importer makes a big/unfortunate
| tradeoff of trying to have something which works for the
| majority of material on people's goodreads lists.
|
| It doesn't preclude further efforts -- Open Library knows
| about millions of books that don't have ISBN. So if
| anyone wants to help us improve our importer (or at least
| register their interest by creating an issue which calls
| out what other identifiers should be considered -- e.g.
| LOC, etc) that would be very helpful.
|
| # To open an issue:
|
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new
| /ch...
|
| # Here's the code for the importer
|
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/blob/892ad
| ebb...
| sdoering wrote:
| Thanks a lot. I learned something today. I knew of the
| ISBN issue, but didn't think of it.
|
| Having some free time on my hands I will take a look in
| the next few days. Looking for an alternative to GR and
| for something that tickles my interests.
|
| Python, Search and literature. And open source.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Have you tried Library Thing?
|
| https://www.librarything.com/
| jiofih wrote:
| Adding your data to yet another proprietary archive doesn't
| sound like much of a solution..
| activatedgeek wrote:
| I don't think I am particularly worried about a
| proprietary solution. If I am putting my preferences in
| the public, pretty sure I am giving up on some dimension
| of privacy. With books at least, it doesn't seem so
| concerning as long as the recommendations don't suck too
| much (I don't particularly rely on recommendations that
| much though). But of course, you never know!
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| You might wish to review their Privacy policy, which
| inspires more confidence than Goodreads:
|
| https://www.librarything.com/privacy
|
| The site's also been around since 2005, so, that speaks
| well to both its longevity and its integrity. Of course,
| that's not to say they couldn't be acquired tomorrow and
| paywalled, but I think it unlikely.
| activatedgeek wrote:
| Just tried this out. Quite a large community, so I'm
| assuming it is a well fed machinery. The interface is
| outdated. Nevertheless, the website does its job quite
| well. I am happy I found this. Thanks!
|
| ...And they even have an API!
| waterfowl wrote:
| I recently "kondoed" my books down to like ~2xx total
| volumes and once I had them all organized it only took me
| an hour or so to scan all of them into the LT iOS app.
| Very few wouldn't scan but those were mostly findable by
| manually searching. Having an up to date list of all my
| books is pretty satisfying and LT seems to have a decent
| reputation in the serious-about-books-online community.
| Even inspired me to schlep into the office to catalogue
| my work related collection.
|
| Made me realize how many booksellers(especially used) put
| proprietary barcode stickers on top of the 'actual'
| barcode stickers.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Should this be a separate HN post?
| jabo wrote:
| Openlibrary looks pretty awesome. Thank you for sharing!
|
| Would anyone be interested in having an instant search
| experience for this books dataset, like the one I built for the
| 2M recipes database posted on HN earlier this week:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25365397
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Jabo, please also help us @ openlibrary improve our search.
| @cdrini is the lead on our solr efforts and we could really
| benefit from teaming with someone who is really passionate
| about search. If you have questions about using our data,
| please send over a message and I'm happy to help:
| mek@archive.org
| jabo wrote:
| Happy to! Sent you a DM on Twitter, but I'll email you
| shortly.
| obviyus wrote:
| That would be amazing!
| jabo wrote:
| Alright! A handful of upvotes in addition to a comment. I'm
| on it! I'll whip something up and report back in a few
| hours.
| jabo wrote:
| Looks like it's going to be a while before I can download
| the dataset. Seems to be pretty slow even when
| downloading on EC2 with a 10Gpbs connection.
| ol_dump_latest.txt.gz 0%[
| ] 28.73M 115KB/s eta 21h 54m
| dmje wrote:
| Be great to see your search on there. I was admiring the
| speed and accuracy on the post you put on the other
| day...
| jabo wrote:
| Thank you! Working on it as we speak.
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Thank you buttscicles (hard saying that with a straight face)
| for OP'ing this thread and to Joe Alcorn for the amazing
| original article.
|
| I haven't shared this yet -- it's more for the community, but
| I've tried to address various questions from the community and
| distill answers + resources for Open Library here:
|
| https://blog.openlibrary.org/2020/12/13/importing-your-goodr...
|
| Tried my best to include others players in the space (wikidata,
| inventaire, bookbrainz, worldcat, bookwyrm) who are doing great
| work and pay respects to readng, storygraph and other
| innovative services which are breaking onto the scene.
| bbkane wrote:
| I just signed up for this and imported my GoodReads csv export.
| the csv has 90ish rows and I was only able to import 60ish
| rows.
|
| I get that Open Library doesn't have as much data as GoodReads,
| but I wish it would show me the data it couldn't import so I
| could add it manually to Open Library's data store.
|
| Nevertheless, I love the idea and I'll be opening bug reports
| and maybe code contributions if something looks easy enough.
| mekarpeles wrote:
| bbkane, this is a great idea (identifying which books didn't
| import). If you'd be so kind as to help, please open a
| feature request for this!
|
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new/ch.
| ..
|
| If you tag @tabshaikh who helped implement the importer and
| me @mekarpeles we can make sure it gets triaged and tagged
| correctly this week :)
| acomjean wrote:
| Doesn't the library of Congress in the US issue ISBN numbers
| for each book published. there must be a public listing of
| those.
|
| After some looking, there are Some private databases with
| millions of # but no official site. Eg
|
| https://isbndb.com/isbn-database
| [deleted]
| pmyteh wrote:
| No. ISBNs are issued by publishers, from delegated blocks,
| and there's no unified listing.
|
| For books in the collections of large libraries (like the
| LoC) there will be a public catalogue entry with the ISBN
| attached, but they don't assign it.
|
| There were also a lot of books published before ISBNs were
| created, and not every book has an ISBN attached even to this
| day.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Also: ISBNs often change when publishers are bought, split,
| sold, merged etc.
| bloak wrote:
| That is all correct. Another consideration: occasionally an
| incompetent publisher puts the same ISBN on two unrelated
| editions. A bibliographer might just carefully record
| what's printed on the book, but many users of ISBNs won't
| be at all happy with that "solution".
| efreak wrote:
| I've seen a number of books, mostly children's books from
| scholastic, with different editions (different art,
| copyright, etc) that have the same ISBN number. I've
| since removed most duplicate books from my collection,
| but I had found a bunch when I last sorted my books;
| Maniac Magee is the only one I can remember by title.
| More annoying was the book with a CD attached to the
| front, that caused the finish to peel off when the CD was
| removed (the CD contained a non-working installer for a
| screensaver that, when extracted using other tools, also
| didn't work).
| mekarpeles wrote:
| For anyone who wishes Open Library was even better, please join
| one of our weekly community calls @ 11:30am Pacific.
|
| For an invite, please send me an email at mek@archive.org or go
| to: https://openlibrary.org/volunteer
|
| # APIs & Data Dumps
|
| - https://openlibrary.org/developers/api
|
| - https://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api/books
|
| - https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps monthly data dumps
| for if you need bulk access and the APIs are not enough.
|
| # Spread the word
|
| Also, if you want to help raise awareness of this resource,
| please help us get the word out on twitter!
|
| 1. https://twitter.com/openlibrary/status/1338185940469051392
|
| 2. https://twitter.com/openlibrary/status/1338186553915367425
|
| # Issues
|
| Thank you all for helping us discover some issues with our
| goodreads importer and search (recently migrated to Python3 +
| thanks @cdrini et al for these fast bug fixes! If you notice an
| problem, please help open an issue here:
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/new/ch...
|
| # Learn More
|
| - https://archive.org/details/openlibrary-
| tour-2020/openlibrar... if you want to learn more about Open
| Library, here's a short intro vid.
|
| - https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary if you want to
| follow on github.
| bloak wrote:
| I noticed that two authors with the same name are conflated.
| But if I try to edit any of the editions involved, the
| interface won't let me either modify or delete an existing
| author nor even add a new author using the author ID rather
| than the author's name. What should I do to sort this out?
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Howdy bloak,
|
| Many of our librarian processes & FAQs are detailed here:
| https://openlibrary.org/librarians
|
| Most data on Open Library is publicly editable by members.
| In this case, author merging is a capability that only
| folks who have been added to our Librarians usergroup can
| access because the process of reverting an accidental merge
| is quite time consuming (and so we have some training in
| place).
|
| If you tweet @ our lead community librarian
| (http://twitter.com/seabelis) she can likely help you make
| this fix! Also, if you're interested in helping us make
| changes like this, we can invite you to our slack channel
| :)
| bloak wrote:
| Thanks, but what I'm trying to do is split authors ...
| and I think I've worked out how to do it. The trick is to
| make sure you're looking at the "work" rather than the
| "edition", because when you're looking at the "edition"
| the author is immutable.
| rikroots wrote:
| Hi, Mek. Awesome project!
|
| How do I go about claiming my author page? The current book
| listed there has been officially "retired" for over a decade
| now, and I have plenty of other books that I'd be happy to
| add.
|
| https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2965893A/Rik_Roots
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Howdy rikroots! Thanks for this kind message, we're really
| excited about designing a way to help authors claim their
| pages. It's not a feature our current author pages have
| _yet_.
|
| As a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, having a
| trusted catalog is pretty paramount to what we're trying to
| accomplish and Aaron Swartz's original dream for an Open
| Library.
|
| I've created an issue for this feature (as it's something
| we've discussed doing for a while). I'll also be adding
| this to our upcoming Tuesday 2021 roadmap discussion.
|
| https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/4263
|
| Thanks for raising this
| bborud wrote:
| This is actually very cool.
|
| Dissatisfied with how slow and clunky Goodreads is I actually
| thought about making my own (albeit much simpler) version of
| Goodreads to keep track of my reading habits. I often dig
| through Goodreads to find books or authors I can't remember the
| names of -- and Goodreads isn't great for that.
|
| Open Library actually provides the missing piece. The fact that
| they offer bulk downloads also makes it easier to be a good
| internet citizen and not send tons of API traffic their way.
|
| Looks like I'll have to set up a monthly donation. I'd really
| like see openlibrary succeed.
| drusepth wrote:
| I built a private Goodreads "competitor" for friends (with
| groups and book clubs and whatnot) using the Open Library data
| dumps for book/author/publisher data (since GR APIs were too
| restrictive in how they could be used). They're great, easy to
| use, and the site behind them looks like it's run well and
| stable (edit: didn't realize they're under Internet Archive!).
| Would definitely recommend them as an alternative.
| throw0101a wrote:
| See also WorldCat:
|
| > _WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of
| 17,900 libraries in 123 countries and territories[4] that
| participate in the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by
| OCLC, Inc.[5] The subscribing member libraries collectively
| maintain WorldCat 's database, the world's largest
| bibliographic database.[6]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldCat
|
| * https://www.worldcat.org
| OOPMan wrote:
| I used the Goodreads API a few years back. It was awful.
| doublejay1999 wrote:
| > open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support
| independent businesses
|
| Except these things began as hobbies before business became
| involved at all.
|
| It's a message board for book lovers ffs, pre web people used to
| build things themselves, at their own expense, just for fun.
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| Based on the quality of MusicBrainz [1], I thought that
| BookBrainz [2] could be a good alternative, but unfortunately it
| looks rather incomplete.
|
| [1] https://musicbrainz.org [2] https://bookbrainz.org/
| dpeck wrote:
| Remember those few years from around 2008 to 2013 or so when open
| APIs were cool, mashups of different services were everywhere,
| the web felt just a bit younger and more carefree, and people
| didn't immediately sneer when they learned that you were a
| software developer?
|
| Those were good times.
| spideymans wrote:
| >people didn't immediately sneer when they learned that you
| were a software developer?
|
| People sneer now?
| dpeck wrote:
| There's quite a bit of animosity directed at various tech
| companies from people all over the political spectrum. That
| is definitely bleeding over into the professional generally.
| mikejethi wrote:
| _The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model.
| For this to happen people are going to have to open their
| wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent
| businesses._
|
| I hope it does! I'm banking on it too for my project.
| newbie578 wrote:
| This is such an interesting topic to discuss. The book industry
| by itself is somewhat in a state of limbo.
|
| Goodreads is basically the only major social network for
| bookworms, yet the majority of its users hate it (including me),
| but are forced to use it to their chagrin.
|
| You would think that would make the market ripe for a disruptor
| to arrive and topple the incumbent leader, yet each year nothing
| happens.
|
| I personally have also thought of making a new rival product, but
| when you do the math on the market potential and the financial
| benefits, I just don't see a viable way.
|
| People who read books, even if they read them every day, won't
| use your social network each day since books by themselves are
| the type of content which is consumed the longest (compared to a
| movie, tv show, song, or video game).
|
| So you have a social network where users come back on a whim,
| even if you read like a maniac and try to read one book per week
| (I tried it one year, it was crazy, you are basically spending
| all your free time reading), even then users wouldn't use your
| app each day, but perhaps once or twice a week, and who knows how
| much time would the average session last?
|
| To make things worse, you could maybe even get away with users
| using your app once a week if you have a big enough market (user
| base), but the number of book readers is not that great
| (especially compared to other media consumption)... The median
| American reads 4 books a year [1], or simply put, one book in
| three months.
|
| So you have a social network where users don't need to use it
| often and there aren't a lot of users, that already spells
| trouble, but there is another major issue.
|
| You could even succeed with those issues if you had a highly
| commoditized product to advertise, let's say a social network for
| yacht lovers, even if you have a small number of users and they
| do not use it much, you can still manage to succeed with it,
| since if you advertise yachts to potential yacht owners, you have
| a very valuable marketing channel which is worth quite an amount
| to the right people.
|
| You can see where I am going with this, just compare a 5%
| commission on a yacht, vs a 5% commission on a book...
| Unfortunately books are not so highly valued (in monetary terms)
| nor sought after.
|
| To sum up, you have a social network where users don't spend a
| lot of time, you don't have a lot of users and it is centered
| around a low profit product... Of course Goodreads has no
| competition, no sane person would touch that market with a ten
| foot pole.
|
| Yet, to quote George Bernard Shaw, "all progress depends on the
| unreasonable man". If someone manages to solve this problem and
| find a profitable way to survive, I would not be surprised to see
| Goodreads fall.
|
| I even thought of contacting Scribd to work with them, since I
| think they might have the best shot currently to position
| themselves as market leaders. They have an excellent product
| (Netflix for books) and already have a well sized user base.
| Would be interesting to see them expand and also became a social
| network for book lovers.
|
| [1] - https://www.bustle.com/p/how-many-books-did-the-average-
| amer...
|
| [2] - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-
| man-a...
| aww_dang wrote:
| Firstly, I am interested to know your pain points in using
| GoodReads. What are the features you would add or change? For
| me it is simply user book reviews and summaries. My
| expectations are limited, so I don't see what you see.
|
| I believe that Amazon owns GoodReads. There's a natural
| conflict of interest, but at the end of the day sales are
| sales.
|
| Last I heard, commissions for Amazon affiliates were not only
| for the linked item. For example, if you link them to the book,
| but they go on to buy a toaster oven, you'll receive a
| commission for the entire purchase.
|
| If you think more user engagement is necessary, that's fine.
| Strategies could be developed to drive more engagement.
|
| If the problems you see in the site are shared by others, I
| think you could have something viable. Please don't let a
| can't-do attitude stop you from experimenting. Web development
| is an open landscape for adventurers.
| soft_dev_person wrote:
| I've been thinking about this too. I think a subscription
| service could work, but have no idea how many would pay to
| escape Goodreads, or how much.
| newbie578 wrote:
| I thought of that also, but don't know really any social
| networks where users pay to be a member? And I don't see a
| growth potential if users have to pay, especially if you want
| users from Africa or India.
|
| That is why I think Scribd has a chance, users pay for book
| rentals, yet they are also part of the social network.
| prepend wrote:
| I think the goal shouldn't be a social network, but just shared
| libraries with markup. Like an infinite hallway with doors that
| each open to the library of every person. I use goodreads for
| tracking my library and browsing others libraries.
|
| I think a site trying to make me "interact daily" about books
| would suck. But I do want a way to use reading and collection
| information of others to help me pick my own books.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yes, and these libraries should be hosted on people's own
| websites.
| adolph wrote:
| That can recognize one another's collections and route
| search queries among them for aggregating personal
| commentaries and cross collection borrow/buy.
| adolph wrote:
| Maybe a scaled down version of this:
| https://www.folio.org/about/
|
| _The FOLIO project aims to facilitate a sustainable,
| community-driven collaboration around the creation of a
| modern technology ecosystem that empowers libraries through
| open source applications to manage library resources and
| expand library value._
| aminozuur wrote:
| Goodreads has not changed in 10 years. See comparison pic of 2010
| vs 2020: https://twitter.com/aminozuur/status/1338037049941757953
|
| It's sad that Goodreads way forward is to stifle competition,
| rather than innovate.
| bzb6 wrote:
| Things don't need to change constantly. If it works it must be
| left as it is.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Goodreads has a nice UX, though. The site linked to by the OP
| is painful to use.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| I don't mind no changes to the UI at all. The Goodreads UI is
| information-dense and very powerful to use on a desktop/laptop.
| Alternatives, like the Readng site linked to in the posted
| article, are often examples of that annoying trend in web
| design UI where the limitations of mobile-phone touchscreens
| are forced on all users.
|
| Where Goodreads has really failed to change is something not
| easily visible in pithy screenshots: there are a lot of bugs
| and missing functionality with regard to book metadata, but
| these flaws are something you don't quite grasp unless you
| become a Goodreads Librarian.
| scoot_718 wrote:
| Goodreads is complete garbage, they can't even sort a list of
| ratings properly.
| lars512 wrote:
| I find their poor recommendations the most obvious issue here.
| They have so, so much reading data on me, even a massive list
| of books I'm interested in, but they are still so off.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| They're probably using Amazon's recommendation system which -
| at least in my experience - is pretty terrible with books. It
| might just be because I'm in the category of people who
| constantly get recommendations to buy things I've just bought
| and whatever puts me in that category stops them being able
| to make interesting recommendations, but it's always pretty
| naff. I think the only good book recommendations I get from
| Amazon are authors I've specifically followed, or the monthly
| free early read choices which I don't think are actually
| targeted at all
| efdee wrote:
| Not changed? I mean, those two screenshots kind of look
| similar, but are still totally different to me.
| fireattack wrote:
| This comparison shows nothing but they have a consistent UI,
| which probably isn't a bad thing to begin with.
|
| And even that is a stretch, you can see there are plenty of
| adjustments in the layout, and the right one looks fine by
| today's standard.
| aminozuur wrote:
| "the right one looks fine by today's standard"
|
| I disagree. It might be subjective, or a matter of taste.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Does anybody know what these Goodreads APIs that are being
| deprecated actually are?
|
| I'm struggling to imagine what they could be; Goodreads doesnt
| exactly have much data that's really useful.
| sradman wrote:
| https://www.goodreads.com/api
| swilk001 wrote:
| My whole app depends on the Goodreads API so I have to shut it
| down.
|
| https://blog.stephanieawilkinson.com/posts/2020-12-10-yonder...
| vuciv1 wrote:
| I'm sorry. that's awful. if you plan to start a new one, let me
| know I'd love to check it out.
|
| i was just planning on making one, but that dream is dead now
| judge2020 wrote:
| A lot of others in this thread have mentioned the API being
| neglected for a long time, did this impact your app?
| BigBalli wrote:
| Truly a bummer although Goodreads was never truly "happy" with
| third party. I created https://MyBookList.club and messed around
| with many book providers, GR was always last.. only strength is
| its large user base.
| vuciv1 wrote:
| damn, this is really disappointing. I use Goodreads, Letterboxd,
| and GG pretty frequently and wanted to use the three APIs to just
| have all these sites' functionalities in one place.
|
| Guess it won't be happening now...
| padraigf wrote:
| I'd just started a hobby project to use the Goodreads API for
| book recommendations. That's not going to happen now.
|
| I feel bad for people who put more work than I did into using the
| API. It seems kind of short-sighted to me, I'd have thought
| anything promoting book-reading would be good for
| Amazon/goodreads.
|
| Hopefully it's the catalyst for a good alternative to appear. I
| know developers weren't happy with the API, or users with the
| site in general.
| stakkur wrote:
| Amazon owns Goodreads. Goodreads is nothing but a sales funnel,
| and Amazon doesn't like public APIs to their data.
| dash2 wrote:
| Key para:
|
| The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. For
| this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets,
| pay for the services they use, and support independent
| businesses. That's how we build a web where indies can thrive -
| one that's more village centre than financial centre. I think the
| shift is underway.
|
| True/false?
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model.
|
| Is the Web a business model?
|
| The Web really is machines serving HTML, JSON, XML,... over
| HTTP/HTTPS across physical connections. There are several ways
| of looking at this, but often enough the debate gets reduced
| into a dichotomy.
|
| I'll put this into two simplified extremes.
|
| The Web is a shared infrastructure seen as a "public commons".
| You can access that infrastructure, request/receive bits and
| bytes from other machines for free and if you want to host
| content yourself, you connect your own machine to that
| infrastructure and you share content via your own machine for
| free. You carry the costs of the usage of the infrastructure
| yourself, regardless of the direction of data traffic across
| the network.
|
| The Web and it's infrastructure are commodities. Storage,
| maintenance, bandwidth,... are expenses that should be
| offloaded. The main goal of hosting and making information
| available on the Web is to, either directly or indirectly, make
| a marginal profit. You pay for the privilege of accessing
| someone else's machine to download data, and you get paid by
| those who want to gain access to information you host on your
| own machine.
|
| The problem with the statement above is that it implies that
| both extremes are mutually exclusive, and only the latter one
| is viable.
|
| This is false.
|
| The Web is ultimately a decentralized network which is build on
| top of intentions and goals of humans. And those intentions and
| goals can be wildly differing. There are parts of the Web that
| operate according to the former idea, and there are parts that
| operate according to the latter. Both exist, and there's a
| spectrum in between.
|
| In the analogue world, the same notion translates into private
| businesses, non-profits, cooperations, community initiatives,
| charities, public initiatives and so on.
|
| Goodreads choosing to close down it's public API is just one
| case choosing to move towards one side of the spectrum. It's by
| no means an indication that the entirety of the Web and - more
| specifically - it's denizens decide to move towards that side.
|
| That spectrum does emerge based on laws of economics, though.
|
| Goodreads has always been a private business. public API's of
| private businesses are never truly "Public". They are either a
| courtesy or a business investment. And they will step away from
| such courtesy if the costs outstrip the benefits.
|
| The Web isn't quite the same as public space though - parks,
| beaches, forests, streets, grasslands,... - because the vast
| amount of infrastructure is privately owned. In that regard,
| the notion of "The Web is a Commons" is only true to the extent
| that private people are willing to accept and support that
| idea, and are willing to carry a shared part of the costs.
|
| It's that last part which makes all the difference. Operating a
| basic website with a limited number of visitors comes at a low
| cost, and so one could operate a small Goodreads like website
| with a niche of books. There are plenty of examples of people
| keeping freely accessible blogs and the like with their own
| book reviews.
|
| Goodreads tries to turn that idea into a business model. The
| intention of generating a profit is very distinct in that
| regard. However, not only is it hard to sell the opinions of
| other people, it's even harder if costs generated by trying to
| cater to an audience of millions outstrip the revenue
| generated.
|
| The Web isn't financial centre. Just like London nor New York
| aren't representative as to the entirety of human society. Big
| businesses are - ultimately - only a part of the Web, just as
| much as they are only a part of society. And if their business
| models fail to keep them operational, the Web, and society,
| will, ultimately, churn on without them.
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| That said, the there is a tilt towards the second idea in
| some areas where perhaps it would be prudent of us to invest
| more in the public space model, or in other ways shape things
| more to our liking.
|
| As the infrastructure changes the dominating idea shapes it.
|
| As an example there used to be (and stills is, but the change
| is evident) vendors selling music recordings. Vinyl, tape,
| cd. The market traded in tangible artifact that could change
| owner, could be copied (legally or not) could be put in a
| library and lent out.
|
| In Sweden we even pay a special copy compensation tax when
| buying any device with storage capacity to tunnel some money
| towards "content creators" in support of this distribution
| form.
|
| However as the technology has shifted, allowing for direct
| streaming, the trading of artifacts has disappeared. The laws
| and economic realities now promote a market with fewer
| vendors offering only a limited catalogue of recordings, and
| only in a form that can never leave their control
| effectively.
|
| This is only an example. And I think this particular one is
| mostly about reviewing the legal landscape.
|
| Another example might be how protocols like RSS, XMPP, SMTP
| was used for interoperability and allow different vendors to
| offer compatible services. As things shift, this time perhaps
| more due to economic realities, the dominating tendency is
| still to erode interoperability and dominating players shape
| the technology towards their more siloed reality. Perhaps we
| need more tax funded players, (public service?), simply
| competing and collaborating to tilt things back again.
| wojciii wrote:
| I want to pay for stuff that I want to read/consume. The
| problem is that no one implemented micro payments and wants me
| to pay some amount every month for crap that I don't want
| (Netflix, spotify, Disney, newspapers). This needs to end
| first.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I used Flattr, but they have now discontinued their browser
| extension... :(
| wojciii wrote:
| I think that the traditional card/banking companies who
| handle transactions are probable stopping any innovation in
| this area. They have a working model and no reason for
| innovation if it works. The newspapers and traditional
| banking are slowly bleeding/dying here in DK so perhaps
| they need to die off before something new can take their
| place.
| chippy wrote:
| Isn't Goodreads primarily a community? Are there many pay-to-
| enter community websites?
| iamben wrote:
| Lots - you just have to figure that the value you get is
| worth the price of entry. Usually it's an "I'm going to learn
| something, or learn from people enough that will cover the
| cost of community" or an "I'm going to satisfy a personal
| need" (be that meditating, new recipes, or getting tied up
| and whipped).
| _Understated_ wrote:
| > The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model.
|
| I've said it many times before but it's worth repeating...
|
| The Internet survived just fine before all the ads and tracking
| and it will survive fine without it.
| josteink wrote:
| Back then the internet was created and run by enthusiasts
| which passionately wanted to share and build.
|
| Today it's run by people, standing on their shoulders, whose
| dominant motivation is making money or how to "capitalise" on
| something, something which they have no fundamental interests
| or passion for.
|
| Obviously the outcome is going to be different.
| pbronez wrote:
| I'm certainly sympathetic to this idea. The marginal cost to
| serve an HTTP request is vanishingly small, but the fixed costs
| to develop the application itself (mostly labor) is pretty
| high. That means your cost per user is pretty high at first,
| since all that work supports a handful of people. You seek more
| users to amortize costs further, and it works until you start
| accumulating enough HTTP requests and user data that costs
| start to climb again. And of course more users means more use
| cases and user agents, which require ongoing maintenance
| investments.
|
| The whole process doesn't have to be expensive, but it's
| certainly not free. You can build very cool stuff and give it
| away for free, but sustainability and scalability ultimately
| require revenue. The magic thing about a successful business is
| the ability to cover execution costs, support the development
| team, and still leave value on the table for users.
|
| I think digital services have drastically different economics
| depending on (1) how adding a NEW user changes the value
| proposition for EXISTING users, and (2) something like the
| user's start up/discovery cost relative to lifetime value
|
| A direct payment model makes sense when your users' value is
| independent from the size of the user base (assuming
| performance scales at least linearly). These services can
| tolerate moderate startup/discovery costs. For critical
| enterprise services, startup costs can be high because the
| lifetime value is still much larger.
|
| If value scales with the user base, as in a social network like
| good reads, then startup/discovery cost must be pushed to zero
| to grow the user base as quickly as possible. A paywall slows
| user base growth and reduces value for those users that
| actually choose to pay.
|
| So far, advertising is the only known way to monetize (and thus
| sustain) a digital service while maintaining near-zero
| startup/discovery costs for individual users. Micropayments,
| even with good UX and low fees, increase joining costs relative
| to advertising. Thus they will reduce the value of the service
| to paying users if value scales with user base size, but would
| benefit services where value is independent of user base size.
|
| Federation is maybe the best way out of this dilemma IMHO. The
| value of the overall network grows with the user base, so
| adding new federation partners should be near-free. Each
| instance is small relative to the network as a whole, and thus
| can focus on individual user value rather than growing the
| network, which means it can charge users directly. This is why
| you're willing to buy a great Twitter or Reddit client app, but
| would never pay for a Twitter or Reddit subscription. (Yes I
| know those are centralized services, but the model holds if you
| look at the business relationships).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Ideally, "book reviews" would be a semantic web category,
| which a search engine could fetch from personal websites.
| (Note that this already kind of works with current search
| engines.) But the incentives were never really aligned for
| that...
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Advertising is just too lucrative for them - they'll still do
| it even if we end up paying subscriptions. For example, look at
| the New York Times; you're still served ads with a paying
| subscription.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| This kind of service is pretty trivial, you can run it for
| cents per user.
|
| If you allow the web to move to a model where you have to pay
| dollars for a service worth cents it turns into the same kind
| of market as the mobile phone operators market charging fees
| for sms messages: a total rip off.
|
| Why does this needs to be a business anyway? The only reason is
| because it can be.
| downrightmike wrote:
| False, one of the big players will either rip them
| off(snapchat) or force them into a buyout by under cutting them
| (diapers.com)
| wpietri wrote:
| I think it's a nice idea, and I love the spirit of it. That's
| certainly how I try to live. I have a lot of small
| subscriptions, and my Patreon bill is over $100/month.
|
| But I think individual action isn't sufficient to get us over
| the hump. There are just too many things we use on a daily
| basis, and often those things use things that use things.
| "Free" is an illusion, but it's an illusion with a very low
| cognitive load. Manually supporting each and every thing I
| appreciate at the right level is a complex and taxing process.
| In practice, I'm sure I miss a lot.
|
| In the physical world, we have some solutions for this. I don't
| have to subscribe to each park I use. I don't have to kick in
| for each sidewalk tree I walk by. I live in a neighborhood with
| a lot of street and alley murals, all community supported in
| various ways. I think the next step forward for the web
| involves finding ways for collective action with low individual
| cognitive load. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could be better
| than what we have now.
| Privacy846 wrote:
| I choose the third value, "ridiculous premise". People love to
| craw about how "you are the product" because they don't pay for
| some service. Well, physical newspapers have been advertiser-
| funded for a long time now, even though people still pay for
| them. Chomsky writes in Necessary Illusions that newspapers
| sell the eyeballs of the readers to advertisers and that that
| in turn deeply affects what is printed. That book was published
| in 1989.
|
| As far as the media is concerned, everyone here under the age
| of sixty have always been the product. And it's deeply naive
| and idealistic to think that "paying for their services"--how
| will they do that? Oh well--will change something which is now
| completely fundamental to media as we know it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Where we are now is the best it's going to get.
|
| Switching away from ads will feel good until some do-nothing
| decides they'll hit their bonus targets by re-introducing ads
| in addition to the subscriptions.
|
| This has happened many times. It's obviously going to happen
| again.
|
| You do not want to normalize subscriptions for every old Web
| service, trust me.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| I don't know if its true but I think its a valid perspective
| and so there's likely some truth there.
|
| People don't want to pay for content. If people pay for content
| and feel ripped off, they can ask for a refund. Then cheaters
| can pay to access the content then ask for their money back if
| they want to. This puts the content provider in a bad position.
|
| If people pay for content, then they want to have that content
| themselves forever. In some sense, this is fair. But then they
| want to share that content with others. Then the other
| person/people don't need to pay. Now you have a problem where
| everyone can just get the content when one person has paid for
| it. This is a bad dilemma where content providers and consumers
| both seem to have a good case.
|
| Since neither pay model seems to work, companies just show ads.
| Then people ignore ads, so the ad companies make them more
| attention-grabbing and intrusively targeted. So people use
| reader mode and ad blockers. Now no one is looking at the ads
| that pay for the content.
|
| I wish I knew the answer.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'd say piracy like you are saying is not even a blib on the
| radar. Steam, Netflix and Spotify have proven this.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| I think it depends on the genre. Sci-Hub is hugely popular
| [0] among academics and the academic publishers allege that
| they are missing out on a lot of money because of it (Can't
| find the source now).
|
| [0] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/sci-
| hub-us...
| rowanG077 wrote:
| That's a completely different game. Academic publisher
| have little value add. They essentially steal and make
| money of the work of scientist while the scientist
| themselves have to pay them. This is not comparable to
| piracy in the consumer sense.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| I'm not assigning any moral weight to them; just
| observing the basic facts as they result to publishing.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's not about anything moral. It's about a qualitative
| difference between. The second one should even be called
| piracy.
| randomchars wrote:
| Sadly I don't think the majority of the people are willing to
| pay. Getting things for "free" is so ingrained into how the web
| is, that it's too big of a paradigm shift now.
| oefrha wrote:
| The web was built to facilitate the exchange of knowledge. Ad-
| sponsored content, despite shortcomings, has so far kept
| textual content mostly free of charge (talking about content
| that wouldn't exist by voluntary contribution here). I fear
| this push for paywalls is merely going to further disadvantage
| poor people and people in developing countries who can't easily
| hook into whatever payment scheme that is required.
|
| No, I don't have a great solution other than the status quo.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| True, but I don't think the shift is underway.
|
| I think in order for this to happen, there's going to have to
| be better payment models than $4-9 a month subscriptions.
| canofbars wrote:
| Agreed. There are so many services I hardly use but would
| happily pay $5-10/year for but their paid services are
| targeted only at the power users who are happy to pay
| $10/month for.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| > For this to happen people are going to have to open their
| wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent
| businesses.
|
| Yes but to be frank if I had to pay for everything I use I
| would go broke.
|
| We're not all on SV salaries here. I have about 100EUR of
| disposable income per month. If I put it on online things, it
| means I would have to stay at home (I mean pre or post pandemic
| times).
| est31 wrote:
| The ad revenue Google makes depends on many factors but also
| on the disposable income. If you only make EUR12k per year,
| you won't bring them the same revenue as someone making
| EUR120k.
| [deleted]
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| The problem is, companies overcharge in dollars and
| undercharge in ads. Your visit to a website may make that
| site, say, $0.1 in ads. Would you pay $0.1 per day? Of course
| you would. But when they add a paid ad-free option? It's more
| like $1 a day. They're greedy.
| foota wrote:
| I think part of this is about an inability to market
| discriminate effectively. Some people will likely make the
| website much more money (whales), but if they can't capture
| that difference with their pricing they'll be making less.
| jlokier wrote:
| Even $0.1 per day is too much for the person with $100/mo
| disposable income to continue browsing with the freedom to
| browse they have now.
|
| Sure, for _one_ site, that $3 /mo will not break the bank.
|
| But being limited to only $100/$3 = 33 sites a month would
| be quite constraining.
|
| When I'm reading about a topic or searching for a purchase,
| I'll typically visit that many sites in one session. Over
| the course of a month it is normal to visit hundreds of
| sites (I have counted for auditing a job), sometimes over a
| thousand. That's without giving it any thought, just
| following links and reading linked content.
|
| (Heck, when reading HN I sometimes read more than 33 HN
| stories in a single sitting, but to be fair I don't often
| follow the links to the articles themselves ;-)
|
| If I had to monitor my usage to keep it down to 33 sites in
| a month, I could do that but it would be a very different
| reading experience than I currently have.
|
| Like back in the days when we had to pay per minute of
| online access (outside the US, using audio modems). The
| change to a single monthly subscription with the freedom to
| read as much as you want, as long as you want, was
| liberating and transformative. It would be a little sad to
| go back to having to self-police reading in order to keep
| costs down.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Moreover, running a site with ads and tracking has higher
| hosting costs than a cleaner one that just serves contents
| to paying customers.
| foota wrote:
| I don't think it's much of a difference, given most of
| that will be third party and content can be (but isn't
| always) heavy.
| est31 wrote:
| The part of the website that does payment processing and
| ensures only authorized users can view content isn't free
| either.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| In your scenario they need ten times the free users to get
| the same revenue as one paying customer yields. Presumably,
| for most services we're talking about here the marginal
| cost of having one user versus ten is probably negligable.
| It doesn't seem unlikely to me that if a sevice starts
| charging, 90% of the users drop off, and thus the revenue
| per user needs to increase commensurately in order to have
| the same profits.
|
| Of course this is totally made up, so it's impossible to
| argue about, but my point is that what you described didn't
| necessarily seem out of line to me.
| heinrichhartman wrote:
| I wonder how much banks are the problem here. I am not sure
| if payments of a few cents can be realized online without
| loosing money on fees to payment providers or banks.
|
| AFAIK, this is the "micropayment" problem, that people were
| hoping bitcoin would solve.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| The banks are 100% of the problem.
|
| Bitcoin solved it, and then AML/KYC made it illegal to
| not have bank-like overhead costs.
| notahacker wrote:
| Miners don't do AML/KYC, they just charge higher
| transaction fees than Visa etc al on small payments.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Bitcoin didn't "solve" the micropayment problem.
|
| Compared to Visa, Bitcoin solved micropayments only if
| micro refers to the daily transaction volume.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| Visa settles at the end of financials days with
| revocation possibly up to 80days out. Bitcoin settles
| every 10mins with revocation possible up to 1 hour out.
|
| To keep the comparison accurate, you can transact many
| times within an "accounting block". Bitcoin has the
| shorter accounting block and tier 2 systems laid on top
| of it seem to scale Bitcoin well beyond any accounting
| block maximum transaction cap.
|
| The GP is probably not referring to speed of settlement
| though. Bitcoin solves KYC and trust and allows
| frictionless micro-payment.
| rswail wrote:
| AML/KYC is not the problem.
|
| Companies can issue gift cards that are entirely
| anonymous, paid for in cash, redeemed anonymously for
| cash.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Bitcoin is only economical for very large transactions -
| the energy cost of even a single btc transaction is huge.
| It doesn't solve the micropayments problem at all.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| It makes me really curious to know how they plan to monetise
| readng too. There's no pricing or anything yet that I can see,
| but I wonder if that's where they plan to go post-beta.
| bschne wrote:
| It sometimes feels like ad-supported online offerings are a bit
| like cheap fossil fuels in a way. The negative consequences
| across the board are obvious. This goes for the short-term,
| immediate nuisances it creates, but people who think about the
| hard questions also see the long-term negative consequences way
| ahead.
|
| Unfortunately, advertising has also created an unsustainably
| high "standard of living", so to speak - you get so many
| services and applications for free these days that would
| realistically not exist or cost much more than you were willing
| to pay for them had it not been for advertising.
|
| Personally, I don't think there's a way out of it until someone
| comes up with an alternative that brings the benefits of
| advertising without all the downsides it has, because
| individual consumer incentives are just not aligned. I'll
| gladly pay a one-time fee for some productivity app, or a small
| subscription for something I use almost daily. But if e.g.
| goodreads wanted to charge a subscription, community size would
| probably dwindle, and personally I'd just start keeping a
| spreadsheet of my books again.
| pbronez wrote:
| I like Affiliate Links for this. It's above-board,
| acknowledged, and aligns user, publisher and advertiser
| value. There's still some privacy costs, but they're focused
| on users that actually take action to engage with the
| promotion.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The alignment is imperfect at best. How many "review" sites
| do you see out there with reviews that are shallow (to put
| it politely) and consist primarily of gigantic "check price
| on Amazon" buttons?
|
| If you ban ads and monetize only via affiliate links, I
| think you'll see a lot more poorly written, often
| algorithmically generated content shilling for affiliate
| clicks.
| idclip wrote:
| True. Web "Advertising" is a poison that is shredding society
| apart.
| dsohn0 wrote:
| That's how we build a web where indies can thrive - one that's
| more village centre than financial centre. For this to happen
| people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the
| services they use, and support independent businesses.
| timwaagh wrote:
| A web where everything needs a subscription is a closed web. I
| would only subscribe to the things i deem fun enough or
| necessary enough. So that would be perhaps fb, Whatsapp, Gmail,
| Tinder, Netflix and Amazon. The latter three i already
| subscribed to.
| polote wrote:
| Most people don't have money, and when I say most, I mean at
| least 90% of people. So free services powered by ads are the
| best thing for them, and those people are the large majority.
| dash2 wrote:
| I'm not sure what "don't have money" means here. Presumably
| 90% of users do have some money. I would think most of them
| pay money for internet access. The question is whether they
| can afford service X given the other things they would prefer
| to pay for.
| avian wrote:
| I'm not sure it's that clear. The fact that free services
| with ads manage to thrive means that they somehow manage to
| extract money from those 99% of people. I'm pretty sure it's
| not only the richest 1% supporting the whole Internet ad eco-
| system.
|
| Ads convince people to spend money on some product they
| wouldn't buy otherwise. This in term finances those ads which
| finances the service. I'm not convinced this is better in the
| long run for many than paying services directly.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I am not sure why are you getting downvoted. If vast
| majority of Internet users were broke, there would be no
| sense in tracking them and showing them ads for paid
| products/services.
|
| Looking at the strain of our local delivery services right
| now, that cannot be just 10 per cent of people shopping.
| jlokier wrote:
| > The fact that free services with ads manage to thrive
| means that they somehow manage to extract money from those
| 99% of people
|
| I think that doesn't hold logical water.
|
| If only 1% of people buy things of significant value based
| on ads, and 99% of people never buy what's advertised, it
| is still worth advertising while advertising is cheap.
|
| A related phenomenon is the way online games make their
| money.
|
| The vast majority of players never pay for anything. A few
| pay a little, and a tiny minority pay so much more than
| everyone else that it's the tiny minority that the game-
| maker depends on for their business.
| [deleted]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > For this to happen people are going to have to open their
| wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent
| businesses.
|
| Crowdfunding is probably the best solution, if it can be made
| to work - it would allow for some kind of monetization on a
| voluntary basis, while preserving free access for most users.
| But I don't know of any site that really uses it successfully,
| aside from Wikipedia.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I used Flattr, but for some reason they have now discontinued
| their browser extension... :(
| Catsandkites wrote:
| I would happily pay for all of the services I use. The problem
| is that that isn't enough for them and it would still be an
| capitalistic greed anti-consumer shit show.
|
| If I pay I want: No ads, no tracking, full access to my own
| data in sane export formats, schemas, no data mining, no data
| selling, no "sharing data with our partners", encryption
| options, no dumb hoops, no dark patterns, the ability to point
| a product at an API endpoint of my choosing, backup options
| that default to my infrastructure first and so on.
|
| Actually let's add more: The data generated by my use of my
| data in the product. Non-canned support responses that don't
| ask for information I literally put in the ticket three weeks
| ago. Prominent indication of where (geographically and legally)
| data is stored and used. If/how often you do backups. If/how
| often you practice disaster recovery.
|
| So really what I want to pay for is sanity and no bullshit.
|
| Yet if I do pay, many services and companies will still do all
| of this shit in the background until midnight the day it's
| finally made illegal, all the while gaslighting me about "how
| much they value me as a customer" and how they "respect" our
| "relationship".
|
| It's literally obscene.
| m463 wrote:
| Is the answer to patiently await the post-scarcity anarchist
| utopia?
| Catsandkites wrote:
| My main criticism is unfettered and immoral capitalistic
| behaviour. That doesn't automatically mean I want to
| replace it with a different unworkable -ism.
| glenstein wrote:
| >and so on.
|
| Yours is a great list of stipulations. I would just add:
| support for open + interoperable protocols such as
| activitypub and RSS.
| riffic wrote:
| https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/learnawesome-is-an-
| act...
| throw0101a wrote:
| Or, if everyone (or at least more people) managed to have
| symmetrical high-speed Internet connections, self-host a lot
| more stuff.
| sbarre wrote:
| You're going to leave security, data integrity and privacy
| compliance up to random unaccountable anonymous strangers
| on the Internet who self-host?
|
| You're going to trust them to have proper backups, proper
| disaster recovery, proper resiliency and scalability?
|
| What you're describing works for small-time stuff like
| blogs, personal projects or other inconsequential things,
| but anything at the scale of Goodreads, where users are
| trusting years of data to someone just can't be hosted by
| random people.
|
| I'm not saying I have the answer but "people should self-
| host this kind of thing on their Internet connections" is
| not it.
| throw0101a wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily trust others with _my_ data, but
| if a person wants to trust _themselves_ then that 's up
| to them.
|
| Symmetrical high speed connections allows for _the
| option_ of self-hosting one 's own stuff and being able
| to serve it to the Internet (or connect to it remotely),
| but it is _not mandatory_ for people to choose that
| option. They may _not feel confident_ in their owns
| skills so _choose the option_ of paying someone else to
| be responsible for it.
|
| I'm simply talking about having _more options_.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Rather like those awful gdpr notices which use Orwellian
| doublespeak like "We value your privacy" while presenting you
| with a dark pattern dialogue box which you have to opt out
| of, rather than (as the gdpr stipulates) opt in.
|
| Nearly every time I contact customer services these days I'm
| fobbed off with obnoxious PR speak instead of just telling me
| straight.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Good Lord. That wishlist.
|
| If only...
|
| Maybe one day these things will be standard. We have to
| convince the mainstream these are goals worth pursuing... As
| long as most people accept how shit the status quo is, it
| won't improve.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The game is rigged, though. Mainstream is not in a position
| to say anything against the kind of crap modern technology
| is full of - and those who speak up anyway get labeled as
| "whiny".
|
| FWIW, I also share the GP's wishlist 100%. But we're a
| niche in our own industry these days. I'm not having hopes
| the market will deliver - on the contrary, all these points
| are things for unscrupulous vendors to control to extract
| more profit.
| saalweachter wrote:
| So one of the things that bugs the crap out of me is
| hearing programmers complain about features or bugs in
| open source software while doing nothing.
|
| Like, I know it's a lot of work to jump into a codebase
| and make a change and that some projects are a pain to
| work with, etc etc, but still. This is what OSS is
| supposed to fix, and we're exactly the demographic who is
| supposed to be able to contribute.
|
| Obviously, the above is even a bigger lift, but at the
| same time -- if a community of online hackers, many
| skilled, many experienced, many damn near independently
| wealthy from decades at FAAMGs, can't build an Internet
| 3.0 to fix the Internet 2.0 we all got rich building on
| top of Internet 1.0, who is supposed to?
| lol768 wrote:
| > Maybe one day these things will be standard
|
| Many of these things already are standard for EU data
| subjects.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Without regulation that won't ever happen.
|
| Because you, a paying customer, are worth the most to the
| advertisers.
| dtech wrote:
| I never buy this argument. If this were true, why aren't
| Tesla cars, Apple computers, Rolexes and other premium
| products plastered full of adverts?...
| II2II wrote:
| These companies still participate in advertising. All of
| these brands include the company logo and usually try to
| differentiate their design so that you, as the consumer,
| are a walking billboard for them. Beyond that, you can be
| assured that they collect any data on the consumer that
| they can. What they do with that data is out of the
| consumer's eyes.
|
| It is also worth noting that there is plenty of
| advertising in Apple products. Heck, the last time I used
| one they had at least two digital storefronts built in.
| They may not be as crass as Microsoft is (e.g. with the
| use of the Start Menu), but it is data driven. Whether
| the advertising is plastered everywhere or not simply
| reflects the target market, rather than how they collect
| and use data.
| dtech wrote:
| I think including advertisements to have logo brands or
| linked purchase options is a bit of a disingenuous
| generalization, it's not what we're talking about with
| "advertising" in this context.
|
| Yes, you are promoting Apple products if you carry around
| a Macbook with its logo, but you aren't being advertized
| to. The built-in stores might just barely meet the
| definition, but it is very different from a random ad
| during a TV show or on your desktop.
| hedora wrote:
| Tesla aggressively tracks your car's movements and your
| driving style.
|
| The have publicly discussed their plans to monetize that
| data.
| soupson wrote:
| Would you mind sharing the public discussion to monetize
| data? Would be interesting to read.
| vvG94KbDUtRa wrote:
| apple is leaning into services and advertising heavily
| right this instant
| dontTango wrote:
| It's hard to see when the constant privacy commercials
| contradict their performance.
|
| It's legitimate gaslighting.
| AntiImperialist wrote:
| What? Since when does a Hyundai car, Windows computers or
| Seiko watches have ads? Those are not the categories of
| things where ads are tolerated.
|
| That's not what the previous commenter was talking about
| at all.
|
| Some platforms and services have been selling "no ads" as
| a feature. Say Apple or YouTube Premium or 100s of 1000s
| of applications on Android. This does not mean they'll
| never open up to ads in the future. Maybe a future
| "premium value" will just be "fewer ads". And when they
| do, they're more likely to generate sales because they're
| customers who are already paying for premium services.
| dtech wrote:
| Have you ever looked at a fresh Windows 10 home install?
| It's full of ads. [1]
|
| The argument says "the more you spend the more you are
| worth to advertisers, thus eventually you will see ads".
| It doesn't add, "there are some categories of products
| for which ads aren't tolerated but for all the others
| this holds"
|
| There's more than enough examples anyway where cheaper
| options have ads and more expensive ones don't, like
| airplanes or restaurants and bars.
|
| [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/how-remove-
| advertising-window...
| vmception wrote:
| Alot of blockchain services share that philosophy and have a
| decent revenue model with the tokens.
|
| The only problem is that the consumers want to trade the
| tokens at a profit instead of as purchases.
|
| But that isn't really a problem for the service that sold
| them. It is revenue. But people have an uncomfortable
| relationship with other people making money when they can
| extrapolate how much and consider that a problem.
|
| Many services now are completely client side and use the
| nearest node that you connect to as the backend. They store
| enough variables in their smart contracts on chain and do the
| rest of the calculations client side. So their web service
| isn't tracking you. But if you reuse addresses other people
| are.
| input_sh wrote:
| If I may add: stopping the payment should be as easy as it is
| to start it. Not "call us at this number in this time frame
| and jump through multiple hoops that we've set up to try to
| convince you to keep paying".
| mettamage wrote:
| What would you consider to be a reasonable price?
| lol768 wrote:
| > If I pay I want: No ads, no tracking, full access to my own
| data in sane export formats, schemas, no data mining, no data
| selling, no "sharing data with our partners", encryption
| options, no dumb hoops, no dark patterns, the ability to
| point a product at an API endpoint of my choosing, backup
| options that default to my infrastructure first and so on.
|
| GDPR's right to data portability provides much of the export
| functionality you're after. It must be structured, in a
| format that is commonly-used and machine-readable. The ICO's
| guidance suggests that CSV, XML and JSON best meet this
| requirement.
|
| Tracking is something else that GDPR helps with. Tracking of
| personal information via e.g. cookies require active consent.
| Silence is not consent.
|
| "sharing data with our partners" requires a lawful basis when
| dealing with EU data subjects. This will normally be consent
| where data is sold to third-parties for e.g. marketing, so
| data subjects will be able to make an informed decision and
| opt out of this. Again, silence is not consent - and burying
| data sharing in an unreadable legal document is not informed
| consent.
|
| > the ability to point a product at an API endpoint of my
| choosing
|
| The right to data portability includes this:
|
| > Individuals have the right to ask you to transmit their
| personal data directly to another controller without
| hindrance. If it is technically feasible, you should do this.
|
| > Actually let's add more: The data generated by my use of my
| data in the product.
|
| This is in scope for a Subject Access Request.
|
| > Non-canned support responses that don't ask for information
| I literally put in the ticket three weeks ago
|
| This is difficult to solve with regulation but I think it's
| an entirely reasonable thing to expect for your money. GDPR
| does not help here
|
| Hopefully if there are multiple competitors in the space,
| customer support is something that providers can compete on.
|
| > Prominent indication of where (geographically and legally)
| data is stored and used
|
| Privacy information _already_ must contain a transparent list
| of data processors:
|
| > This includes anyone that processes the personal data on
| your behalf, as well all other organisations.
|
| What we really need is for other countries to start taking
| data protection regulation seriously.
| est31 wrote:
| Yeah if you pay then they'll have strong identities linked to
| the accounts in addition to the tracking. Free services that
| can be accessed without a log in on the other hand have to
| correlate all the data. They are quite good at it, but not
| perfect.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| That's not different from pre-Internet era, though.
| Subscriptions were never anonymous.
| est31 wrote:
| Of course, the _fact_ that you were subscribed was known
| to them, but which articles you read in your paper copy
| of the new york times they didn 't know, unless you
| specifically told them. Nowadays the Reddit redesign
| tracks your mouse movements, Netflix when you pause a
| video, and Amazon which page of the book you are reading.
| I don't want any of this tracking for myself. I have no
| problem with people opting in, but don't make this
| tracking inescapable.
|
| A tracking free format would involve in you downloading
| the _entire_ newspaper issue, then reading inside in ways
| of your own choosing.
| forest_dweller wrote:
| I always hate the framing of something being "capitalistic
| greed". The market has decided that they don't care about
| their privacy. You are complaining about the wrong people,
| you should be complaining to your fellow consumers/users.
| I've lost count of the number discussions I've had with
| people where they said they don't care about their privacy.
|
| As for legalities. It is a global world. There is no way to
| enforce this effectively globally. This is a pipe dream.
|
| Also data in some cases must be shared with partners, those
| might be payment processor, ID checks etc.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The market is literally fueled by people full of
| capitalistic greed one-upping each other and forcing others
| to play by the same rules. It's a _capitalistic greed
| optimization engine_. For all benefits we yield from it, it
| 's still fair to call it capitalistic greed and notice the
| ethical failures the market strongly encourages.
| forest_dweller wrote:
| I cannot stand the gas-lighting here. Your perception of
| capitalism is one that is framed as a winner takes all
| mentality that been sold to you by propagandists.
|
| Capitalism is about free market trade. You provide
| something and people choose whether they want to buy it
| or use it. People add greed qualifier in there so they
| can frame it as something illicit going on.
|
| The fact still remains that if people cared about their
| privacy (and there is no evidence they do), they wouldn't
| use these sites.
|
| Before it was done online. Store cards used to track
| purchases and spending habits in store in the same way
| that sites do today (however at a much greater scale) and
| customers were given vouchers in return.
|
| In much the same way. Almost all the local stores have
| dissapeared to be replaced by large corps that can
| provide everything in super stores and in much the same
| way that is the fault of the consumer by not supporting
| their local stores.
|
| > For all benefits we yield from it, it's still fair to
| call it capitalistic greed and notice the ethical
| failures the market strongly encourages.
|
| No the failing is on us and the users of the site for
| using these services when we were warned by many people
| that this would be the case. Pretending otherwise is
| passing the buck.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Your perception of capitalism is one that is framed as
| a winner takes all mentality that been sold to you by
| propagandists._
|
| Not really. My perception comes from thinking about the
| market as a dynamic system, and not a static picture
| described by pro- and anti-market propagandists.
|
| > _Capitalism is about free market trade. You provide
| something and people choose whether they want to buy it
| or use it._
|
| That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect free
| trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are privileged
| to partake in it. Market offerings aren't independent -
| they're in competition, which means a lot of possible
| products aren't provided, and those that are face
| competitive pressure to provide less value for more
| price.
|
| The most important thing to recognize is that the market,
| as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable companies.
| _Not_ for maximizing value these companies deliver to
| their customers. Usually, providing value is the most
| straightforward way for profit. But there are other ways
| - ways to provide no value, or even negative value while
| still netting additional profit - and the market takes
| them as much as it can. Vendor lock-in and surveillance
| are just few ways of making money by providing _negative_
| value-add.
|
| > _People add greed qualifier in there so they can frame
| it as something illicit going on._
|
| Not illicit. _Immoral_. Because after all is said and
| done, the market is still entirely made of people and
| their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the
| lens of ethics.
|
| > _The fact still remains that if people cared about
| their privacy (and there is no evidence they do), they
| wouldn 't use these sites._
|
| They care and they will use them anyway, because the
| market doesn't provide any other option.
|
| > _Store cards used to track purchases and spending
| habits in store in the same way that sites do today
| (however at a much greater scale) and customers were
| given vouchers in return._
|
| In the store. Not _across stores_. And they gave vouchers
| back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that 's
| without touching the qualitative difference between a
| human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems
| doing the same.
|
| > _Pretending otherwise is passing the buck._
|
| I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming", because
| it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you can't
| expect individuals to be able to rationally make market
| decisions while working their asses off trying to make
| ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing
| against compounding improvements in manipulation
| techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut
| regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people
| running these companies, who had a _clear choice_ , and
| _chose_ to engage in abusive practices. You don 't
| impulse-adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as
| a moment of weakness either.
|
| (But then I'm willing to cut these business folks some
| slack too; in many cases, it's the market pressures that
| force to choose the abusive option - which leads us back
| to my original point: the market is a capitalist greed
| optimization engine. It promotes business people who
| think that, much like your margin, your ethics are their
| opportunity.)
| forest_dweller wrote:
| > Not really. My perception comes from thinking about the
| market as a dynamic system, and not a static picture
| described by pro- and anti-market propagandists.
|
| Nonsense. Your framing is exactly the same. Don't
| gaslight me on this. I am not naive.
|
| > That's a "motte and bailey" defense. Such a perfect
| free trade almost doesn't exist, and very few are
| privileged to partake in it.
|
| Yes the free market doesn't exist because governments
| stick their noses in.
|
| >Market offerings aren't independent - they're in
| competition, which means a lot of possible products
| aren't provided, and those that are face competitive
| pressure to provide less value for more price
|
| What a load of nonsense. It is because of the free market
| we have niche products (Amiga accelerators would exist
| and that is pretty damn niche).
|
| > The most important thing to recognize is that the
| market, as a dynamic system, optimizes for profitable
| companies. Not for maximizing value these companies
| deliver to their customers. Usually, providing value is
| the most straightforward way for profit. But there are
| other ways - ways to provide no value, or even negative
| value while still netting additional profit - and the
| market takes them as much as it can.
|
| You are speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
|
| > Vendor lock-in and surveillance are just few ways of
| making money by providing negative value-add.
|
| If vendor lock in a problem if the customer is happy with
| it? It is up to the individual customer to decide.
|
| > Not illicit. Immoral. Because after all is said and
| done, the market is still entirely made of people and
| their decisions, which get to be evaluated through the
| lens of ethics.
|
| That is splitting hairs. No you want them to be evaluated
| through the lens of ethics because it benefits to do so
| in this argument.
|
| > They care and they will use them anyway, because the
| market doesn't provide any other option.
|
| You don't need yourtube, you don't need facebook, you
| don't need a lot of this nonsense.
|
| > In the store. Not across stores. And they gave vouchers
| back, not shoved extra ads in your face. And that's
| without touching the qualitative difference between a
| human clerk doing the surveillance and automated systems
| doing the same.
|
| You have no idea if that data wasn't sold to anyone else.
| The vouchers are in themselves ads.
|
| These store cards proved two thinds. The first being that
| people will willingly give up their details for some
| trickets, and two that tracking customers and optimising
| via that works. It was a _stepping stone_.
|
| > I hate to invoke the concept of "victim blaming",
| because it's usually invoked very unreasonably, but - you
| can't expect individuals to be able to rationally make
| market decisions while working their asses off trying to
| make ends meet, having their attention DDoSed, and facing
| against compounding improvements in manipulation
| techniques (courtesy of the market). I'm willing to cut
| regular folks some slack, and instead focus on the people
| running these companies, who had a clear choice, and
| chose to engage in abusive practices. You don't impulse-
| adopt business models, so you can't excuse it as a moment
| of weakness either.
|
| Yes I do expect individuals to able to rationally make
| decisions. People have been told for years and year and
| years on end what these companies do and they don't care.
| So it is their fault.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _If vendor lock in a problem if the customer is happy
| with it? It is up to the individual customer to decide._
|
| _No customer_ is happy with vendor lock-in. It is
| negative value to the consumer, which was the parent 's
| point.
| forest_dweller wrote:
| Why do people buy Apple products on mass then?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Think how many more people would buy Apple if not for the
| lock-in.
| thesteamboat wrote:
| Because there are many factors which go in to decisions
| and a particular negative feature might be outweighed by
| other concerns?
|
| Also, pedantic point, I think you were looking for the
| phrase _en masse_ , of french origin. See
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/en_masse
| Catsandkites wrote:
| But the free market literally cannot exist? The free
| market won't bring you back to life so you can "choose a
| different competitor" if it kills you.
|
| That food? Bad. Dead. That tool? Dangerous. Dead. That
| work on your house? Dangerous. Dead. That car?
| Unroadworthy. Dead. Those aircraft parts? Counterfeit and
| not to spec. 300 people dead.
|
| Every single thing humans do is already regulated in some
| way. Why? Because humans in the end, like all animals,
| try to achieve the best least effort : highest reward
| ratio they can.
|
| In the modern world, these regulations need to be
| extended to automatically cover modern technologies and
| prevent inherent harm. They shouldn't be overbearing.
| They shouldn't be pointlessly excessive. But they are
| required for all things.
|
| Many people think capitalism is greedy because they have
| literally spent a lifetime experiencing greed fueled
| capitalism first hand, not because they sit on YouTube
| watching propaganda videos.
| forest_dweller wrote:
| > But the free market literally cannot exist? The free
| market won't bring you back to life so you can "choose a
| different competitor" if it kills you.
|
| Life is full of risks. Lots of things were approved by
| bother government and experts in the past that was bad
| for you.
|
| > That food? Bad. Dead. That tool? Dangerous. Dead. That
| work on your house? Dangerous. Dead. That car?
| Unroadworthy. Dead. Those aircraft parts? Counterfeit and
| not to spec. 300 people dead.
|
| The FDA has stopped people from getting medication in the
| US that are over the counter medicines because they
| haven't been _approved for use_. It is a double edged
| sword.
|
| >Every single thing humans do is already regulated in
| some way. Why? Because humans in the end, like all
| animals, try to achieve the best least effort : highest
| reward ratio they can.
|
| Unfortunately. What has the current light regulation on
| the web brought us cookie popups that are irritating that
| people just click through and a GDPR warnings that don't
| actually solve the problem of collecting your data. I
| don't hold out much hope for future regulation, which btw
| will favour the big tech players that have been
| collecting our data thus far. BTW you don't know the
| names of many of them, because they are B2B players and
| provide services to the companies we do know the name of.
|
| As for "best result for least effort". Well it depends
| how it manifests itself. It can either be laziness or
| efficiency. The latter is not a problem.
|
| > In the modern world, these regulations need to be
| extended to automatically cover modern technologies and
| prevent inherent harm. They shouldn't be overbearing.
| They shouldn't be pointlessly excessive. But they are
| required for all things.
|
| Inviting any sort of regulation will involve government.
| Government will try to justify itself by demanding more
| regulation. It will always be overbearing and that will
| cement these players in place.
|
| At the moment, we have the best chance of these players
| being toppled. People are looking at alternatives to big
| tech and are going to smaller players, mainly due to
| censorship. The trickle has now become a stream, sooner
| or later it will be a flood. However because of
| regulation on the horizon (which doesn't address any of
| the issues we care about)
|
| > Many people think capitalism is greedy because they
| have literally spent a lifetime experiencing greed fueled
| capitalism first hand, not because they sit on YouTube
| watching propaganda videos.
|
| I suspect you are confusing _corporatism_ (which is a
| form of fascism) with capitalism (which is a party of
| liberty).
|
| As for propaganda. I never said anything about Youtube.
| Don't put words in my mouth. I am talking about how
| hollywood, novelists (since the 19th century), newspapers
| have framed it since forever. You are soo fermeted in it
| you don't even realise it is propaganda.
| Catsandkites wrote:
| Thanks for your reply, it was really interesting and gave
| me some things to think about.
|
| I agree that government intervention is not ideal, as
| government is also often dumb, evil or incompetent. But
| that's more our failure to set up a political system
| where only the best, skilled, most ethical, least selfish
| people can rise to the top. We are nowhere close.
|
| Propaganda: I wasn't putting words in your mouth
| intentionally, I see your point though. It was a
| description of how your words felt to someone making a
| critism of capitalism, that for me to dare criticise I
| must be propaganda-ised.
|
| I don't watch movies. I don't have a TV. I don't read
| newspapers. I read a lot but a broad spectrum of works
| from a variety of times.
|
| I like your distinction between capitalism and
| corporatism, it's a great point. I wonder though:
| Corporations exist inside of capitalism, so isn't it a
| failure of capitalism to bring outrageous cooperations to
| heel?
|
| I dislike your "fermeted" comment, you literally followed
| an accusation of fallacy from me to you, with a whole
| bunch of actually intentioned fallacy of your own?
|
| Anyway, have a great day!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _What has the current light regulation on the web
| brought us cookie popups that are irritating that people
| just click through and a GDPR warnings that don 't
| actually solve the problem of collecting your data. I
| don't hold out much hope for future regulation,_
|
| GDPR is quite decent as laws go; the problems you mention
| happen because the regulation _enforcement_ is too weak.
| Displaying a cookie popup was never anything but an
| admission that you 're doing something you're not
| supposed to. GDPR notices again mostly give the same
| evidence. A lot of them aren't even compliant. I honestly
| wish DPAs of EU member states would start beating these
| companies down until this bullshit stops.
|
| > _I suspect you are confusing corporatism (which is a
| form of fascism) with capitalism (which is a party of
| liberty)._
|
| Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors
| something resembling corporatism, because _capital
| compounds_ - the more you have of it, the easier it is to
| get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what
| matters is what it evolves over time into.
| forest_dweller wrote:
| > GDPR is quite decent as laws go; the problems you
| mention happen because the regulation enforcement is too
| weak. Displaying a cookie popup was never anything but an
| admission that you're doing something you're not supposed
| to. GDPR notices again mostly give the same evidence. A
| lot of them aren't even compliant. I honestly wish DPAs
| of EU member states would start beating these companies
| down until this bullshit stops.
|
| All that sites will do is do a cost assessment of whether
| it is worth serving those in the EU and just block the IP
| range and people that want to use those services will
| just use VPNs anyway (which is what I do when I am banned
| by IP from a site because of the GDPR rules).
|
| >Potayto, potahto. Capitalism structurally favors
| something resembling corporatism, because capital
| compounds - the more you have of it, the easier it is to
| get even more. The market is a dynamic system - what
| matters is what it evolves over time into.
|
| No it doesn't. Corporatism is a collusion with
| government. If governments were smaller, buying influence
| wouldn't be effective. You don't even understand what you
| are arguing.
|
| Yes the market is a dynamic system that why if you allow
| it to operate freely those companies that are abusing
| their position will start to lose market share when other
| competitors that don't will be more attractive to
| consumers. However once you involve regulation, then that
| mechanism doesn't happen because you just raised the bar
| higher for all the would be smaller players.
|
| Again you always want to frame it in the worst light.
|
| Anyway. Fuck this site, dissenting opinion is frowned
| upon here. So much for the hacker part.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's plenty of room for dissenting opinion here. But
| if you're going to offer up an argument for capitalist-
| libertarianism that isn't any more than a largely
| evidence-free rehash of the same positions that filled
| talk.politics.theory on usenet in the 1990s, then yeah,
| you're probably not going to see a lot of support. Offer
| up a cogent, evidence-filled position that genuinely
| causes people to say "huh! gonna have to think/read about
| this ..." and I'm fairly sure you'd see a different
| response.
| forest_dweller wrote:
| I've given my rationale. Calling it evidence-free when
| there are thousands of examples where it works and almost
| everytime there is government involvement it happens to
| be a mess. So piss off with you patronising response.
| HexagonalKitten wrote:
| One huge error HN made was telling people that downvotes
| can be used to disagree.
|
| If a view is so rehashed that it was disproven in the 90s
| then surely a simple cut&paste would do your work for you
| and the ignorance would be challenged. Instead people
| simply downvote, thinking that this is approved and
| useful, without saying anything and it turns the site
| into an echo chamber where any questions to the standard
| view is unreadable.
|
| Because there are no limits on downvotes a few righteous
| groupthinkers can and often do downvote every post they
| disagree with, letting 2-3 people make a thread entirely
| ideologically "pure". This ease of driving a post
| invisible versus actually putting words to screen mean
| that the baying hounds always win.
|
| I admit I'm controversial in many of my opinions, but I
| posted what I thought was a very bipartisan post in the
| voting thread, about how we should fix the holes (and
| things that appear to be holes) in the system so that
| people trust it more next time and I was downvoted. The
| only acceptable message is that there wasn't a single
| fraudulent vote cast. And we don't know that. We hope,
| but the very existence of SD cards that can go missing,
| internet connected machines, and so many other things,
| means we can't verify this.
|
| Without misused downvotes someone would have called me a
| trumper, and I'd deny it, and my point would remain, and
| maybe other people would argue the points. It'd probably
| even get support and encourage more people to reconsider,
| if not reject voting machines in the future. But with
| disagree-downvotes it's just hidden because it's not
| immediately on point with the groupthink.
|
| This is why politics seems so radicalized. Moderate views
| get censored.
| pushrax wrote:
| The major barriers to competing with
| Google/Amazon/Facebook etc are not regulatory hassles, by
| far. Even in highly regulated industries, like space
| launch vehicles, the additional cost of compliance over
| your own due diligence isn't the biggest barrier.
|
| Also, consumers on average do a bad job of managing
| anticompetitive behaviour and harmful externalities, even
| if they know about them. Convenience and habit are strong
| motivators. And we need regulation to disincentivize
| companies from outright lying in the first place.
|
| Companies and people in a fully free market system won't
| magically become rational automata that behave ideally.
| We're only human. Our superpower is the ability to
| collectively leverage our individual specialization.
| Foresight for negative externalities is a specialization
| that needs regulation to be effective.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I agree, the consumer has responsibility here, and
| leverage.
|
| But that does not absolve the producer. They are still
| using ethically questionable methods.
|
| The market doesn't get to decide the rights and wrongs.
| It just allocates resources. That we have to do
| collectively if we want to call ourselves democratic.
| forest_dweller wrote:
| I don't care for democracy, so no I don't want to call
| myself democratic.
|
| > But that does not absolve the producer. They are still
| using ethically questionable methods.
|
| Most people don't care. How can it be an ethical issue if
| the vast majority of people are unconcerned by it?
| HexagonalKitten wrote:
| > Capitalism is about free market trade.
|
| A sort of freedom. Not _free_ from taxes, free from
| interference. But that 's really never the case.
|
| Say you buy something from a store, and you expect their
| use of your data to follow the terms on the loyalty card.
| They've got a bunch of commercial-code laws that protect
| them. You can't pay with counterfeit money, or give
| yourself a 2-for-1 discount. If you use credit and don't
| pay, men from the state with the right to use violence
| come and collect for the store. They're totally legally
| protected. But how are you protected? Only at the end of
| a hugely expensive court case in the best outcome, but
| probably not at all.
|
| The potential risk to the store from you is limited to
| the cost of goods, the risk to you is almost unbounded.
| You might lose healthcare coverage, or your boss might
| buy your data and use the store to link your id to your
| pornhub usage and fire you. Minimal, limited risk for
| them, huge unbounded and unprotected risk for you.
|
| But then you discover after buying your gallon of milk,
| that they (knowingly) sold your data to someone who then
| sold it to, let's say an insurance company, in direct
| violation of the words on the back of the card. Now, how
| do _you_ get made whole?
|
| So, no. I don't actually feel that the free market meets
| that description for 99% of transactions. Between two
| citizens over a used lawnmower, yes. Between Warren
| Buffet and Bill Gates, yes. But between you and the
| supermarket - not even a little.
| pydry wrote:
| There needs to be some sort of institution that can verify
| these claims that these companies can use.
|
| The reason all of these things happen is because it's easy to
| slip into them in a tight financial spot and there's usually
| no instantaneous backlash.
| ardacinar wrote:
| > There needs to be some sort of institution that can
| verify these claims that these companies can use.
|
| A government?
| Proziam wrote:
| This is the least efficient answer. A more efficient
| answer is an independent entity that simply has the
| public trust and the capability to verify such claims. I
| can imagine a non-profit that pulls this off, if the will
| to execute were there.
| hagibborim wrote:
| How are you defining "efficiency" here?
| rswail wrote:
| Why is the idea of government regulation of fitness for
| purpose the "least efficient" answer. That's one of the
| primary _purposes_ of governments, to ensure the quality
| and safety of what citizens consume and how it is
| delivered.
|
| Otherwise, why are there regulators for advertising or
| for food or government standards for anything?
|
| I'm not talking about censorship or somehow evaluating
| the quality of _content_ , I'm talking about if a company
| is delivering a service and I am paying for it, then the
| conditions under which they deliver that service should
| be regulated to ensure a fair and competitive
| marketplace.
|
| Apple shouldn't be getting plaudits for making privacy a
| unique selling proposition.
|
| All the other companies should be getting told that their
| business is unfair and exploitative. Privacy should be a
| right, the control of my personal information should be
| mine and consent to have it should be able to be
| withdrawn at any time.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| The number of people that would need to coordinate their
| actions to acheive the outcome is almost certainly fewer.
|
| The formation of something new, and independent, means it
| would also be less susceptible to corruption.
|
| Given that this is one of the primary purposes of
| governments, what do you suppose has been keeping them
| from stepping in so far?
| kaibee wrote:
| > The formation of something new, and independent, means
| it would also be less susceptible to corruption.
|
| "independent" is doing a lot of work here. Government
| regulators are, at least in theory, independent because
| they're paid from taxes collected, and have no incentive
| . What mechanism is supposed to keep the new
| 'independent' entity, actually independent?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Given that this is one of the primary purposes of
| governments, what do you suppose has been keeping them
| from stepping in so far?_
|
| Businesses are much faster at inventing ways to abuse
| people than governments are to regulate them away, even
| if we ignore lobbying and corruption.
|
| Such a hypothetical organization we seek needs to be both
| swift and impactful. This automatically suggests some
| ties to government, as it's the best way to fulfill the
| criterion of impact. Not sure how to handle the "swift"
| part, though. Can't do it through regular market
| mechanisms, because ultimately price trumps all on mass
| market. The government reacts slowly for (among others) a
| good reason - while an unscrupulous businessman needs to
| invent just one weird trick, the government regulates
| away whole classes of tricks by default, and they need to
| take care to not outlaw perfectly legit new ideas.
| pydry wrote:
| EU government _might_ be trustworthy enough to run an
| institution like this. US definitely isn 't.
|
| In the UK the soil association is a private charity which
| mostly decides which food is "organic" and which food is
| not and it does a pretty good job. In the US, the USDA
| decides whether you can call your food organic and from
| what I understand it's kind of meaningless.
|
| I think a private charity would work better here.
| morelisp wrote:
| Who ensures the auditors aren't fucking up then?
|
| It's not that a private entity can't do it - I largely
| trust the TUVs and UL and other NRTLs for example. It's
| that most auditors - especially once you leave the "ship
| a physical product with verifiable physical properties"
| sector - instead look like E&Y, which I trust less than
| most of the companies they have audited.
|
| You eventually need to have someone who will be
| substantially at risk if the audit is insufficient -
| "skin in the game" to use the modern idiom - controlling
| the audit. In the case of UL that's insurances companies
| (which are highly regulated by... the government), for
| other NRTLs it's the government directly.
| s3tz wrote:
| Audits can do that. Maybe a voluntary audit where they can
| then say they're compliant with NoBullshitForYourMoney.org
| thetanil wrote:
| A search engine which only lists sites which adhere to a
| set of rules / quality standards is the only answer I see
| here. The question is would people use it? I don't think
| so. They won't even use DuckDuckGo and similar which
| attempts to address the issue for themselves but at the
| same time provide a complete index. Not enough care /
| awareness.
| john_minsk wrote:
| And who is going be able to provide for all this shit? I'll
| tell you who - FAANG. Good luck starting your company when
| all of the above is a law! I've had enough clicks on GDPR's
| "OK" buttons. What did it change?
|
| All this crying about tracking - how else the owner of the
| place can make product better? If I own a store - I can see
| where people go, how they shop, how they walk around, which
| basket size they prefer, what they buy. If I don't collect
| data on my website - I can't THINK about how to make my
| service better. I can only GUESS. What about data collections
| for simple functionality - like, when you come back to the
| half-filled form and I remember the values you already
| submitted by matching your cookies. Are you against this as
| well?
|
| Sorry, but if this is the alternative - I would rather have
| Google know everything I do online and hope that they
| honestly don't store data on my Incognito browsing. If they
| do - worse for them.
| dash2 wrote:
| So you think it's obscene, but you still use them? Doesn't
| that suggest that you value your privacy less highly than you
| claim?
| gpvos wrote:
| Life is full of compromises; it may still be the best
| available service on balance.
| dash2 wrote:
| Sure, but one available choice is "don't use x". The
| point is that he says it's obscene, but he acts like he
| prefers it to not having it.
|
| One worry about the rising tide of anti-Facebook etc.
| sentiment is that it is driven by (a) a small number of
| vocal people who (b) say that x is horrible, but don't
| act like it. (I don't say whether this worry is always,
| or even mostly, correct. Just that it is worth
| considering.) The result can be problematic.
|
| For example, like millions of people in the EU, before I
| use any new website, I now have to click "OK" on a GDPR
| button. I consider myself as caring about my privacy. But
| my behaviour tells me that I just click "OK" without even
| reading what they have to say. Obviously, my privacy is
| less important to me than the 10 seconds or 1 minute that
| it would take to read their policy and opt out from
| anything I dislike.
|
| You can respond that this is a "dark pattern", and I
| agree. You could also say it would be better for me to be
| able to set my privacy once - say, via browser settings -
| and I indeed try to do that, having used various Firefox
| settings and plugins to manage my cookies. Nevertheless,
| the fact is that, as my behaviour reveals, I would rather
| get on with my life, than waste 10 minutes a day clicking
| on privacy policies. Given that, of course, I would also
| rather not be presented with the "GDPR OK button" at all.
| It's a fleabite of annoyance that I deal with many, many
| times, and every time I mutter to myself "screw the EU
| and screw the GDPR". I suspect I am not alone.
|
| I also suspect I will be downvoted for this, by just the
| noble idealists about whom I am grumbling. Sigh.
| wolco2 wrote:
| " would rather get on with my life, than waste 10 minutes
| a day clicking on privacy policies. "
|
| The price of privacy sounds cheap. 10 minutes a day for
| privacy. How much cheaper do you need it to be.
| dash2 wrote:
| That may be an excellent argument for what I ought to
| want, but I am reporting what I actually do want.
| Catsandkites wrote:
| Use what? The jist of your argument here feels like it's
| heading straight towards "you are against foo, but you
| still bar, hmm interesting" meme.
| birdsbirdsbirds wrote:
| True, it could work like pinboard or MetaFilter.
|
| In general, I doubt that the network effect can be overcome for
| consumer platforms. People want to share their book reviews.
| Why should they limit themselves to people who pay? Paying only
| works for those who want social filtering.
|
| To compete with Goodreads, the data would have to be free like
| Wikipedia, for other competitors to emerge so that it is not
| just a village but a country with many villages. But then, it's
| a rtf reader situation where it is difficult to survive as an
| app creating company.
| lazyjones wrote:
| There's already plenty of paid content available, but for now,
| the advertising model wins? Why? Because most paid content is
| simply too expensive. You can't charge $5-$10 or more for
| rarely used niche stuff when Netflix is $8.99 and when
| musicians get $0.01 per streamed view or less.
| [deleted]
| Ekaros wrote:
| One wonders if there is even business model on web? Maybe it
| would be better to go back to passion projects. Ones where
| person making content also pays for the hosting. Probably leads
| to lot less content being around, but also removes money.
|
| Ofc, this could exist with actual paid services.
| dan1234 wrote:
| I think a lot of these services could also be run more
| efficiently.
|
| I've not used GoodReads before but it appears to be a book
| recommendation service. I'm surprised they can't run the main
| site & API on Amazon referral links for the recommended
| books.
| pbronez wrote:
| Well, they got bought by Amazon so basically the whole site
| is a feature of the Kindle Store at this point.
| beowulfey wrote:
| Believe it or not, Goodreads is actually _owned_ by Amazon.
| dan1234 wrote:
| Ah, I had no idea!
|
| Makes me think there's a different reason for closing the
| API, because Amazon could run the service for close to
| nothing on AWS.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| This is way, way beyond the web. Cue in "the century of the
| self". Advertising and self deception is too embedded in our
| culture and way of life. Also cue in "Ways of seeing".
|
| Iow, I believe advertising is symptomatic of our current state
| of consciousness as a collective, and so it is not a cause.
| pbronez wrote:
| Thanks for the reference to Ways Of Seeing by John Berger,
| looks interesting.
| door99 wrote:
| The Web needs the equivalent of public access television or
| public radio -- platforms that are sustained for public good
| via public money and/or donations
| Zhyl wrote:
| The model dictates the medium. Advertising as a model has
| forced a need for engagement, notifications, stickiness,
| attention grabbing.
|
| I'd argue the term 'pay for the services [they use]' is too
| vague here to be meaningful - there are too many options that
| would drastically change the incentives.
|
| Pay per API call? APIs start to need 5 calls to get all the
| info you'd need for one request. Subscription model? Consumers
| are going to have to juggle a different account for every
| provider they use. Subscription to aggregator who then pays
| content providers based on usage? We're back to the clickbait
| situation we were in in the early days of advertising and are
| arguable still in.
|
| For me the insane thing is that there are no options. I can't
| universally buy any song I want DRM free from a range of
| providers. I can't pay per article for news from an RSS feed.
|
| TV is an interesting one because the industry has convinced the
| user base to pay for content, but the subscription model is
| already showing some of the limitations shown above.
|
| I feel like the biggest innovations in this space aren't so
| much new ideas or 'just convincing people to pay for things',
| it's a case of making the payments as easy and understandable
| as their previous counterparts.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| > it's a case of making the payments as easy and
| understandable as their previous counterparts.
|
| Blame AML/KYC.
|
| Frictionless, permissionless micropayments are illegal. On
| purpose.
|
| This is not a social or technological problem. It is a legal
| problem. AML/KYC does not scale.
| dash2 wrote:
| Could you say what AML/KYC is?
| detaro wrote:
| anti-money laundering and know-your-customer rules.
| rswail wrote:
| Frictionless, permissionless large payments are illegal.
| The problem is that no one has worked out how to make
| micropayments costless, and that has nothing to do with
| AML/KYC and everything to do with the costs of running a
| payment system.
|
| Bitcoin has turned out to be expensive to mine. Most other
| distributed ledger "currencies" have been launched to make
| money for the creators of the artificial scarcity.
|
| Governments cannot give up control of the money supply but
| they are the only ones that can establish a form of
| electronic currency that works the same as cash does now.
|
| Whether they're willing to make it as anonymous as cash or
| allow it to be exchanged for other government's electronic
| currency is part of the problem that needs to be solved.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Nanocurrency addresses these issues. There's still the
| cost of running the node for those that need it. Outside
| of that transactions are free and typically settle in
| about a second or less.
|
| The KYC stuff is still there at the exchange level of
| course.
| snarf21 wrote:
| We need to start taxing digital advertising heavily. All it
| creates are dark patterns.
| podviaznikov wrote:
| I made a tool[1] a year ago to export Goodreads reviews into
| markdown and synced it Dropbox. Wanted to have two way sync, but
| I guess not anymore.
|
| [1] - https://borges.ai
| deep_merge wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a Goodreads alternative?
| rdl wrote:
| Goodreads has just generally been "sad" for a very long time.
| Even before the Amazon acquisition, the site has been slow,
| hasn't actually innovated in anything, and basically is the
| equivalent of a late-90s/early-00s craigslist -- a mediocre but
| "good enough" service which squats on a market preventing better
| competitors from existing.
| Merman_Mike wrote:
| It kills me to see because Amazon is _the_ entity that could
| build the best book recommendation engine of all time. And it
| would help them sell more books!
| hoyd wrote:
| One of the very first programs I wrote, was a python script that
| used this API. I enjoyed the learning and what I could do with
| it. This is indeed very sad.
| asplake wrote:
| What kind of API does/will Readng have? Bookseller integration?
|
| I have a use case: the bibliographies (recommended reading pages)
| for my own books. Could I send readers to their choice of
| bookseller?
| buttscicles wrote:
| Hi, author here!
|
| Would love to have a public API for readng but don't want
| supporting it slowing us down when we need to change something.
| It's just the three of us in our spare time at the moment, so
| we need the agility!
|
| I really, really like that use case too! Right now all you
| could do would be to create a collection of books on your
| profile, but would be nice to have on the book page I think.
|
| > Could I send readers to their choice of bookseller?
|
| We would like to refer people to libraries and indies, but
| these are obviously fragmented so a bit difficult. I think
| allowing authors to set a preferred book seller probably makes
| sense.
| smarx007 wrote:
| Could you please at least create an export button under
| https://beta.readng.co/settings so that we can migrate to
| readng.co without having similar concerns that made us to
| sign up for it today? And ofc it has to be machine-readable,
| e.g. JSON or XML but CSV should work too (for CSV ideally it
| would be in the same format as the one from GR to reduce
| fragmentation in this space). This is also a must under GDPR,
| so not going to be an effort wasted.
| buttscicles wrote:
| Long term there'll be a button for sure! For now, feel free
| to email us and I'll take care of it (limited time and all
| that)
| Cenk wrote:
| https://boook.link is a useful tool for offering people links
| to different stores
| asplake wrote:
| Thank you!
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I'm curious: What were people using this API for exactly?
| nefitty wrote:
| The LibraryThing API might be an approximate replacement,
| although I'm not sure what the major differences are:
| http://www.librarything.com/services/
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Interesting. They could do a better UI, mobile responsive, but
| their db is pretty big.
| satyanash wrote:
| Note that you can still export a CSV of your books, (although
| this is not all the data that is present).
|
| Here https://www.goodreads.com/review/import
| gravitas wrote:
| It's still a pretty good backup which I've imported to other
| services before, here's the CSV header row for those
| interested:
|
| Book Id,Title,Author,Author l-f,Additional
| Authors,ISBN,ISBN13,My Rating,Average
| Rating,Publisher,Binding,Number of Pages,Year
| Published,Original Publication Year,Date Read,Date
| Added,Bookshelves,Bookshelves with positions,Exclusive Shelf,My
| Review,Spoiler,Private Notes,Read Count,Recommended
| For,Recommended By,Owned Copies,Original Purchase Date,Original
| Purchase Location,Condition,Condition Description,BCID
|
| The CSV export uses both quoted and unquoted fields at the same
| time on the same record which is unfortunate, but it works.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| Yeah, the Python csv package hasn't had problems for me yet.
|
| One unfortunate bug that they seem to have put onto the
| 'wont-fix' pile is that for many recent-ish books, the 'date
| read' field isn't properly exported, so if you try to make
| reading stats you have to cheat a bit by approximating the
| 'finished date' with the 'book added' date.
| gravitas wrote:
| Because of this post I went looking at a backup of my
| LibraryThing data as well (it's "more fresh", been trying
| to convert) and it seems just as messy; community threads
| going back years.
|
| The LT JSON export looks well-formed however, the book
| records I see are quite vast in content/data/metadata and
| would probably be a nice python fit. I'm not sure if I
| could import this with the LT webUI, but it's a nice
| looking JSON backup nonetheless.
| justhw wrote:
| Welp..If you just need the make a book list features, i made an
| alternative a while back.
|
| https://bookshulf.com/
| _iyig wrote:
| Sad but not surprising that Amazon let Goodreads moulder. They
| did the exact same thing with Shelfari [0], formerly Goodread's
| main competitor.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelfari#Amazon_and_shutdown
| iou wrote:
| That site they're building looks dope https://beta.readng.co
| nfriedly wrote:
| That's a real disappointment. I've gotten back into reading in
| the past few years, I've been tracking everything in goodreads,
| and I was just thinking about building something to display what
| I've been reading recently on my website that would pull from the
| goodreads API. There goes that idea...
| numair wrote:
| This makes absolutely no sense and has no relation to any
| economic variables. Goodreads isn't some struggling self-funded
| startup -- it's owned by _Amazon.com._ The acquisition was a deal
| that should have never been approved, if the Obama administration
| had been anything beyond completely impotent at protecting us
| from monopoly games:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/02/amazon-purchas...
|
| I would like to understand the true strategic interest behind
| this. Is Amazon simply penny-pinching now that they've
| successfully obliterated the market for both new and used books
| online? There's way more to this story than appears on the
| surface.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > Goodreads isn't some struggling self-funded startup -- it's
| owned by Amazon.com
|
| Not that I like Amazon, but it is not philanthropy. I assume
| goodreads take non trivial cost to run operations, moderations
| and the site and just because Amazon is doing well financially
| it doesn't mean they have free money. This move makes it easier
| for Amazon to monetize on goodreads, it is as simple as that.
| mattmanser wrote:
| You're missing his larger point by focusing on the first few
| sentences.
|
| Effectively the only reason it's not supporting itself is
| precisely because Amazon bought it.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| The only reason it was supporting itself previously is
| because investors are pouring money in it with the hope
| that some big company will buy it with the hope that they
| can have value to them.
| wpietri wrote:
| Nope. Per Crunchbase, Goodreads took only $2.8m in
| funding to cover the more than 6 years they were in
| operation.
| veidr wrote:
| I am sympathetic to what you are saying, but I think it _does_
| actually make sense: destroying Goodreads and turning it into
| just another sales funnel was presumably why Amazon acquired
| it.
|
| A bunch of book reviews and book recommendations that can be
| used separately from Amazon doesn't help Amazon.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Amazon acquired Goodreads because it was forced to: when
| still independent, Goodreads made its money through affiliate
| links to various online bookshops. Soon Amazon's dominance in
| this sector was so entrenched that most purchases from GR
| were being made through Amazon.com and not the other sites
| like Barnes & Noble that GR linked to. It got to the point
| where Amazon was paying GR so much money in referral fees
| every month, that it struck Amazon as cheaper just to buy the
| site outright.
| bredren wrote:
| I thought at some scale Amazon has different affiliate
| agreements.
|
| For example Duck Duck Go. I had thought there was no way
| DDG could possibly be paid at the normal affiliate pricing
| structure.
|
| Anyone have insight into this
| veidr wrote:
| Oh, I hadn't heard that. Well then, perhaps destroying
| Goodreads is just the cherry on top of a deal that made
| sense to Amazon for other reasons.
| MereInterest wrote:
| I would want to rephrase that. Amazon acquired Goodreads
| because it was _cheaper_ to do so than to allow a good
| service to continue, and prevents those referrals from
| going to any site other than Amazon. To me, this sounds
| like textbook anti-competitive behavior, and grounds for
| Goodreads to be split off from Amazon.
| wpietri wrote:
| Exactly. Amazon wasn't forced to do anything. Other
| companies _like_ having a healthy vendor ecosystem. E.g.,
| Toyota is famous for that.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| People are weirdly imprecise with their language in this
| domain. It's like when people say a corporation is forced
| to do something to appease its shareholders, a complete
| falsehood.
| x0x0 wrote:
| The thing is, Goodreads always felt like a feature. They
| failed to build a business, let alone one that should
| take VC (and hence be required to generate venture-scale
| returns). And my guess is the only way they could have
| generated the right returns is to move down the sales
| funnel, which is a direct threat to Amazon's business.
| Making the subsequent behavior inevitable.
|
| It feels like there are a couple very nice small (not
| necessarily lifestyle, but not vc) businesses in that
| space.
|
| I'm aware of https://readng.co and https://bingebooks.com
| propogandist wrote:
| Don't worry, Joe Biden's bringing back the old gang together to
| protect the people
|
| https://twitter.com/kgosztola/status/1326387797347930114
| jeswin wrote:
| > The acquisition was a deal that should have never been
| approved
|
| Regulators should step in when businesses/startups are being
| harmed by a monopoly via unfair practices such as bundling. But
| intervening otherwise will simply deny founders and employees a
| decent exit. And if the economics are not sound enough it'll be
| harmful for customers as well - the app will get loaded with
| too many ads or simply shutdown.
|
| So IMHO not a good case for regulation.
| mdoms wrote:
| Founders and employees are not a priori entitled to "a decent
| exit", especially not at the expense of healthy market
| conditions. Or at least this should be the case, but American
| regulators have been asleep at the wheel for decades now.
| numair wrote:
| I think the 2010s model of "just build it to be acquired by
| the industry giant" was a mistake, and is officially dead.
| You can't expect to sell to the giants anymore, because they
| can't expect to be allowed to buy everything that could grow
| to be a threat. It's time to come up with a new model (maybe
| even a return to the 1990s model of small IPOs and mini-
| consolidation into a crop of strong mid-tier players, rather
| than giants).
| picardo wrote:
| It's not mentioned in the article but Amazon had disabled their
| affiliate link program for Goodreads ahead of this
| announcement, which cut off a major source of their revenue for
| them, and forced them to sell. They had no choice.
|
| The strategic reason for Amazon is obvious. As someone else
| mentioned, Amazon doesn't want Goodreads data to be used to add
| value to their competitors' offerings.
|
| Speaking as a developer who tried to build on top of Goodreads
| API, I also want to add that this was a long time coming. The
| API had been neglected for some time. And some of the most
| interesting datasets weren't even made available through the
| API.
| gallego2007 wrote:
| Apparently Amazon's Kindle lost the ability to share progress
| on Goodreads in the last week as well.
|
| I guess the writings on the wall...
| nojokes wrote:
| Looks like a by the book anti competitive behavior.
| adrr wrote:
| It's not illegal though unless you can prove it harmed the
| consumers.
| redisman wrote:
| Isn't that what all the big tech acquisitions have been in
| the last few decades?
|
| Buy it so no one else can have it or buy it so you can shut
| it down.
| wzy wrote:
| > Amazon doesn't want Goodreads data to be used to add value
| to their competitors'
|
| This is it exactly. Goodreads was/is the best/largest source
| of information on books available online.
| throw0101a wrote:
| See also WorldCat:
|
| > _WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the
| collections of 17,900 libraries in 123 countries and
| territories[4] that participate in the OCLC global
| cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc.[5] The
| subscribing member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat
| 's database, the world's largest bibliographic
| database.[6]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldCat
|
| * https://www.worldcat.org
| benibela wrote:
| that would be great, if it had an open API
|
| It is useless without API
| wpietri wrote:
| I think there's been a long-term trend away from open APIs
| toward ever-more-proprietary treatment of data. Data that
| wasn't _created_ by the companies; they just happen to have
| control of it. Another example is the recent FB lawsuit threat
| against researchers. [1] Facebook will squawk about user
| privacy to justify this, but I have a hard time thinking Mark
| "privacy is dead" Zuckerberg is particularly worried about
| that.
|
| What I think all off these large companies are doing is pulling
| up the open-web ladder after they've climbed it to dominant
| positions. The problem with anti-trust action is that it's
| reactive; we wait until a company has gotten too big, and then
| hope we can cut it down to size. I'd love to see moves toward
| proactive open-data and open-algorithm requirements, so that we
| guarantee a level playing field. That won't be easy, but
| neither is trying to rein in companies with annual profits in
| the tens of billions.
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/24/tech/facebook-nyu-
| political-a...
| heyoni wrote:
| They did the same thing with IMDb a few years ago. Their data
| dumps now are absolutely useless and they don't generate any
| of the information themselves.
| whymauri wrote:
| It's a moat for Amazon. That simple.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| And the real data is now behind AWS Data Exchange at
| $150k/yr.
|
| Oh, and the old IMDB API you could pay for is gone (or,
| gone soon), and some of the features it provided are gone
| permanently.
| iou wrote:
| Roadmap for that reading app is here
| https://readng.nolt.io/roadmap
|
| Personally I'd like to see audible integration, which ironically
| goodreads does not provide :(
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Very sad. Good bye Goodreads.
| gundmc wrote:
| So much for the narrative that Amazon never kills any services.
| kopakabana wrote:
| Not having an API is short-sighted.
|
| Those who will use your info legitimately will probably use an
| API, but those who only want your data can hide their IP across a
| number of cloud agents to extract all of the data from your site
| regardless of whether you offer an API or not unless you use
| CAPTCHA.
| gravitas wrote:
| LibraryThing has a Goodreads importer which I have used in the
| past with good success (nothing is perfect).
|
| https://www.librarything.com/more/importgoodreads
|
| The general LibraryThing UI is a bit scary at first, don't let
| that stop you. All "Pro" accounts were made free for everyone
| some years back.
| milofeynman wrote:
| I also use library things, and thanks to their change to their
| business model their free accounts work great for tracking my
| home library and what I read. I also like their app for
| scanning barcodes into my library.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Equal parts sad and unsurprising.
| user5994461 wrote:
| Let's say you have the whole database of books from
| Amazon/GoodReads, including
| title/authors/genres/publishingdate/userrating/sales.
|
| You'd like to make a recommendation engine, the idea is that the
| user could input 1-3 books they liked and it would suggest more
| books that are similar.
|
| What sort of algorithms should I look into to do that sort of
| things?
|
| Note that I don't have user profiles with what book they read,
| only have the database of books, can't do the recommendation
| engine based on two users liked the same book so they will also
| like other books either of them liked.
| meekrohprocess wrote:
| IMO, you could highlight the differences between similar
| titles.
|
| It's easy for recommendations to get stuck on a local maxima if
| they only look at one metric at a time, like "similarity"
| weights. But if you have a lot of metadata about each title,
| you can break out of those "loops" by sprinkling in metrics
| like ratings/genres/release date/popularity/etc. This doesn't
| have to hurt from a performance perspective, either; you can
| filter on the same single metric, but request more
| recommendations than you need and pluck out a pseudo-random set
| in the application logic.
|
| That also lets you provide context for the recommendation.
| "It's like this, but [older/more obscure/with vampires]."
| inoop wrote:
| AWS has a service for that, it's called
| [personalize](https://aws.amazon.com/personalize/)
| eznzt wrote:
| With time everybody learns if your time is worth something you
| will be scrapping, not using an API.
| octoberfranklin wrote:
| I dunno, maintaining a scraper across neverending site
| redesigns is a friggin' lot of work. Way more work than
| updating my code to use a new version of an API.
| genidoi wrote:
| If all that's changing on a site is the presentation/ordering
| of elements, then you just need to update some XPath
| selectors every now and then and have a notification system
| for knowing when those selectors aren't working.
|
| You can even automate this process by having a known input
| (eg, URL to a book on goodreads + its known [and hopefully
| unchanging] book title) and have a script that periodically
| checks that the xpath string matches the known pages text /
| generates a new one to point to the title. This is harder for
| values that do change but there are always workarounds
| eznzt wrote:
| When was the last time goodreads was redesigned?
| hiq wrote:
| It depends on what you do with the content: if you're just
| using it for yourself and can afford it to break at random
| times, scrapping can be fine (although maybe still more time-
| consuming depending on the website).
|
| But if you need predictability and reliability (e.g. you're
| providing a service to other people) for whatever you implement
| using this 3rd party service you don't control, relying on
| their ui that they can break any time they feel like it will
| lead to more downtime than APIs for which you're usually given
| some notice before they're deprecated.
| billfruit wrote:
| Goodreads really needs a solid competitor, the site seems to be
| stuck in a timewarp:
|
| It is load times are one of the longest of the sites I commonly
| visit, and it barely had any new functionality added in the last
| 10 years.
| mro_name wrote:
| there seems to be no such thing as a reliable 3rd party.
| benibela wrote:
| Guess, I am not going to add goodreads support to my reading-
| tracking library app
| loosetypes wrote:
| What's a good data source for book metadata and covers these
| days?
| loosetypes wrote:
| What's a good way to group isbns for various versions of the same
| title?
|
| For example, searching Old Man and the Sea on isbndb returns (as
| you'd expect) many isbns:
|
| https://isbndb.com/search/books/Old%2Bman%2Band%2Bthe%2Bsea
|
| Do books have another identifier that logically consolidates
| editions, foreign language prints, etc.?
| cdrini wrote:
| Open Library has a notion of "Works" which group together
| editions across languages:
| https://openlibrary.org/works/OL63073W
|
| (Note the work id is in the url: OL6307W)
|
| If you want to get the work id for a given ISBN:
| https://openlibrary.org/isbn/2070360075.json will redirect to
| the edition page, and there you can get "works[0].key".
|
| Or, you can search by the isbn:
| https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=isbn:2070360075
| loosetypes wrote:
| Thanks. So Open Library implemented that because there's no
| interoperable, universal concept for literary "works"?
|
| And then each of Goodreads, Amazon Retail, Ingram, et al.
| would likely have their own internal system for isbn
| identification and grouping accordingly?
|
| And I guess that means similarly, there's no isbn-analog for
| a series or interrelated set of "works"?
| towelpluswater wrote:
| If someone can manage to find a creative way to tap into the
| Kindle ecosystem and provide a similar service, I'd imagine they
| could do quite well.
| 67868018 wrote:
| Storygraph is the new hotness
|
| https://beta.thestorygraph.com/
| miguelrochefort wrote:
| I recently built an audiobook scrobbler for Android that
| automatically updates the status of books I read on GoodReads.
|
| I'm very disappointed to see that they're killing their API. I'll
| be looking for an alternative.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| >So this is an "announcement" much in the way a windshield
| announces its presence to bugs on a highway
|
| This is a very poetic way to describe API deprecation. I'm gonna
| steal this.
| [deleted]
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Except this isn't so much deprecation as _removal_. Deprecation
| says "we don't recommend this any more, and it'll probably be
| removed _in the future_ ". Deprecation would be quite unlike
| the windshield analogy, because it _is_ an announcement.
|
| (It's not quite cut and dried in this case because there may
| still be some people that still have access to the API--but
| those that have been cut off look to have no recourse.)
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Except this isn't so much deprecation as removal.
| Deprecation says "we don't recommend this any more, and it'll
| probably be removed in the future"._
|
| At AWS, I was "put on a pedestal" for stating (in an internal
| forum) that _X_ was deprecated (I meant it in a sense it was
| "not recommended anymore" and wasn't updated at all)... The
| management thought it sent the wrong message (that is,
| deprecation == removal).
|
| People often associate wrong meaning to deprecation (ironic
| in my case given Amazon is a Java shop).
| efdee wrote:
| Super off-topic, for which I apologize, but being put on a
| pedestal means being admired. Probably the opposite of what
| you meant.
| jefftk wrote:
| I would interpret an internal deprecation notice as saying
| that consumers of X should start planning to migrate away.
| If instead, X is in maintenance mode but with no plans to
| drop support, to me that is not deprecated?
|
| It sounds like perhaps X was in the earlier state of not
| being recommended for new projects?
| ignoramous wrote:
| _X_ is a public AWS service.
|
| > _I would interpret an internal deprecation notice as
| saying that consumers of X should start planning to
| migrate away._
|
| Yes, everyone (internally but privately) was told to not
| touch it with a ten-foot and migrate away. Mentioning
| that it was "deprecated" apparently took it a step too
| far (even if internally but not privately).
| booleandilemma wrote:
| And just like one must scrape bugs off one's windshield, so
| people will have to scrape content off Goodreads, or something.
| throwanem wrote:
| Tangential, but I've always been curious. What's the use of a
| public "what I'm reading/have read/will read" in the first place?
| Goodreads has users so I guess it has some value, and I do
| occasionally look at reviews there, but I'd be interested to hear
| the perspective of someone who uses and likes this kind of thing
| on what's to like about it.
| dan1234 wrote:
| I guess if you're looking for something new to read, you can
| look for someone with similar taste and look at the books
| they've read that you haven't (presumably the GoodReads
| algorithm could do this automatically).
|
| I actually use Last.fm to do this for musical taste.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Goodreads recommendations are only really useful if you match
| the demographic mass of their membership. And since they've
| tied in with Kindle so heavily, that leans hard towards
| suggesting historical romances and Oprah's Book Club fodder.
| dan1234 wrote:
| I wonder if there's a gap in the market, or perhaps there's
| no market for book recommendations?
| rcarmo wrote:
| I've been using Goodreads for years. Not so much for the
| tallies of what I've read, but to discover new things to read
| (either related books, random searches or just stuff my friends
| have read as well).
|
| Although there is always the risk of spiralling down an echo
| chamber, having two or three people you know give a decent
| review to a book is a strong signal that you might enjoy it (or
| not, once you know those peoples' tastes).
|
| So it saves me time and ensures a steady pipeline of "likely
| interesting stuff" to follow up on. Their e-mail newsletter is
| also likely to be the only one I let into my inbox willingly,
| just so I have an idea of what might be interesting to add to
| my queue.
|
| Of course, the API deprecation is just bad. I've always been
| frustrated with the way Goodreads was integrated with the
| Kindle (it hardly, if ever, worked) and now syncing between
| Calibre and Goodreads is likely to stop working as well, so I
| won't have a non-wetbrain list of what I've read over the last
| decade or so.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > Having two or three people you know give a decent review to
| a book.
|
| I have a large amount of Goodreads friends, often IRL friends
| with whom I know I share hobbies and interests. And yet, when
| I use the Goodreads "See books in common" feature, we share
| almost no books. I think a real problem for media-rating
| websites today is this: the glut of readily accessible
| content on the internet makes it less and less likely that
| any two people will share any one item of content.
|
| The same problem can be found on Last.fm, where there are so
| many bands out there today, so much free listening to do,
| that even ardent lovers of a particular genre might not have
| very overlapping tastes. Last.fm appears to have been forced
| to change their compatibility algorithm, so that now you are
| "Super compatibility" with another user by just sharing a
| handful of bands in common, whereas in the past you would
| have had to share a _lot_ more bands and listens in order to
| be ranked as Super.
| sradman wrote:
| The API is good for general purpose book metadata. I found the
| Goodreads database a good source for series order; maybe I just
| didn't look very hard.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-12-13 23:00 UTC)