[HN Gopher] Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazo...
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Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it
Author : pseudolus
Score : 416 points
Date : 2023-07-03 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| > By joining Amazon, Goodreads has accelerated their mission to
| delight customers with the help of Amazon's resources and
| technology.
|
| Seriously, reading the diarrhea vomited out by corporate PR
| shills nowadays seriously makes my teeth hurt.
|
| Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're spouting to
| the general public?
| bacchusracine wrote:
| >Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're spouting
| to the general public?
|
| With the kinds of salaries they make? Absolutely! I'll believe
| your butt makes chocolate ice cream for the kind of money those
| people make ^1.
|
| ^1 testing the theory on the other hand...not so much.
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| Amazon's resources and technology to display a static web page
| with a few low resolution images and a bunch of text.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| At least Apple's marketers will say things like
|
| "While I don't like that they do X, they are the best at Y, and
| they need to do X for your safety"
|
| You get what you pay for.
| garciansmith wrote:
| I wish news organizations would not give direct quotes when
| pure marketing nonsense was written. Just say something like
| "Amazon did not give us any substantive comment on the matter."
| batch12 wrote:
| I suspect it's a case of one hand washing another. They
| publish the fluff so they can be on the list of publications
| that get early dibs on 'news' that will drive engagement.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Don't forget the Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. If
| they didn't give Amazon's side unquestioned, someone would
| be in trouble.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The article's entire theme is "was this purchase a good
| thing" and the subhead ("raises questions about
| [Goodreads'] longtime owner") strongly implies the answer
| is no.
|
| I get why "well, journalists never critically report on
| the people who directly or indirectly sign their
| paycheck, dontcha know!" is such a popular take
| (particularly in cynical times with a skeptical crowd),
| but the history of news shows journalists reporting on
| things that could potentially piss off their owners
| pretty repeatedly, and the _Washington Post_ reporting on
| things relating to Amazon doesn't seem to be a serious
| exception.
|
| Amusingly, I just did a DuckDuckGo search on "washington
| post reporting on amazon", intending to see if there were
| critical takes on said reporting, and what came up
| instead was: a plethora of WaPo articles with headlines
| like "Bernie Sanders launches investigation into Amazon
| labor practices", "Lawmakers: Amazon may have lied to
| Congress", "Perspective: How Amazon shopping ads are
| disguised as real results", "FTC sues Amazon over Prime
| enrollment without consent", "Amazon's OSHA data shows
| its workers injured at higher rates than rival
| companies", and "Tour Amazon's dream home, where every
| appliance is also a spy".
| deanCommie wrote:
| I wish people also learned some critical reading:
|
| Amazon spokesperson Ashely Vanicek said that "<exact quote>"
|
| Is journalistically neutral. Amazon was asked about what we
| wrote. Here's what they said. You decide if you believe us,
| or Amazon.
|
| I see nothing wrong with this, unless the headline of this
| story was "Goodreads' accelerated mission in delighting
| customers with the help of Amazon's resources and
| technology."
| cratermoon wrote:
| It's not "Is journalistically neutral". It's being a
| purveyor of propaganda. Just like when journalists quote
| cops using CopSpeak. It lets the interested party defined
| the terms of the debate. By constraining the terms, it can
| become literally impossible to say some things.
| archgoon wrote:
| [dead]
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I see both peoples' points. Yes, journalism can objectively
| report the fact that Amazon said something. I think it is
| _also_ fair to wish for informationally bankrupt statements
| to be called out by decent institutions. As you say, the
| headline suggests an opposition to Amazon 's position, so
| maybe that's enough.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| I really liked Hunter S Thompson's gonzo journalism take
| in that regard.
|
| It went along the lines:
|
| "The defence secretary said that we're fighting a
| righteous and humane war in Vietnam. The defense
| secretary is full of shit!"
|
| Nowadays they send their spokes drones and have the spin
| masters cook up even more ridiculous shit.
|
| Hunter S Thompson (RIP) must be spinning in his grave.
|
| e: added quotes around Hunter's fictious statement
| monktastic1 wrote:
| Not giving substantive comments makes it sound more honorable
| than what was actually said. I actually prefer them exposing
| the nonsense that corporations spew, so that their
| disingenuity is in plain sight and on the record.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| Devil's advocate: What if they gave a comment the publication
| didn't like (but readers would) and hid it?
|
| Publishing what was said is more "just the facts, please"
| than editorializing the response, as shitty PR-speak as it
| is.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| No. Most of the political and corporate apparatus communicates
| as an occupation, what they believe has no correlation with
| what they say.
| Lolaccount wrote:
| I've found that "delight customers" is the key phrase.
|
| Just write a script that excludes any articles which mentions
| that phrase for a better life.
|
| That's been a pretty reliable indicator over the last decade.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Nah, better marketers know to pretend to be a frustrated
| human who relents because 'this is the best we got and
| everything else sucks even more'.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I agree. There are a handful of red flag phrases that can
| reliably predict whether or not you're being sold a bill of
| goods. "Delight customers" is one of them. As soon as a
| company says anything like that, I know to avoid them like
| they're radioactive.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Greetings, fellow customer!
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Do those people actually believe the bullshit they're
| spouting to the general public?
|
| I don't know. but I do know that the best marketers I've worked
| with all had one trait in common: they believed their own
| bullshit. One told me outright that the first thing he has to
| do when taking on a new account is to convince himself that the
| story he needs to tell is true because that stops him from
| having to lie.
| goodthrowreads wrote:
| hi i worked at goodreads and this comment is giving me gell
| mann amnesia.
|
| ask any engineer there, this is basically true in the sense
| that amazon drastically professionalized what had been a deeply
| fly by night company. the way software was written and product
| cycles were done pre acquisition was hilariously bad.
|
| the reason goodreads still looks so ancient today is that even
| a decade of amazon engineers trying to salvage it haven't been
| able to climb out from under the mountain of tech debt the
| company accrued pre acquisition.
|
| amazon should have just scrapped and rebuilt the entire thing
| after the acquisition. or just not bought it and finished
| building their competitor to it that was in progress. either
| would have been more successful what they did.
| ims wrote:
| Seems like the existing user base, reviews, and lists were
| the main source of value. I don't want to be "that guy" but
| I'm curious what made it so hard to rewrite some or all of
| the CRUD aspects?
| intesars wrote:
| Agree, it was a preemptive buy to keep the competition out.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Amazon buying it is one problem. But the other is the users,
| review-bombing books they haven't even read
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| But Amazon is otherwise so good at rooting out fraudulent
| reviews!
| pessimizer wrote:
| This article starts off pretending to be a criticism of Amazon,
| and this is highlighted in the headline. After a few vague
| critical gestures towards Amazon in the first four paragraphs, it
| gets to its real point: Goodreads, a social network, has woefully
| inadequate _censorship,_ which can lead to financial losses to
| authors and publishers.
|
| According the the WaPo, Amazon's crime with Goodreads seems to be
| that it hasn't kept the site up with changes in _censorship_
| standards and technology, and just lets whoever say whatever
| about books.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Preventing fraud, not censorship. Writing a fake review of a
| book that hasn't even been finished written yet is fraud.
| pessimizer wrote:
| A review of a book that hasn't been published that explains
| why I don't think the subject is appropriate for a book, how
| I don't like the author, and what I think about the author's
| previous opinions about the subject isn't "fake" or "fraud,"
| it's discussion that virtually all intelligent people can
| handle.
|
| "Fake" and "fraud" are words that you're adding to the
| article.
|
| -----
|
| edit:
|
| I feel like it's important to mention that the only reason
| this "review bombing" is painted as bad is because _it
| convinces people._ This is yet another case of (calling for)
| censoring speech _because_ it is convincing. It convinced the
| Eat, Pray, Love author not to publish at all.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| If your review "of a book" is actually a review of the
| author, I agree that it's not quite right to call it a fake
| review, nor fraud, but neither is it truly a review of the
| book. Ideally there would be a way to rate authors so that
| people don't feel compelled to categorize their author
| reviews as book reviews for books they haven't read. People
| are going to leave these kind of reviews, so the system may
| as well be set up for it.
|
| Generally, I'm wary of attempts to address 'review bombing'
| (besides standard anti-botting measures) because it seems
| like accusations of review bombing have become a sort of
| general cope employed by creators whenever their thing gets
| a negative reception. It's common to de-legitimize contrary
| points of view by calling people dehumanizing terms like
| 'troll', when in fact those people probably earnestly feel
| that way (they aren't trolling.) If I know the earth is
| round but I _pretend_ to think the earth is flat to get a
| rise out of people, that 's trolling. But if I'm a halfwit
| who earnestly thinks the earth is flat, and I say so,
| that's not trolling. The difference between these won't
| necessarily be apparent from the text of the review itself;
| how then do you separate the trolls from the people you
| disagree with? On an individual basis you can go with your
| gut or look that person up, but that doesn't scale up to
| classifying thousands of reviews. What creators are really
| asking for is the privilege to curate the reviews
| themselves, but that isn't a reasonable privilege to grant
| because it would completely devalue reviews for consumers.
|
| Do what needs to be done to combat botting, use captchas or
| account verification or whatever works. But after that? Let
| the reviews fall where they may. Creators will cry that the
| bad reviews aren't legitimate because the reviewers are
| [dehumanizing term], but there's nothing that can
| reasonably be done about this.
| drxzcl wrote:
| That's only true for extremely small values of "censorship".
| pessimizer wrote:
| The values that include _commenting on writing in general_
| aren 't small to most people. I can't imagine a larger value.
|
| edit: hopefully somebody reading the WaPo has some sort of
| connection to Amazon, and can really commit to making sure
| that people's inappropriate opinions on the quality of books,
| the subjects of books, or whether books should have been
| written at all - will be corrected promptly and repeat
| offenders banned in future.
| lkbm wrote:
| Do you consider it censorship when Amazon removes fake
| reviews from their products? This is something most people
| are in favor of.
|
| You can write what you want about books elsewhere. On
| Amazon, product reviews and ratings should be from people
| who have used the product. On Goodreads, reviews should be
| by people who have read the book.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Do you consider it censorship when Amazon removes fake
| reviews from their products? This is something most
| people are in favor of.
|
| This isn't about fake reviews, this is
|
| 1) partially about reviews from people who haven't read
| the book, but object to the subject matter or something
| else about the book, and
|
| 2) about "review-bombing," a phrase that is used a lot in
| this article without an argument being made as to exactly
| what constitutes review bombing (do the people involved
| have to collude?), or whether it's illegitimate. It just
| assumes that it is.
|
| You've said "fake reviews" in this comment when the word
| "fake" wasn't used in the article a single time. They
| depend on you doing that for them.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > partially about reviews from people who haven't read
| the book, but object to the subject matter or something
| else about the book
|
| Which is a fake review in my view. Or, at least, an
| irrelevant review. A review is supposed to be about the
| particulars of that book, not about whether or not the
| reader thinks the subject matter is objectionable.
| Presumably, people who dislike the subject matter won't
| be reading the book anyway, so such a review is
| worthless.
|
| If you haven't read the book, you cannot possibly write a
| legitimate review of it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If it's a "fake" review for values of fake that don't
| include dishonesty, you can easily choose not to read it.
|
| This is not that. The big example cited is a bunch of
| people registering their objection to a light book being
| written about Soviet Ukraine while there's a war on. This
| is a real objection that a lot of (silly, annoying)
| people have. _The reason the book was not published is
| because they thought that this objection would go viral
| and affect the sales of the book._
|
| That has nothing to with fake or false. That has to do
| with suppressing financially threatening speech.
| lkbm wrote:
| > you can easily choose not to read it.
|
| I cannot easily exclude it from the ratings. There's a
| pretty widespread understanding that star ratings are
| meant to aggregate the opinions of people who read the
| book.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > But Goodreads allows any user, not just those who've received
| advance copies, to leave ratings months before books are
| released. Authors who've become targets of review-bombing
| campaigns say there's little moderation or recourse to report the
| harassment. Writers dealing with stalkers have pointed to the
| same problem.
|
| "Problem": chicken-and-egg problem. Until it's actually
| published, there's little or no way for a review site to verify
| that you actually got it, let alone read it.
|
| Once it's published, people look at the reviews to decide whether
| to buy it. So where are those reviews going to come from, for a
| self-published book?
|
| Solution: the publisher gives advance review copies to readers.
| Yes, the system IS ripe for abuse. But if you're reading a
| review, it ought to be apparent whether the reviewer actually
| read the book, or whether they have anything interesting to say.
|
| And Goodreads _should_ remove the bad ones.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| That implies people will read the reviews rather than just
| seeing something with a star rating lower than a 4 and
| automatically discount it (or that it won't be dramatically
| deprioritized in Amazon's recommendations because of it).
| prox wrote:
| There is also a problem with quotes; you have these nobody
| self-help book writers adding hundreds (?) of quotes that are
| very poor, and gamed with upvotes. So you some see some nobody
| authors quote next to Plato.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| What does that last sentence mean?
|
| Edit: the current comment is not what I was responding to.
| It's clearer now after editing.
| prox wrote:
| I changed the wording. Basically you get noname brand
| authors quotes next to really legendary figures quotes
| because it's all gamed.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| The thing is that it is a pretty easy to solve problem. Print
| advance copies with a QR code that contains a link to the
| publisher's site with a GUID in the params. The publisher would
| have a page, authenticated with the GUID, with authenticated
| links to private review pages. This allows for knowing the
| person had the advance copy. Just that line will kill 95% of
| review bombing. You can also use the publisher side to collect
| analytics on books before retail.
|
| Why am I telling you this? It's a not-half-bad B2B startup one
| could MVP over a week or so and your first publisher could get
| you in the door with the review sites who would love to have
| verified reviews.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| It's half-solved. I used a service to send out review copies,
| so I have a record of who downloaded from the email and who
| didn't. Which means the service does, and Amazon / Goodreads
| could easily use that.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Why stop at that? Why not have every book contain a QR code
| (crypographically secure GUID) and you have to be an
| "authenticated buyer" in order to participate. The ones that
| go to libraries could either be tagged specially or have the
| reviews scrutinized / shadowbanned until vouched for.
|
| This started out as /s but now I just feel like all of my
| information and every daily habit is going to end up (sold)
| online anyway.
|
| We're still hoping the owner of the New Goodreads doens't
| sell the ability to remove bad reviews. But what's the
| incentive not to? Hoping I see something better in the
| comments here.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Good idea. Maybe YCombinator would back it.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Potentially good alternative is https://literal.club/
|
| Not affiliated, just a happy user of the site.
| mighmi wrote:
| Do you know of any good forums or discussion places about books
| overall, or is literal good for it?
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Don't know about forums unfortunately. I use literal
| primarily for book tracking and discovery and I have no idea
| if it's any good to also discuss books with other people.
| jamilton wrote:
| There's also Storygraph. Looks like both sites support
| exporting data from Goodreads, and Literal.club supports export
| from Storygraph.
|
| Storygraph is pretty good, the UI is a little wonky but I
| prefer it to Goodreads largely because it isn't Amazon. I use
| it mostly for tracking reading, not so much for
| recommendations, but I have gotten some good recs from it.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I don't think GoodReads has any real alternative. Amazon knew
| that. That's why they bought it.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Storygraph is _fine_, but the UX is worse. (And that's saying
| something, because imo the Goodreads UX is just barely
| serviceable.)
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| It's been 10 years since Amazon bought it. Maybe it's time
| for alternatives to go online.
| sidmitra wrote:
| As others have pointed out, alternatives do exist. They
| just lack the network effect.
|
| I've recently moved to Bookwyrm.
|
| I was able to move import my Goodreads list, although many
| books were missing. Any new books i'm reading, go on
| Bookwyrm first. I had to add the ISBN details etc. for
| some. It's a bit of work initially, but atleast i feel my
| contribution is going to a non-walled garden.
|
| ----
|
| https://joinbookwyrm.com/ - Social Reading and Reviewing,
| Decentralized
|
| >BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading,
| talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what
| to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join
| small, trusted communities that can connect with one
| another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon
| and Pleroma.
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| Beware that Bookwyrm is neither Open Source (as per OSI
| definition) nor Free Software (per FSF definition). It is
| legally impossible for a lot of people to deploy it, I
| think it even include myself (I am employed by a company,
| does it counts as "laboring for myself" in my country?)
| sidmitra wrote:
| Doh!
|
| I went and looked at the license.
| https://github.com/bookwyrm-
| social/bookwyrm/blob/main/LICENS...
|
| Comment from the author. https://github.com/bookwyrm-
| social/bookwyrm/issues/2152
| meesles wrote:
| I think we're seeing increased scrutiny towards any social
| network remaining after Reddit and Twitter have been anti-
| consumer in their monetization practices.
|
| Personally, I've taken a great interest in ultimate-guitar.com,
| which I consider the equivalent of Goodreads for guitar and other
| music tabs. Networks like UG and Goodreads are the juiciest
| targets for corporate takeovers, and both those sites were
| entirely started on the contributions of non-employees. It
| doesn't matter if they have now started to produce the content
| themselves, they wouldn't have had the chance to without the work
| put in by others already.
|
| I encourage you, reader, to look into the social networks you use
| and to think about how you can archive the data submitted by the
| public. UG caught my attention because I refuse to allow them to
| steal their users' content after the fact just because they added
| some lines to their ToS. I don't know that that's their plan, but
| based on everything I've seen it seem inevitable.
|
| I hope someone else is looking to download all of Goodreads' data
| to make it available to future hobbyists and grassroots websites.
| MandieD wrote:
| This is the sort of thing the folks behind ArchiveTeam.org live
| for. I've not looked at their site in awhile because it's
| heartbreaking what they didn't get the chance to archive, but
| they've managed to rescue an awful lot, and provide the means
| for even not-very technical people to help out.
| sidibe wrote:
| My absolutely inane contribution I'm sharing only because it
| contrasts with everyone else commenting:
|
| I think Goodreads is fine, I do glance at it before any book I
| read to see what kind of reviews it has.
|
| The Amazon site I used all the time that sucks now is IMDb.
| r721 wrote:
| >The Amazon site I used all the time that sucks now is IMDb.
|
| Did you try enabling "Show reference view" setting? (Account
| Settings -> Content Settings)
| raydiatian wrote:
| Washington Post was the future of news then Jeff Bezos paywalled
| it
| pentagrama wrote:
| I hope no corporation buys https://letterboxd.com which is
| currently similar to the good old Goodreads but for movies.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| [dead]
| mg wrote:
| For me, it was always more important to discover authors than to
| discover books.
|
| When I find a author whose thoughts and theories I am interested
| in, I usually read everything from this author. Usually their
| most popular book is the best one.
|
| How is this for everybody else here? Any examples of books you
| discovered on GoodReads where the book itself was the important
| discovery and not the author?
| hnburnsy wrote:
| I've always suspected that journalists get story ideas from
| Hackernews top posts...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533153
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Now Bookwyrm is the future of book reviews. Because it's FOSS and
| federalised with ActivityPub protocol.
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| > Because it's FOSS
|
| It's not FOSS, my other comment on the issue:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36578294
| nologic01 wrote:
| Came here to say the same.
|
| Bookwyrm is a good example of how the fediverse architecture is
| more profound than social media (and definitely more profound
| than mastodon that is in the end of the day a twitter
| imitator).
|
| People may tire of social media inanity, whether it is
| centralized or decentralized. But there will always be
| communities that want to exchange information, thoughts,
| feelings, whether that is about movies, books or any other
| creative artifact.
|
| Its important that those conversations don't take place inside
| a giant automated vending machine.
| sidmitra wrote:
| One caveat for new users is that it requires some effort to
| use it. In many cases, if you're reading non mainstream books
| then it's on you to add those books and ISBN details + cover
| page etc. You're essentially contributing to the site
| content, but hopefully it's worth it.
|
| My profile is here, as an example:
| https://bookwyrm.social/user/sidmitra
| fastball wrote:
| Eh, Goodreads has always suffered from the same problem that
| plagues every other review system which uses "score out of X"
| ranking.
|
| Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal
| distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books in
| this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range (since
| Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover around
| 8ish. When in reality the average book should have a 2.5. If you
| _don 't_ rate like this then you just end up with garbage.
|
| Just allowing a boolean rating (ala Rotten Tomatoes when
| aggregated) is much better, _assuming_ you can get enough reviews
| for that system to actually work (probably > 30 is required for
| most applications).
|
| I think "aggregated personal Elo" would be a fun way to rank
| things: I just give you two books that you've read and you tell
| me which is better. Do this loads of times and eventually you
| have a solid ranking of every book you've ever read. Aggregate
| everyone's rankings and you have a much more robust system then
| "please rate this book out of 5 stars".
| bstpierre wrote:
| See https://www.criticker.com/explain/ -- it works sort of like
| what you're suggesting. You _rank_ movies from 0-100, which is
| different from _rating_ them. Your percentile ranking scores
| are compared to other users ' rankings, and then it can suggest
| movies that it thinks you will rank highly.
|
| IMO the real problem with something as subjective as books or
| movies is that even completely honest, well-reasoned reviews
| are going to be all over the map. My review of a Pride and
| Prejudice movie is going to be maybe 3/10, but my wife would
| give it 7/10, while we have the opposite reactions to something
| like The Hunt for Red October.
|
| I don't care about reviews from experts _or_ the unwashed
| masses. I don 't even really care about reviews that much --
| I'm more interesting in ratings from people who like the same
| kind of stuff I do.
| fourmajor wrote:
| I disagree that stars should be evenly distributed between 1 to
| 5 stars. I think it's quite possible that most books that
| people choose to read end up being a 3 (good with some flaws)
| or 4 (good but not all-time great). It's kind of like the same
| thing with pizza. I'd give most pizza a 3 or 4. Very few 1s and
| 5s to be sure. 1 doesn't have to mean bottom 20% of pizzas. It
| can mean "awful, couldn't finish," where very few pizzas would
| fall into that category. 5 doesn't need to mean "best 20% of
| pizzas," it can mean "telling strangers about it the next day,"
| again where very few pizzas would fall into that category.
| [deleted]
| kortilla wrote:
| "Normal distribution" doesn't mean evenly distributed. Most
| being in the middle is a normal distribution.
| LVB wrote:
| I had a debate on the Criticker site about this topic since
| they try hard to turn your raw ratings into a normalized
| span. The fact is that _because_ of ratings sites, I 'm very
| rarely watching 1-star movies. That's good! So the low end
| was dominated by a 2.5/3 type ratings, which per my scale
| meant "just OK," but they were mapping it to "bad," somehow
| inferring that my rating range is 3-5.
| tim-fan wrote:
| _I just give you two books that you 've read and you tell me
| which is better._
|
| I played around with a tool for sorting through my personal
| photos based on that idea.
|
| It gets interesting when you start thinking of how to optimally
| choose pairs to compare, to maximise signal and minimize
| redundant comparisons. This becomes more important as the size
| of the set of objects you are comparing becomes large.
|
| https://github.com/tim-fan/image_sorting
| nextos wrote:
| There's also TrueSkill, by Microsoft Research, which turns Elo
| into a proper generative model:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueSkill
|
| It'd be definitely interesting to see a book review site like
| this. In the meantime, for math books, I trust curated rankings
| by MAA: https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews
| pizza_pleb wrote:
| We use this at https://languageroadmap.com, but for
| difficulty rankings between titles in the context of language
| learning using media. It does seem to work pretty well and we
| disclaim rankings with the confidence score.
|
| As for the grandparent comment: recency bias, as pointed out
| by another commenter is a thing, as is the tediousness of
| doing a bunch of pairwise decisions. I think a happier medium
| is to have everyone fill in tier charts (with variable number
| of tiers) and build the pairwise rankings from that.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I just give you two books that you've read and you tell me
| which is better.
|
| I've always been so for this in situations where the users also
| have a database of their own history on the site, like
| Goodreads or Boardgamegeek.com, for example. Just throw up
| modals every once and a while comparing two books that you know
| the user knows, and make it easy to opt out of. I probably
| wouldn't opt out, because it would appeal to my ego and feel
| like a game.
|
| > Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal
| distribution, so you invariably end up with every item (books
| in this case) being ranked somewhere in the 3.5-4.5 range
| (since Goodreads is out of 5). For IMDB the rankings all hover
| around 8ish. When in reality the average book should have a
| 2.5. If you don't rate like this then you just end up with
| garbage.
|
| Just normalize the users against themselves. I wouldn't be
| giving a 4-star review, I'd be giving a _pessimizer_ (4-star
| review).
| mahoho wrote:
| Well rating scales don't have any absolute meaning, only that
| which is attributed to them either by the reviewer or the
| audience. On any aggregate review site the scale of the
| aggregate score will take on its own semantics, which is the
| aggregate of all the users' own semantics they use for their
| individual scores.
|
| And for most people, it seems like the semantics of rating
| scales don't align with a normal distribution about the 50%
| mark, but something more like letter grades where 70% is
| decent/mediocre, while 50% is a failure (in the US).
|
| IMO this makes at least as much sense as centering around 50%;
| if you only score 50% of the points on a test I don't think
| you're competent in a subject, and if your book only meets 50%
| of the criteria for a great book then it might be a bad book.
| But again, it's all arbitrary and only makes sense in the
| context of the particular reviewer or aggregate community.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| > I just give you two books that you've read and you tell me
| which is better.
|
| I can't wait to compare _The Pickwick Papers_ against _The
| Unfolding of Language_.
| gavmor wrote:
| A solid point: books may excel at one dimension while not
| even attempting another. I suppose one might have to
| ascertain what genre, exactly, a book falls in, and how it
| fares in its own genre. But then you're not comparing
| pairwise, and we lose the benefits of our visual cortex or
| whatever neural system is so good at pairwise comparisons.
|
| Constraining pairings within their genres might suffice, if
| possible. There are several standard ontology for books, and
| it's not a trivial problem.
| [deleted]
| waspight wrote:
| I have thought about this relative rating as well. Would it be
| possible to use? I mean, does it scale? I also have seen some
| ratings where you can only rate between 5 - 10, I guess since
| no one ever rates below 5 anyway. I think it kind of works.
| ohlookcake wrote:
| > the average book should have a 2.5 Disagree on this. This
| assumes that people read books completely at random. In
| reality, people read blurbs/summaries or get a recommendation
| and the typical book you read is likely to be better than the
| midpoint between the worst book you've read and the best book
| you've read (I'm assuming a linear scale mental model).
| CSMastermind wrote:
| > This assumes that people read books completely at random.
|
| I'm not sure it implies that. I think that if:
|
| 1. Book quality follows a normal distribution.
|
| and
|
| 2. People are capable of accurately assessing the quality of
| books relative to other books.
|
| then you'd end up with an average rating of 2.5.
|
| It doesn't matter if people are disproportionately reading
| the better books and rating them highly because an increasing
| number of reviews on a book would only give you more
| confidence in its rating, not change the rating of the book
| relative to other books.
|
| To illustrate this we can imagine a world with only 100 books
| in it and only 100 people in it.
|
| Let's assume that a single person from that group reads all
| 100 books and per the two assumptions above correctly rates
| them on a normal distribution.
|
| Then the other 99 people read only a single book which the
| first person recommends as a 5. And per the two assumptions
| above they all also rate it as a 5.
|
| Now there are 99 books with only 1 rating normally
| distributed between 1 and 5 and there is 1 book with 100
| ratings - all 5s.
|
| Does this change the average rating of books on the platform?
|
| Nope the average rating is still 2.5. In fact the one book
| could have a million ratings or a billion 5 star ratings and
| the average rating of books on the platform would still be a
| 2.5.
|
| What we see on sites like goodreads is that either book
| quality doesn't follow a normal distribution and/or people
| are not capable of accurately assessing the quality of books
| relative to other books.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Good points. But do we have evidence GR is not a normal
| distribution. GP's comment does apply to views of ratings,
| so we might have an impression if higher average rating
| because the books we look at are more often better than
| avg.
| throw0101a wrote:
| For a while now I've though that maybe only three rankings are
| needed:
|
| * Recommend this thing
|
| * Neutral opinion
|
| * Do not recommend this thing
|
| Not sure how much "neutral" would be used: kind of like thumbs-
| up/down or up-down-vote mechanic: if you're neutral you may
| simply not vote at all.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| In medicine they use a pain scale with faces when they need to
| find out from kids how much pain they are in. Something like
| that might be a better system?
| xhevahir wrote:
| This article about Microsoft's research on recommendation
| algorithms was interesting. It's from several years ago, so I
| imagine some people have begun using it.
| https://news.mit.edu/2017/better-recommendation-algorithm-12...
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| And in many such systems the peer pressure to give a 5 is
| tremendous, which further devalues the rating system. Uber
| drivers for example have told me that if more than a few
| customers give them a 4 they will be effectively fired.
| Restaurants, tour companies etc have asked me to please give
| them the maximum number of stars on Yelp, Google, Tripadvisor,
| etc lest there be dire consequences for them.
|
| This is of course Goodheart's Law in action but I don't have
| any ideas for fixing the problem.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Seems like this is culturally different for some things. And
| corporations can influence too.
|
| I have a friend who has four restaurants in Tokyo, and I've
| been several times there. If you keep attention to the
| restaurant reviews in Google Maps, Japanese people is very
| hard. They'd go like "The food is great, incredible service,
| surprising flavors, very good experience, best Spanish food
| I've had in a long time..." and then they go "...but I know
| they can do better and have space to improve. 2/5".
|
| In Spain we would be like "Nice beer, they gave us some tapas.
| 5/5"
|
| Gig economy corporations also have made this worse. You're
| scared to score your driver, your server or your hotel by less
| than a 5/5 or somebody might get punished or fired (and maybe
| they didn't even had a contract in the first place).
|
| And this becomes a snake biting its own tail. Now I rarely go
| to a place with a score of less than a 4/5, and I'll score
| relatively high because I know I could influence votes out of
| what people consider "worthy to visit".
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I rarely go to a place with a score of less than a 4/5
|
| I have a simpler heuristic. I ignore all customer ratings
| entirely, and refuse to leave any.
| [deleted]
| yurishimo wrote:
| 100% it's cultural. In the Netherlands, companies brag about
| a 7 or 8 out of ten as proof of their amazing customer
| service. When I lived in America, it seemed the consensus of
| anything under a 9 is killing puppies.
|
| Coincidentally, NPS is entirely based on this fact. 8+ is
| required for a "happy customer". 7 is given a little wiggle
| room to win them back and under 6 is a lost cause.
| autarch wrote:
| At my last employer they ran regular eNPS surveys using
| this 1-10 response scale where only 9 or 10 were considered
| positive. After much complaining from me that this was
| batshit crazy (I phrased this more appropriately at work),
| they finally switched to using just three possible
| responses. The question was something like "Would you
| recommend an acquaintance or friend with the appropriate
| skills to apply for a job at $Company?". The three
| responses were "No", "Maybe", and "Yes".
| MandieD wrote:
| Fun related fact about 1-5 survey responses in Germany:
| make sure you specify that 5 is the top mark and 1 is the
| bottom, otherwise you're liable to get some really odd
| results.
|
| This is because 1 is the highest grade (mark) in school,
| and 5 is failing, as is the even-worse 6.
|
| And even so informed, or accustomed to 1-5 scale used by
| everyone else, Germans are more likely than Americans to
| give a 4 instead of a 5 to something that they were happy
| with, but was not the best they'd ever experienced.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > In the Netherlands, companies brag about a 7 or 8 out of
| ten as proof of their amazing customer service.
|
| Huh, could you give an example of it? I am new to the
| Netherlands and hadn't realized this yet.
| yurishimo wrote:
| Sure. I was looking up energy price comparisons last
| night and came across this.
|
| https://www.overstappen.nl/energie/vergelijken/
|
| Under "Beste energievergelijker"
|
| > Onze klanten beoordelen ons daarom met gemiddeld een
| 8,6.
|
| If you scroll further, you can see their ratings for
| other services; none reach even an 8.
|
| Compare that to Nerd Wallet's "Best Life Insurance
| Companies" (a segment that is nearly identical from all
| providers if you purchase term life).
|
| https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/best-life-
| insur...
|
| 5/5 across the board for all parties. I get that it's a
| "best of" list, but you seriously mean to tell me all of
| these companies are exactly the same? The rest of Nerd
| Wallet's top pick lists are the same.
| dahwolf wrote:
| How we rate things in the Netherlands is a reflection of
| the rating system used in schools.
|
| 1-5. Ranging from pathetic to inadequate, in any case you
| didn't pass.
|
| 6. Adequate, the minimum needed to pass. A culturally
| important number as it expresses the "zesjescultuur", a
| phenomenon where somebody is intentionally doing the
| absolute bare minimum to not get into trouble.
|
| 7. More than adequate.
|
| 8. Good. Even if near-perfect, few Dutch people would
| rate above this number because we don't want you to get
| all cocky.
|
| 9. Excellent. In service, only awarded when you did
| something completely unexpected or memorable.
|
| 10. Perfect, flawless.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The insiders say never to rent from AirBnB if the property
| isn't at least 4.8 stars. These days those ranking systems
| don't truly start from 0 or 1. The statistically significant
| range is much smaller. I don't personally know have the stats
| chops to do it, but I'm sure determining that range can be
| done.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The important thing is to actually read the reviews. A
| five-star place that's located 2 blocks away from a
| railroad crossing that's active all night won't yield a
| five-star experience, but the host can hardly be expected
| to mention that.
|
| The last AirBnB I rented was a five-star house where the
| host had installed one of those Nest smoke detectors with
| the motion-sensing night light directly above the bed. He
| still got a five-star rating, but I went well out of my way
| to mention the night light in my review.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Humans
|
| There's the problem there - assuming human input makes up an
| important part of the rankings.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| The Modern Zelda reviews are a prime example of this.
|
| The non-industry people reviewing Zelda have 4 options, 7/10,
| 8/10, 9/10, 10/10.
|
| A 7/10 means the game was bad and you had a hard time finishing
| it, and won't be playing again.
|
| 8/10 means the game was also bad, but you had fun for a few
| minutes/hours.
|
| 9/10 means the game meet minimum expectations.
|
| 10/10 means you enjoyed the game, but there were countless
| flaws that took away from enjoying the game.
|
| 10/10 Greatest game of all time means, the game was above
| average.
|
| Now, this same system applied outside Nintendo's curve, you
| knock these numbers down 2.
|
| Its incredibly hard to figure out if a Nintendo game is good,
| if you treat them like other companies. Even Nintendo believes
| this and will yank early access/ads/etc... from gaming websites
| if you don't comply with the Nintendo curve.
| afterburner wrote:
| > The non-industry people reviewing Zelda have 4 options,
| 7/10, 8/10, 9/10, 10/10.
|
| Did you mean the industry people? Plenty of user reviews are
| 1/10. It's the industry guys that are always rating stuff 7+
| yurishimo wrote:
| Devils advocate; Is it not possible that Nintendo just makes
| good games?
|
| They spend a lot of time on development, don't rush things,
| the trailers are honest about gameplay and what to expect.
|
| I can understand it's not your cup of tea or arguments that
| their online service is shit (it is) but reviewing a video
| game in isolation, many of them seem to be good games
| objectively. Games that don't appeal to the average CoD fan
| sure, but that doesn't mean they are bad games.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Nah, you can see it on subreddits as people discuss the
| game. Complaining about a few enemies, copypaste world,
| etc... Its not a 10/10, but it will still be reviewed like
| this.
|
| Imagine you got rid of the Zelda skins and Zelda name,
| released it on Xbox. What would it get then?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I religiously play all the zelda's and
| find ways to enjoy them. I am under Nintendo's spell, but I
| also know these are the corporate mascots I grew up with.
| Nintendo markets to children, we basically need therapy if
| we want to be free from their grip.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| > _Imagine you got rid of the Zelda skins and Zelda name,
| released it on Xbox. What would it get then?_
|
| You're right, but to be fair sort of 'reskin and re-rate'
| test would decimate the reviews of most sequels, remakes,
| adaptations, etc. Not just in video games, but movies,
| books, etc. Would Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings
| trilogy have been half as culturally relevant if it
| weren't standing on the shoulders of a very popular
| series of books?
| yurishimo wrote:
| That's fair. I would take a minor issue with your framing
| (someone who didn't play BotW wouldn't find the map a cop
| out and I'm glad they put the effort in for the 2 other
| layers of the map) but you could make those same
| arguments against COD or Destiny.
|
| I do think it's worth noting how many of the ideas from
| BotW have been copied in the past 6 years in other games.
|
| I guess my point is, I can understand the 10/10s but I
| also find it entirely reasonable to view it closer to a 7
| or 8.
|
| We're also not thinking about things in a vacuum in this
| discussion. Is the Xbox game released as if BotW never
| happened? Nintendo certainly uses its brand to buy
| marketing influence but importantly, I don't think the
| company is pissed when games fail.
|
| Skyward Sword was a good example of that actually. It's
| failure literally led to BotW. Nintendo got off their
| laurels and reinvented their "tried and true" formula and
| now it's paying off.
|
| I am closer your position for games like 2D Mario. Zero
| innovation and I'll be eagerly watching the reviews for
| the new game later this year.
| delecti wrote:
| A simple point that address a lot of that is just that bad
| games usually get fewer reviews. There are still plenty of
| 6/10 and below games getting reviewed, but (contrary to the
| idiom) you can often accurately get a decent gauge of media
| ahead of time. People want to experience good media, and so
| better media tends to have a gravity of critic and audience
| attention. Most reviews don't go below 7 because reviewers
| are people who, just like the rest of us, want to enjoy good
| media.
|
| A couple examples: Lord of the Rings Gollum (a recent, high-
| profile, but poorly received game) has 36 critic reviews on
| metacritic for an average of 39, Forspoken (another similarly
| high-profile and poorly-received game) has 7 for an average
| of 63, and Tears of the Kingdom has 139 for an average of 96.
| Someone with more free time and motivation could pull a
| better spread of data to really show how the two data points
| relate, but I'd be shocked if there weren't a strong
| correlation between score and review count almost across the
| board.
| sedatk wrote:
| Yes, one person I knew rated my book 2/5 because, as he said,
| it was beginner/mid-level-oriented and he wasn't aware when he
| purchased it (clearly stated on the book's page, and pretty
| much everywhere). A star rating system gives more emphasis on
| an individual's own preference of what a good rating should be
| which works against the consumer.
| berkes wrote:
| I really like the idea of relative ratings.
|
| But that also amplifies a problem that exists with any rating:
| recency bias, or any sort of time bias.
|
| I change over time. An album that I loved when I was 15 could
| get a 1/5 from me today. Or a book that I hated in my teens,
| may now be my favorite. It's complicated.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| Elo/Trueskill sounds like a solid idea.
|
| When you go to rate a book the system asks you if it was better
| or worse (maybe same) then a book of you previously read
| closest in rating or some hidden matchmaking rating (MMR).
|
| I think having books having both a personal and global score
| would be nice as well.
|
| I don't think it would be possible for someone to change their
| rating but that may be a feature.
|
| I also don't think this solves recommendation though it may be
| useful as a feature.
| kmos17 wrote:
| As much as the IMDB rankings are obviously gamed (especially
| when a movie or series just came out) I find the ratings fairly
| accurate over time, a 7+ is usually pretty decent to great for
| 8+, ratings of 6 are usually pretty average and 5 and below are
| truly awful.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Agree. Except for Indian movies. Their ratings aren't
| trustworthy. Lots of 8+ movies they're mediocre or bad
| (despite high production costs).
| jsmith99 wrote:
| It's not just because humans are bad at distributions. I would
| rate almost all the books I read at least 3/5 because I pick my
| books carefully. There are plenty of terrible books deserving
| 1/5 but they are often obvious from a distance.
|
| With eg movies a much greater investment is required to tell if
| it's terrible.
| [deleted]
| glitcher wrote:
| > Humans just aren't very good at ranking things on a normal
| distribution
|
| Anecdotally this feels correct, the more common user rating
| distributions I see are an inverted bell curve - lots of 5's
| and 1's, not too many 3's.
|
| But as far as the same problem that plagues every other review
| system goes, I would say the paid/fake reviews are the far
| bigger problem.
| thebigspacefuck wrote:
| IIRC they initially gave you a text for each star like
|
| 1 - I hated it
|
| 2 - It was okay
|
| 3 - I liked it
|
| 4 - It was great
|
| 5 - I loved it
|
| I thought it was helpful for framing what a score would be but
| I haven't seen this in the app or anywhere for a long time. At
| least it avoids the problem of Amazon where a review is like
| "Best book I've ever read but the copy I received had a rip on
| the dust jacket - 1/5".
|
| Learned through experience to skip anything below a 4 or very
| high 3 now. Probably missing some interesting stuff but I don't
| read that often anyway.
| [deleted]
| zerkten wrote:
| Is there a relationship between the application of product
| management "techniques" and the outcomes for many of these sites?
| It seems that many of these sites hit this wall when they get
| acquired. It feels like they start experimenting incoherently
| with things that don't align with the vision, or even the goals
| of the acquirer.
|
| My personal theory is that this stems from many disjointed
| experiments where the experimentation is viewed as being more
| important than anything else. Their mission is to deliver
| revenue, or some other metric, that isn't visible to users, so
| perhaps they do achieve their goals.
| [deleted]
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| WaPO covering Amazon's Goodreads acquisition is really something.
| garfieldnate wrote:
| I don't really understand the sentiment in the article about
| Amazon not doing anything with it. When Goodreads was acquired,
| general opinion was "oh no, I hope they don't ruin it -- don't
| worry, Amazon is known for acquiring working businesses and
| letting them be." I don't want new social functions on Goodreads;
| I get an email digest with activity of my friends, and I keep the
| friend list very, very short so I'm not overloaded with activity.
| And why on Earth does the author of the article want Amazon to
| get _more_ involved with detecting bad reviews? As if their track
| record on their main site would provide any evidence of their
| being good at that!
| flenserboy wrote:
| Iron Law of User Orientation: User-driven & -oriented sites &
| organization will inevitably be taken over, worn like a skin-
| suit, & used by corporations for their own ends.
| arvidkahl wrote:
| Besides Goodreads falling into complete disarray, it is equally
| painful to know that Amazon owns the .book TLD
| (https://icannwiki.org/.book) and has yet to make that available
| to anyone.
|
| A lot of Amazon's publishing-related acquisitions tend to stray
| from what they were intended to be.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Amazon owns the .book TLD
|
| I'm actually fine with that, because it lets me reliably know
| that site is affiliated with Amazon, so I know to avoid going
| there.
| arvidkahl wrote:
| Making the best of it :D
| triangleman83 wrote:
| Maybe I am behind but isn't ChatGPT a great option for an automod
| which can read reviews and determine whether or not they should
| remain up? I tried it on a few examples with a simple prompt and
| it gave great reasoning why the nasty reviews I fed it should be
| removed.
| charles_f wrote:
| Goodreads had already stopped innovating before it was acquired
| by Amazon. What's sad is that they have a good user base, data on
| who reads what, I'm sure they could do a good recommendation
| engine, but somehow the closest they ended up with is poorly user
| curated lists.
| stevebmark wrote:
| What's the insider report on the Goodreads technical staff? Did
| they all quit after the site was bought? Did they stay, and
| they're just coasting? Did Amazon nix the tech team? The site has
| received almost no technical improvements, so there's clearly not
| an effective tech team anymore. Can someone at Amazon share the
| the gossip?
| ggwareago wrote:
| Nothing salacious. People left over time. Maybe higher turnover
| than other Amazon orgs because change is harder there.
|
| >The site has received almost no technical improvements,
|
| Not true. Theyre under the surface or not webfacing. (Like
| Kindle integration)
|
| The biggest technical issue with Goodreads is this: the site
| was originally built as a giant pile of Rails spaghetti with
| views mixed with business logic and such and then a fuck ton of
| weird features built and left to sit there. Like way WAY more
| than you'd think unless you actively hunted through the webmap.
|
| There is an ongoing metaproject to detangle the spaghetti into
| an api that sits in front of the databases and deprecate the
| Rails hell pit (derisively called 'the monolith' internally).
| It's taken years. It is still in progress. It was started far
| too late in the game. When people talk about tech debt at
| Goodreads thats mainly what they mean.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| As a certifiably "normie" book reader, I find Goodreads useless.
| Whenever I look at a book's reviews to figure out if it's worth
| it to buy, the reviews are filled with book enthusiasts (and
| often enthusiasts of that author). It makes sense, since they're
| probably the most likely to write a review of a book online in
| the first place.
| habosa wrote:
| I'd love to move off of Goodreads but their export function is
| pitiful, to the point that I'd say it's deliberately hobbled.
|
| All I do is mark books 1-5 stars and record the date I read it. I
| recently tried to export to StoryGraph and 1/3 of my books were
| missing finished dates.
|
| If youre owned by Amazon and can't put a date in a CSV I suspect
| malicious intent over incompetence.
| javier_e06 wrote:
| A WaPo article talking about Amazon exploits. What a bizarre
| world we live in. I made the mistake to join Goodreads. Makes
| reading a books a some sort of sport. I was not aware that it was
| owned by Amazon but now it makes sense on how the approach the
| action of reading a book into a data mining affair.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| It's a good sign to me that the Washington Post, a Jeff Bezos
| company, is able to criticize a Jeff Bezos business.
| [deleted]
| hospitalJail wrote:
| This is small fries though.
|
| I'm sure a truly critical post about Amazon's cash maker
| wouldn't make it past the editors.
| boxcarr wrote:
| Goodreads seems to be the Craigslist of the book world: many
| attempts by others to make a better Goodreads, but none good
| enough to displace it.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Given that the article is on the Washington post, it's worth
| pointing out that that is another thing that Jeff Bezos owns.
| CalRobert wrote:
| I interviewed with Goodreads in 2012. If there's one thing I
| learned it's that when you give people weird gimmick problems
| ("How many Starbucks are there in Manhattan?") in an 8 hour
| interview that was supposed to be 2 hours, you're going to
| produce an awful lot of ill will when you reject people because
| they're "too technical". The whole thing was the most bizarre
| interview experience of my life.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| I'd love to hear a bit more about the interview, if you're
| willing to share. Weird interviews are always fun to listen to!
| :)
| Leires wrote:
| I'm sorry you went through that. I had an interview recently
| that asked no technical questions, only logic puzzles like
| "princess is behind door number 1, monster is behind door
| number 2" scenario shit. I mentioned I'm extremely bad at
| these, but I have ten years of experience that I can speak to.
| I went ahead and did the quiz and got ghosted anyways. The
| silver lining is we get to watch companies like this become
| landfills. Cheers.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I had a 1 hour interview go for 3 hours because they couldn't
| get the HR, hiring manager, and engineer at the same time.
|
| Ended up telling the sameish stories 3 times.
|
| They offered me a job, then covid happened, then they offered
| me it at a 10% decrease, then they canceled the contract, then
| they called me 6 months later. I already had a job at that
| point and they were begging me to leave.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > because they couldn't get the HR, hiring manager, and
| engineer at the same time.
|
| I think you dodged a bullet. If a company doesn't have their
| act together enough to actually gather the people they need
| for a meeting that they themselves set up, it hints that
| there are deep management-level problems there.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| For sure, the company was a Zombie company, but the title
| was somewhat impressive for my age. I even worked at that
| company 8 years before, they were so petty when I didn't
| take a pay cut to be a direct hire, and they got rid of me.
| (Got a 30% raise at my next job, doh!)
|
| Ended up getting my dream job to be a programmer instead of
| a (real) engineer. Now I make more money than ever, as you
| can imagine.
| ar_lan wrote:
| I think sharing a Washington Post article about Amazon is...
| probably not a good thing to do at all. This article probably
| isn't worth reading, to be honest, the bias is too high.
| dvt wrote:
| Calling "contextualizing a piece of literature in its broader
| sociopolitical context" review-bombing is pretty myopic. For
| example, if you decided to write a book on how awesome the Nazis
| were, you would rightfully raise some eyebrows. But in any case,
| the problem with crowd-sourced reviews is that this is a "live by
| the sword, die by the sword" kind of game. It's great when a
| bunch of lemmings love your book, cause it to catapult in
| ratings, and go viral. But, some are now discovering that it can
| go both ways: the masses being "negatively viral" or purposefully
| trolling, or brigading.
|
| You can't have your cake and eat it, too. This is the main reason
| I've never seriously used Goodreads as a source for pointed
| literary criticism. Like most social media, it's a bunch of self-
| important folks trying to be more self-important.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| While I understand Bezos is not Amazon (and vice versa), am I the
| only one grinning at the irony of this coming from The Washington
| Post?
| birdymcbird wrote:
| article puts goodreads problems on amazon. partially true but
| lazy journalism.
|
| much goodreads leadership same as when amazon bought them. i know
| because i work close to them before i leave amazon.
|
| tech was outdated ruby on rails. the engineering org has very low
| technical bar and love inventing things that amazon already solve
| at scale. more energy put into resisting amazon than thinking
| about innovation. lots and lots of waste.
|
| i do wonder how amazon layoffs affected goodreads. i would clean
| house.
| kunalgupta wrote:
| I don't think amazon gas touched their UX much since 1998 so it's
| not like Goodreads is receiving unpreferential treatment
| koboll wrote:
| Here's what Amazon.com looked like in 1998:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060522143937/http://www.amazon...
| notatoad wrote:
| i've been "using" goodreads since long before amazon bought it,
| and it's always just been kind of terrible. It was a clunky, not
| terribly nice to use site full of absolutely garbage-tier book
| reviews. the only redeeming quality was the authors who would
| leave honest reviews on each other's books.
|
| i wish there was a site like goodreads, but good. but goodreads
| was not on track to be that site before amazon took it over.
| jbaber wrote:
| I've been liking the recommendations from
| https://thestorygraph.com a lot. They can import your goodreads
| reviews.
| dopa42365 wrote:
| 80% of reviews being "got the ebook for free before release in
| exchange for a very honest review" or "here're my 10000 words
| thoughts on spoiler spoiler spoiler" and overuse of goddamn
| inline gifs everywhere made the review section unreadable. It's
| more like a social network with gamification of book reviews.
|
| Looking at a random book: 4.36 stars, 74 ratings, 28 reviews.
| Release date: 18. July 2023 (in 15 days)
|
| No comment on that required heh.
|
| Goodreads is semi-useful to keep track of upcoming book releases,
| but don't bother reading the reviews, and the score is at best a
| vague indicator (and definitely misleading until months after the
| book is actually available).
| doh wrote:
| Imagine if Goodreads (or similar) only allowed ratings for
| unreleased books if the publisher submitted the ebook into the
| system. The system then embeds it into GPT4 and if one wants to
| submit a review they have to answer a question (or multiple)
| about the book to verify they actually read it.
| kawera wrote:
| Not to mention reviewers with 3k+ reviews. Who in their right
| mind properly read and review 3k books?
| qingcharles wrote:
| WTF. I spent 10 years in jail reading endlessly and only
| managed about 900 in total. And I had LITERALLY nothing else
| to do.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| You read 90 a year. I've read 75 a year while going to
| school or working full time. So it's possible to read more,
| and for more than 10 years.
|
| (However I might lose my mind if I did that. Even at 75 I
| started to feel like I was wasting my life with over
| consumptions.)
| [deleted]
| costanzaDynasty wrote:
| FAANG, because it sucked the internet dry.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| For anime we have myanimelist.com, for (asian) dramas we have
| mydramalist.com; and both seems to work, for both tracking and
| for recommendations... but something like that for books does not
| exist _.
|
| Goodreads acts as the tracker for me, but a recommendations
| engine it absolutely sucks. It has never recommended me a book
| ever, I have to rely on /r/fantasy to churn out new
| recommendations for me.
|
| In the age of AI and LLM and whatever bullshit, how hard is it
| for Amazon (owner of AWS) to see my read list (which I diligently
| update) and recommend me something based on the things I've read
| before, give more weight to my latest reads, and match the
| sentiments with the text of other books (which they have access
| too, and it's just text no audio/video bullshit)?
|
| If Youtube can do it, if god damn Twitter can do it, why can't
| Amazon?
|
| ----
|
| _(we do have mybooklist.com, but it simply does not work
| properly, it just seems to be a simple and literal "list"
| aggregator, from other sources, like newspaper etc.)
| linusg789 wrote:
| https://ghostarchive.org/archive/kp8A4
| vvpan wrote:
| I know it is really easy to disparage blockchain but in my
| opinion smart contracts can mitigate much of the startup buy-up
| problem. They allow describing a system as an autonomous protocol
| that is not "owned" by an entity. Yes, the company that builds
| tooling around the protocol could be bought but unless the
| protocol is explicitly backdoored nobody can pull the rug from
| under the users' feet and data ownership remains in the protocol
| participants' hands. Blockchain UX is not yet where most people
| would like it to be but it is improving fairly quickly and I
| think we could see adoption of autonomous protocols in the next
| couple of years.
| mt_ wrote:
| What happened to Book Depository was disgusting.
| muhammadusman wrote:
| what happened to them?
| mkl wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35439673
| electroagenda wrote:
| OMG... Did not know Amazon was the owner of Goodreads. There is
| practically no way you can buy a book online outside the Amazon
| ecosystem.
| jamilton wrote:
| There's Smashwords. I wish more authors used it, I don't know
| why they don't.
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| There are certainly ways, I switched to a Kobo reader instead
| of a Kindle and haven't bought a book off Amazon in years.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| There's a little bit of discussion from when I posted this a few
| days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36550687
| steedsofwar wrote:
| Bezos also owns the Washington Post. Make of that what you will.
| moomin wrote:
| I think large corporations are typically fine with criticism
| that doesn't affect their bottom line.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| https://www.librarything.com/
| synetic wrote:
| No well done review site will remain good once it reaches a
| critical mass. Private, small scale networks of friends are the
| future of trusted reviews and recommendations.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| https://archive.is/TVPWD
| crazygringo wrote:
| Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good
| review site that might have innovated great new things or might
| not have at all.
|
| But regardless, Amazon should _never_ have been allowed to
| acquire it -- it was _incredibly_ anti-competitive.
|
| Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as
| demonstrated by the fact that it _hasn 't_ done anything. It was
| a purely defensive move to _prevent anyone else_ from acquiring
| or partnering with Goodreads, because their database of books and
| reviews could be used to instantly start competing with Amazon 's
| book business. Amazon snuffed out that threat of competition in
| an instant.
| grecy wrote:
| > _It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from
| acquiring or partnering with Goodreads_
|
| I think there's another angle you're missing here - Amazon
| wanted to stop paying so much in affiliate sales. At their
| size, they were easily taking in tens of millions a year from
| all the Amazon affiliate links.
|
| Now Amazon own it, they don't have to pay that out.
| weego wrote:
| Goodreads was the future of aggressively biased people shouting
| their opinions to other people with no discernable value in
| theirs over others.
|
| Rose tinted view.
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Can't tell your post is sarcastic or not. Good reads is a
| valuable resource, especially for avid readers - without it I
| wouldn't have read as many good books as I did.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| You mean like what you're doing right now?
| pfdietz wrote:
| You do realize that's both an ad hominem argument and an
| admission he's correct, right?
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| First, it's not an argument, it's an observation, as
| there's no argument the be had. Why? Because...
|
| Second, the observation is that you can literally
| characterize every online discussion forum that way. It's
| a pointless comment that borders on tautology. Put people
| in a space together to share their thoughts, and some of
| them will end up behaving badly.
|
| Third, it was an observation of the silliness and,
| frankly, hypocrisy of simultaneously complaining about
| the behaviour of shouting baseless opinions on discussion
| forums by shouting a baseless opinion on a discussion
| forum.
| smeagull wrote:
| There's no admission that he's correct there at all. The
| existence of one bad faith actor doesn't make everyone a
| bad faith actor.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Amazon's inshittification of everything continues. They also
| own AbeBooks, have their own cargo airline, Twitch, Audible,
| Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Kindle, Ring, Whole Foods, IMDb, Zappos,
| Egghead, the late lamented DPReview, and a few others.
|
| > _incredibly_ anti-competitive.
|
| A description of Amazon in general.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| DPReview was bought and saved, at least. So let's not label
| them late and lamented yet!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409566
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| Whaaat I didn't know they owned AbeBooks. I love AbeBooks. I
| wonder how much of a cut they take from booksellers?
| jzonedotcom wrote:
| In my opinion Amazon's purchase and immediate dismantling of
| the vaunted Stanza was most egregious & anticompetitive. I
| loved that app. And then poof gone.
| cratermoon wrote:
| That purchase would not have been allowed to go through in
| the pre-Reagan monopoly legal era.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Vertical integration at its finest. They pay the authors to
| write the books they publish which get sold in their store that
| they link to from the site they own that reviews the books and
| pays the reviewers an affiliation bonus. No one is buying books
| with bad reviews. Brilliant!
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| Full disclosure, I'm an author who has self published a few
| things on Amazon and setup author stuff on amazon and
| goodreads.
|
| > _as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn 't done anything._
|
| There are links between the two. You can buy my books on amazon
| (the dropdown supports other vendors) from their Goodreads
| pages.
|
| But to your point about anticompetitive, I completely agree.
|
| Why are corporations even allowed to just buy other
| corporations, _at all?_
|
| A shitty bank bought my bank and promptly made everything about
| it shittier. Why is this even allowed at all? Companies buying
| other companies is about the most fundamentally anti-
| competitive thing there is.
| abc_lisper wrote:
| Can this not be reversed. Force amazon to spin it out?
| biggoodwolf wrote:
| And who would do that? Even if technically possible, there is
| no one willing to do it.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| FTC, if they weren't captured.
| [deleted]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I think this is correct. The acquisition was anti-competitive,
| and Lina Khan's FTC would probably challenge it.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| You mean in retrospect? Is that a thing? If so, how do you
| folks (assuming here) trigger it - some petition? Or FTC
| picks its own bespoke fights if at all?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Verb tense. Should have said "would have."
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Why? The FTC has shown time and again it has no interest in
| enforcing the rules, whether that's under Pai, Khan, or going
| back every administration since the Microsoft anti-
| competition days.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| In general historically I'd agree with you but the FTC
| under Khan has been prolific, not to mention there was
| recently news that they specifically are going to target
| Amazon for a large antitrust case and Khan wrote what is
| considered her most important paper specifically on Amazon.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-29/amazon-
| ma...
|
| https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.
| p...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Prolific in what, though? Actual fines instead of
| peanuts? Preventing mergers of companies that at the
| federal level don't lead to monopolies, but at every
| local level do? It speaks volumes to how little power the
| FTC has in the modern day if it still doesn't have enough
| on Amazon to have forced them into reform on Khan's first
| day in office. Their business practice isn't exactly a
| secret.
|
| It's not that they haven't gotten better, but "better"
| and "what they should be" are _very_ different things.
| One only hopefully leads to the other.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database is
| enough to threaten their business?
| tivert wrote:
| > Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database
| is enough to threaten their business?
|
| Didn't the GP already answer the question you asked of them?
|
| >> It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from
| acquiring or partnering with Goodreads, because their
| database of books and reviews could be used to instantly
| start competing with Amazon's book business. Amazon snuffed
| out that threat of competition in an instant.
|
| A catalog of user reviews is a pretty important feature for a
| successful eCommerce site. To the point where I've seen some
| "review sharing" between non-Amazon sites (the specific case
| was an eCommerge platform showing reviews from their own site
| _and_ the manufacturer 's direct-to-customer site). Goodreads
| was ready-made to provide that to a competitor, which would
| give them a shortcut around that moat.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Didn 't the GP already answer the question you asked of
| them?_
|
| Do you really that the question was asked in good faith? I
| know, I know, HN guidelines, but that question was asked to
| rephrase the question in overly simplistic terms, willfully
| ignoring that there is more to Goodreads than a mere DB.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| It pains me to learn that I'm so dumb you can't even
| conceive I'm asking in good faith.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| > Didn't the GP already answer the question you asked of
| them?
|
| You think that to start an Amazon competitor you need a
| book database?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Weirdly I've rarely bought a book based on reviews on the
| selling site.
|
| I don't go to Amazon and browse for books, reading reviews.
| I go to Amazon when I've already determined from other
| sources which book(s) I want to buy.
|
| Maybe I'm in the minority.
| dageshi wrote:
| Amazon's carousel of books related to the book being
| viewed is fairly decent at finding books in the same
| genre you might like in my experience.
|
| I have found and read a fair few from that method.
| mynonameaccount wrote:
| Weirdly, I ONLY even look at books are best sellers. If I
| had to wade through books randomly, I'd rather not read a
| book at all.
| andsoitis wrote:
| On Goodreads, the Buy button allows you to buy from:
|
| - Amazon
|
| - Audible
|
| - Barnes & Noble
|
| - AbeBooks
|
| - Walmart
|
| - Libraries
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Amazon, Audible, and AbeBooks are owned by Amazon.
| tivert wrote:
| > On Goodreads, the Buy button allows you to buy from:
|
| Interestingly, 3/6 of the places you list are owned by
| Amazon.
|
| And all those options are hidden behind a menu. I checked
| a few books on that site, the button itself is always
| either "Buy on Kindle" or "Buy on Amazon" (if Kindle
| isn't available).
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Presumably if it is effective enough people might start their
| search for a book on the site and if so why not finish it
| there? The vertical integration is fairly obvious you
| basically need a buy link and a way to deliver. With kindle
| if I understand correctly all you need is the email address
| required to send to it. If you had enough customers you could
| work with other ebook reader hardware as well.
| blackoil wrote:
| Its not database but customer gateway that matters. If
| Goodreads has B&N link prominently some customers will move.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| It also gives them significant power over authors (and
| therefore publishers). If you know that a huge portion of
| demand via Amazon purchases (where many people will
| purchase your book) will be correlated to the goodreads
| review, you're going to optimize for that platform. I've
| seen this before with friends who are new authors that send
| out their books and their biggest ask is to give it five
| stars and a good review on goodreads... which drives more
| traffic to Amazon and creates a flywheel for them. Plus,
| the direct integration after you read a book on Kindle to
| quickly give a book a star rating means that you want your
| Kindle version to be optimized/prioritized not just because
| of the market of Kindle readers, but because it'll send
| more traffic to feed into your rankings and therefore
| affect your demand more.
| teamspirit wrote:
| Unfortunately that's exactly why so many startups get bought.
| Not to become part of the parent company's business, no, just
| not to become a competitor later. Would stronger (and enforced)
| anti trust laws be a solution? I believe businesses would just
| lie and say they _are_ going to be part of the business but
| then just bury them anyway.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Would stronger (and enforced) anti trust laws be a
| solution?_
|
| Stronger employee control and delayed decision-making would
| be a solution.
|
| To take a spin at it:
|
| - Any business that merges would be subject to two binding
| votes (x+2 & x+5 years) with "We wish to remain merged" or
| "We wish to spin off," voted upon by anyone who has been
| employed in the merged business at any time between the
| merger and vote (subject to some voting power apportionment,
| but resolutely not using share ownership)
|
| - The federal government is obligated to perform an x+5 &
| x+10 year review of the merger's effect on the competitive
| landscape, with the power to forcibly unwind the merger
|
| It would decrease valuations of M&A-targets, and decrease M&A
| activity, but I don't think anyone would argue that's
| intrinsically a bad thing in the modern competitive
| landscape.
| afterburner wrote:
| > that's exactly why so many startups get bought.
|
| It's also why so many startups get started in the first
| place. Buyout being the goal.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going
| to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway._
|
| That's where my pet antitrust solution succeeds where others
| fail: ban all M&A. Companies only engage in mergers to
| consolidate market share, but their market share
| consolidation (i.e. monopolization) not only decreases
| competition, but also comes at the expense of employees and
| customers of the acquired businesses. Nobody wins except the
| monopolist, and monopolies are already bad, so why help them?
|
| (I think of monopoly and market concentration on a gradient
| scale, from a little bit monopolized to completely
| monopolized, so don't get stuck on a monopoly being a single
| entity)
| unreal37 wrote:
| Company A is 6 days away from going out of business. They
| will shut their doors. All employees will lose their jobs.
| All customers will lose access to whatever Company A does
| that they find helpful.
|
| But then Company B agrees to buy them for $1 so that they
| continue running. Pays the employees, and continues running
| the service for customers.
|
| Ban it?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| If a blanket ban runs into this problem, what about a
| "ban by default"? Basically just flip the script so it
| doesn't require a denial based on circumstances but
| instead an approval based on circumstances.
| hakunin wrote:
| This doesn't work in practice due to typically severe
| time constraints. You cannot expect a business that has 6
| days of life left to wait for such an approval process.
| These things never happen fast.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > You cannot expect a business that has 6 days of life
| left to wait for such an approval process.
|
| A homeless man that has 6 hours left to live in the cold
| winter often cant get shelter, because instead we are
| really concerned with caterting the entire fabric of
| society to fictiontion problems that might one day affect
| a mismanaged business.
| flangola7 wrote:
| The FTC had no problem running FTX on less notice.
| turmacar wrote:
| What M&A are you familiar with that they can typically
| happen in a 6 day timeframe?
|
| I know this is already a stressed straw man in the first
| place but M&A are aren't a short simple process anyway.
| Adding some oversight isn't going to change that.
|
| Yes there are tradeoffs to more regulation vs total
| anarchy/free market. That doesn't mean they're not worth
| it. "Good" is not the enemy of "perfect" and all.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> What M &A are you familiar with that they can
| typically happen in a 6 day timeframe?_
|
| Youtube, for one: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/30/the-
| entire-1-65b-acquisiti...
|
| Android as well, if I'm remembering correctly.
|
| They don't necessarily need to complete the acquisition
| in a week, just get the broad details negotiated and
| agreed to. Given the GP's bankruptcy example, if they
| thought it was worth the risk the acquirer can extend a
| bare minimum amount of credit to keep the company alive
| while they do the rest of due diligence and finish the
| acquisition, folding it into a breakup fee.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I like the way you think.
| wussboy wrote:
| If the market can be relied upon to determine the
| winners, it must also be relied upon to determine the
| losers.
|
| I support the "no M&A" policy.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Company A is 6 days away from going out of
| business...But then Company B agrees to buy them for
| $1...Ban it?_
|
| versus scenario 2, Company A is profitable. Company B is
| smaller, but up and coming. An announcement is made that
| A will buy B and everything will be better. Layoffs
| ensue, product lines are dropped, employees and customers
| are very unhappy, but prices and profits are up.
|
| Since scenario 2 is quite common today, and scenario 1 is
| relatively uncommon, yes, ban it, that's a better way to
| run markets.
|
| We're conducting a thought experiment here. So we think
| through the implications and try to figure out if there
| is a way to achieve benefits for all, benefits that we
| know exist. Don't be scared of a single negative
| scenario, have to look at the big picture, what is better
| overall. I'm glad billionaires have the freedom to build
| kooky submarines that other multimillionaires can climb
| aboard and go on dangerous adventures, sometimes ending
| in the ultimate sacrifice. Why a whole bunch of other
| people who were uninvolved engage in weeks of hand-
| wringing, I can't grok at all.
| kbenson wrote:
| > that's a better way to run markets.
|
| I'm highly skeptical that heavily restricting buying and
| selling of companies in general will be a better way to
| run a market when it seems your goal is to prevent
| monopolies (or put another way, ensure competition).
|
| Laser focused policies work for a short periods but tend
| to be worked around quickly as the thing they regulate
| falls out of favor in lieu of something functionally the
| same but different enough it doesn't match. Blanket
| policies tend to stifle the market in general, causing
| other problems. Rather than assuming that any specific
| law actually "solves" the problem, we'd probably be much
| better off setting criteria we're trying to match and and
| reassessing regulations regularly to try to meet that
| criteria. Anything unresponsive will be routed around.
|
| The real problem is that we have things that do that (the
| SEC and FTC) and they're broken. We should fix them, not
| swap to a sledgehammer as the only tool available.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _I 'm highly skeptical that heavily restricting buying
| and selling of companies in general will be a better way
| to run a market when it seems your goal is to prevent
| monopolies (or put another way, ensure competition)_
|
| ah, the markets I am talking about are goods and services
| markets. Financial markets, they take care of themselves,
| and at the same time garner no sympathy from the majority
| who don't participate in them.
|
| if monopolies emerge some other way, sure, break 'em up
| just the same.
| itsrobforreal wrote:
| Yes, absolutely. Company B would have to compromise the
| service and change the rules.
|
| Company B can instead spin up its own business and ask
| Company A to advertise for them, but anything else is
| just selling out users.
| hcal wrote:
| I'm not advocating for banning M&As, but I think that
| could be addressed by only allowing acquisitions under
| specific bankruptcy conditions.
|
| Again, though, I'm not advocating for that position. I'd
| hate to spend part of my life building a business and not
| be able to cash out when the time comes for me to retire.
| Curvature5868 wrote:
| Is it possible for private companies to pay dividends?
| Let's say you retire and you own a portion of a small but
| thriving company. Could that company potentially provide
| you with dividends as a form of income?
| bstpierre wrote:
| Yes, a private company can pay dividends. Or you could
| loan it the money to buy out your shares and collect
| interest as it pays back the loan. Or a mixture of the
| two, with a thousand little variations on terms. I
| believe I ran into an employee-owned company once that
| had gone through some version of the loan scenario.
| kortilla wrote:
| They can still go bankrupt and company buys the assets
| without employees ever losing pay. Many bankruptcies work
| this way.
| herval wrote:
| So the rule would be that companies can only get acquired
| after they go bankrupt?
|
| Would anyone ever invest in startups, in that scenario?
| meepmorp wrote:
| There's still IPOs, isn't there? Maybe it cuts down some
| of the stupid money going into tech, too, which wouldn't
| be the worst thing.
|
| And, hey, if the business is successful, you own part of
| a successful business.
| floren wrote:
| A decade+ of acquisition as the default "exit" (and the
| idea that you have to be driving for an "exit" in the
| first place) made people straight up forget how companies
| normally work, apparently.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Seriously, why not just do something well and make a
| living from it? I've seen the word enshittifcation plenty
| lately, and it strikes me that the focus on exits and
| payouts is a big part of the problem.
|
| I feel old and you goddamn kids better be off my lawn by
| the time I get back with the shotgun.
| floren wrote:
| Well, for a long time, you would just get an MVP up and
| then collect as many users as possible by offering free
| accounts, and if you were somewhat aligned with something
| Facebook or Google was vaguely interested in, you'd get
| acquired for $100m. Getting $100m for two years of work
| is a lot more lucrative than working hard for a decade to
| build a self-sufficient company, so I can't really blame
| people for doing it.
| collaborative wrote:
| Plus, in the case where you'd choose to build a real
| business, now you'd have to meet user expectations of
| everything being free because that's what they get
| everywhere else.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is a factor you need to take into account, but in my
| experience, people overstate it. It's not actually that
| hard to get people to pay for things online.
|
| The way you do it is the way it's always been done
| historically: offer a value proposition that justifies
| the money. And _don 't_ offer it for free at the
| beginning. People rightfully get very angry if you change
| the deal after they've come to rely on your product or
| service.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| You've actually made a good argument _for_ the M &A ban.
|
| Consider: if it is as you're implying, that investors
| expect their returns to be realized mainly through
| acquisition, and if it's indeed common that startup
| acquisitions are done to kill a potential competitor,
| then... all the investors are doing is _extorting large
| corporations_. If you include IPO in the picture, they
| 're also alternatively _robbing the public_.
|
| If it's just rich getting richer by pulling money out of
| megacorps and large populations, then this is...
| literally the _opposite_ of useful, valuable contribution
| to the society.
|
| The way I see it, the above isn't 100% true, but it seems
| _true in majority of cases_ , which makes me inclined to
| support the "M&A ban" idea.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Would anyone ever invest in startups, in that scenario?
|
| Because they are expecting that the startup will turn
| into a profitable business, maybe?
|
| Being acquired is very far from the only way that an
| investor can see returns.
| eichin wrote:
| There are lots of early-investor-to-later-investor exit
| paths; it would just cut down on the "built-to-flip"
| model, which is a distraction anyway.
| [deleted]
| sigstoat wrote:
| this sounds like it was dreamt up by a bunch of lawyers
| trying to get themselves more work. there's a lot more
| paperwork and bullshit involved in going into bankruptcy
| than just being bought out.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > there's a lot more paperwork and bullshit involved in
| going into bankruptcy than just being bought out.
|
| Not necessarily.
|
| In fact, based on my experience I'd wager that in the
| bulk of the cases a bankruptcy would be far simpler from
| a paperwork perspective (but harder on the creditors).
| fsckboy wrote:
| the point is not the thin edge case of bankruptcy vs
| merger, the point is that the fat part of the market
| would have been better off if Instagram was competing
| with Facebook, not part of Facebook, if video streaming
| services competed for eyeballs instead of being
| consolidated under Google who already controls eyeballs,
| etc.
|
| little fish companies will be less likely to go out of
| business, and the economy will be more agile when they do
| if we stop allowing these big fat catfish to swallow
| everything in their pond.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This example sounds nice _on paper_ , but has anything
| even remotely similar _ever_ happened, within living
| memory? I have my doubts.
|
| So while possible _in theory_ , if it's impossible to
| happen in practice, it's not a valid counterargument to a
| practical proposal.
| [deleted]
| adalacelove wrote:
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/santander-buys-
| struggling-...
| libraryatnight wrote:
| I agree generally, I'm sure an actual solution is more
| nuanced but coming from the angle of no M&A seems like a
| good ideal. My personal issues with business after having
| worked in it for awhile as an employee and not a
| capitalist:
|
| 1) building a business with a goal of being acquired often
| builds lazy unsustainable businesses built only to be
| cashed out, often at the expense of employees.
|
| 2) buying good businesses seems frequently to do what you
| said: they get absorbed and lost and the social cost is a
| lost source of jobs, innovation, and competition.
|
| I know the companies I worked for acquired wonderful
| smaller companies doing decent things, made happy speeches
| about their future, then they were gradually pushed out and
| shut down. Would they have failed anyway? Maybe, but I'd
| like to see more businesses rise and fall rather than
| cannibalize each other.
|
| I'm not a smart man, so I don't know what to do
| specifically, but I definitely see the problem this
| solution is getting at - I hope some day society has
| figured out a good answer.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| So what happens to the mom and pop hardware store that's
| been running for 30 years when mom and pop want to retire?
| They just have to shut their doors?
|
| Banning all M&A would run into a brick wall of unintended
| consequences. If no one can sell their business, then a
| significant percent of potential small business owners just
| wouldn't start businesses.
|
| Then what would happen? Those people would go get jobs.
| Instead of them owning the things they create, those things
| would be owned by their employers. Instead of having the
| issue where someone goes and creates Goodreads but it gets
| bought by Amazon, nobody would ever create Goodreads. All
| you've done is save Amazon the acquisition cost.
| thomasahle wrote:
| > So what happens to the mom and pop hardware store
| that's been running for 30 years when mom and pop want to
| retire? They just have to shut their doors?
|
| They could sell it to another mom and pop? It's only an
| M&A if the shop is bought by / becomes part of another
| business.
|
| If nobody wants to continue running the independent shop,
| it doesn't make much difference to consumers if a chain
| buys it, or if it closes down and the chain just opens a
| new shop there.
| yibg wrote:
| So only businesses under a certain size can ever be sold.
| If you happen to do well and the business is worth say 10
| million, which mom and pop can buy it?
| idopmstuff wrote:
| If the only people who can buy businesses are
| individuals, you've cut the potential acquirer pool, and
| thus the value, by an enormous amount.
|
| > If nobody wants to continue running the independent
| shop, it doesn't make much difference to consumers if a
| chain buys it, or if it closes down and the chain just
| opens a new shop there.
|
| You're pointing out exactly why banning M&A would be good
| for big businesses. Now instead of having to buy out the
| little guy, they just wait for it close and then buy all
| the assets (can assets be sold under this regime? do you
| just have to throw everything away?) and reopen under
| their own name. Now the mom and pop lost a bunch of money
| and the big company got a new location at a big savings.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Why is a buyout even the only option? Just find new
| management. Keep it in the family. Turn it into a co-op.
| There's also such as a thing as community businesses,
| apparently.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I'm guessing you've never run a small business?
|
| Sometimes people want to exit. They want to retire, move
| onto a new chapter of their lives and not be involved in
| the business anymore.
|
| Finding new management doesn't allow that - they can take
| on the day to day, but you still own the place and are
| ultimately responsible.
|
| Keeping it in the family isn't an option if you don't
| have family that want it. If you have multiple family
| members that want it, you can give it to one and probably
| cause conflict, or you can have them share
| management/ownership of it and probably also cause
| conflict.
|
| Turn it into a co-op? What if the owners have no idea how
| to do this? What if they don't want to?
|
| Why should people who have created a business not be
| allowed to sell it and cash out? Why can't they get a
| payoff for their investment and move on? The solutions
| you're proposing are all about the community and totally
| ignore the actual people who spent years of their life
| getting the business going and probably took meaningful
| financial risk to do so. Why should we just ignore their
| desires and tell them what they're allowed to do with
| their business?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Fortunately in a democratic society, the hoi polloi need
| not actual experience to have a say- nor to have a vote
| on changing policy.
| Yoofie wrote:
| Ok, we can ban M&A for all businesses who exceed $x
| million in revenue. Mom & pop can still put the work in
| and cash out, but bigger businesses are prohibited from
| eating eating their competitors and preventing disruptive
| businesses from growing and having a fair shot in the
| market.
|
| The $x million limit can be decided upon based on the
| industry and other factors.
|
| >nobody would ever create Goodreads
|
| Lots of people create of businesses and pursue non-
| profitable enterprises for non-profitable reasons.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| This would reduce consumer value quite a bit in some cases.
| Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
| tooltower wrote:
| I've actually thought about this. But there are cases when
| mergers can help customers. E.g. when a vertical merger
| happens, that can absorb some of the profit margins between
| a supplier and manufacturer. Ideally, regulators should
| analyze the market for problematic dynamics.
|
| But I agree that the vast majority of mergers that make the
| news are not good for consumers.
| golergka wrote:
| I don't even need to know what unintentional consequences
| of this will be, but I know that they will be catastrophic.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
|
| There's no problem if a company with 2% of the market
| merges with another company with 2% -- it tends to lower
| prices by removing inefficiencies. It's only a problem when
| prices rise or innovation stops when there are only ~2
| competitors left, or when the a single player has 40%+
| market share.
|
| Also a large proportion of mergers have nothing to do with
| market share -- they're acquiring a supplier for vertical
| consolidation, they're buying a product because it's faster
| than building it in-house, etc. These are generally
| entirely legitimate as they enable companies to compete
| _more_ , not less -- which is _good_ for consumers.
| fsckboy wrote:
| Vertical consolidation is also monopolistic, it reduces
| competition by removing a buyer and a seller from a
| healthy marketplace.
|
| what is actually good for consumers is fierce competition
| spoiling the sleep of capitalists.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's still the same rules though.
|
| If you're buying a supplier for 5% of the marketplace
| it's perfectly fine.
|
| If you're buying a supplier for 65% of the market then
| that's a problem.
| spoonjim wrote:
| A lot of technologies are brought to a much bigger audience
| through an acquisition. PASemi for example wouldn't have
| had nearly the impact they did if Apple had not acquired
| them and made them the foundation of Apple Silicon.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > ban all M&A
|
| That makes about as much sense as banning marriage.
|
| M&A is fundamental and important.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > That makes about as much sense as banning marriage.
|
| Banning marriage actually makes a _lot_ of sense,
| according to some. Why is the state even involved in such
| private matters in the first place anyhow?
| paulddraper wrote:
| Same reasons it's involved in medicine, housing,
| education, etc etc.
| enriquec wrote:
| Nothing about this would succeed. Do only monopolies
| perform mergers?
| ardacinar wrote:
| By the way, acquisitions are easier to defend IMO. There
| are definitely cases of "Business X acquires business Y"
| that have no anti-competitive intent or anti-competitive
| consequences. But at least anecdotally, I can say mergers
| that do not lead to anti-competitive behavior are quite
| rare.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Do only monopolies perform mergers?_
|
| companies merge to concentrate market share, i.e.
| eliminate competition, i.e. increase prices, i.e. monopol
| _ize_. Let 's not ban just monopol _ies_ , let's also ban
| monopol _ize_.
| unreal37 wrote:
| Unprofitable companies get bought out to simply continue
| existing.
|
| Like Twitch and YouTube.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Companies also acquire and merge to vertically integrate.
| gAI wrote:
| Lazy, entitled companies should pull themselves up by
| their bootstraps and build their own supply chains from
| scratch. Maybe if they had some work ethic, they wouldn't
| need all that hard-earned tax money - corporate welfare
| queens.
|
| All joking aside, supply chain shenanigans are a
| nightmare.
| fsckboy wrote:
| So, for example Coca Cola has saturated the drinks
| market, and they vertically integrate by buying bottling
| companies... which means their competitor Pepsi can no
| longer buy from that bottling company because Coke has
| decreased competition in that market?
|
| Here's what they teach in business school: if you have a
| cloud computing business, and you have an advertising
| business, and your cloud business wants to advertise its
| services, should the cloud business get a discount on the
| ads, maybe the ad business has some surplus capacity you
| could soak up for free? Nope. The cloud business taking
| advantage of "free" ads from your ad business will make
| the health of the cloud business look better than it is.
| It will cover up overcapacity in the ad business, hiding
| the poor way it is being run. To properly assess your two
| businesses so you can make internal investing decisions,
| you need a clear picture of how those two businesses are
| operating in their respective markets. If a competitor is
| selling ads cheaper than you are, your cloud business
| should buy them.
|
| So, if this is how managers and cost accountants are
| trained to think rationally, well guess what, that's what
| markets are good at.
|
| Vertical integration is part of the monopolization
| problem.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| That's an overly simplistic situation.
|
| Maybe the bottler bottles for multiple companies. Maybe
| Coca Cola _could_ redesign their own bottles to target
| specialized bottle-filling machines, and Coca Cola would
| have enough volume to use all of that bottler 's
| capacity.
|
| But the bottler won't invest in the machines, because
| they don't want to only bottle Coca Cola products. And
| absent that, the bottles never get redesigned and the
| efficient machines never get bought. And absent that,
| Coca Cola is more expensive than it could be.
|
| Or maybe absent an integration, the product offering
| isn't what the market really wants, because it doesn't
| want to have to combine two things.
|
| Vertical integration can breed efficiency.
|
| It can also breed monopoly, but you need to address the
| iron man if you're making an argument.
| vGPU wrote:
| Except in reality, the cloud business would "buy" ads
| from the ad business, and now you have an "expense"
| despite the fact that the money never went anywhere.
|
| Shuffle here, shuffle there, viola! Tax evasion.
| dustingetz wrote:
| that would essentially ban the stock market, i think.
| Shares have value because if you accumulate enough of them
| you control the company, or can sell them to someone else
| who wants to control the company. If you prevent the buyer
| from using the company to benefit their interests then
| there won't be any buyers. and poof, the entire startup
| finance appratus evaporates.
| cwp wrote:
| It doesn't come at the expense of the employees of the
| acquired business. They often get rich, or at least land a
| well-paying and career-enhancing gig at the acquiring
| company.
|
| This is important, because it means that new companies that
| compete with the monopolies have many paths to success. If
| the only possible outcomes are "beat Amazon" and "fail
| hard", you won't get many attempts; it's better to get an
| entry-level job at Amazon and climb the ladder.
|
| So yeah, monopolies are bad, but banning M&A only helps
| them.
| londons_explore wrote:
| You could have other restrictions on mergers... For
| example, "All IP (trademarks, copyright, patents) from one
| of the two merged companies gets released to the public"
|
| Or perhaps "Anyone with contractual obligations to one of
| the merged companies is released from those obligations".
|
| Both of those would be half way to just dissolving one of
| the companies and re-hiring the staff by the other company
| to release a similar product.
| GTP wrote:
| > "All IP (trademarks, copyright, patents) from one of
| the two merged companies gets released to the public"
|
| This sounds very extreme to me, sometimes acquisitions
| are done exactly because the buyer is interested in the
| other company's IP. This would be a showstopper even in
| the cases where the buyer really wants to use the IP it
| is going to aquire.
| int_19h wrote:
| > sometimes acquisitions are done exactly because the
| buyer is interested in the other company's IP
|
| How many of those cases produce an outcome that is
| beneficial to the public?
| kortilla wrote:
| M&A should be allowed for vertical integration and
| efficiency improvements there. Fewer intermediaries is
| better for everyone (except the intermediaries).
|
| Agree on scrutinizing M&A of competitors.
| somenits wrote:
| There is an optimal number of firms in competition with
| each other. It could be that for a particular industry, 10
| firms means everyone is losing money and unable to make new
| investments, while 8 firms means that there's a healthy
| amount of profit that can sustain R&D and growth. Sure,
| eventually it might all work out as firms go bankrupt or go
| into a new business, but you can lose decades in waiting
| that out.
|
| Also, this is easily circumvented by just buying the
| crucial assets of a competitor, like trade secrets,
| factories, offices, patents, etc.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _10 firms means everyone is losing money and unable to
| make new investments, while 8 firms means that there 's a
| healthy amount of profit that can sustain R&D and
| growth._
|
| don't confuse economic profit with accounting profit: the
| promise/goal/benefit of competitive markets is that
| economic profit goes to zero. (quickest way to describe
| the difference is, there are dry cleaners dotting the
| landscape in competition with each other, they make
| income which pays the owner's living including saving for
| retirement, kids college fund, etc. That's accounting
| profit. That's not economic profit, which is why you
| don't see VCs and investment banks investing in dry
| cleaning startups.)
|
| Another important aspect of competitive markets is that
| weak companies die, and new companies enter, what
| Schumpeter called creative destruction. The 10 firms
| "losing money" is 10 firms competing, some of whom will
| fail. The 8 firms making healthy profits with fat (and
| lazy) R&D departments is attractive for disruption.
| somenits wrote:
| I'm not confused. But you are introducing unnecessary
| concepts here. A firm needs to make some profit in the
| long run, whatever you want to call it, to be able to
| sustain investment. If there's too many firms in the
| market, that can be undermined. That's why you don't see
| five dry cleaners right next to each other in the same
| strip mall.
|
| And your second paragraph fails to address my point too.
| I acknowledged that in the long run, the health of the
| industry could be restored by some of the firms failing.
| But that can take way too long, and in the meantime, all
| of them are capital-starved and unable to invest in
| improving their businesses.
| hinkley wrote:
| A lot of my disillusionment with startups come from this.
| Being lied to repeatedly by different owners about how
| selling should be our goal to really start to win, only for
| the purchase to be the moment where we really start to lose.
|
| It breaks something precious.
| florbo wrote:
| Well, the owners win. That's usually who they're referring
| to when they say "our", "us", etc.
| hinkley wrote:
| And every spring, there's a new batch of suckers who
| haven't learned what 'we' means.
|
| Old programmers are discriminated against because they
| point out when you're taking managerial shortcuts or, as
| in this case, outright lying.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Unfortunately that 's exactly why so many startups get
| bought._
|
| Unfortunately that's exactly why so many startups are
| founded.
|
| I can't say what things are like today, but in Seattle in the
| 2010's, it seemed like 90% of the startups existed solely to
| get bought by Microsoft.
| ameister14 wrote:
| We don't need stronger laws - just the enforcement part.
| berkes wrote:
| Even if they'd lie, that's still a lot more effort and a lot
| more risk than not having to lie in the first place.
| hbarka wrote:
| After the acquisition has there been any other startup trying
| to duplicate the value prop of GoodReads? What are the
| barriers to entry for them?
| saghm wrote:
| Network effects, I assume? It would be hard to get everyone
| to move over without having some sort of draw, and I guess
| nobody had a successful enough idea for what that would be
| to get it to happen.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Which is why founders should have a network where one creates
| good reads and sells to Amazon and then one of the others
| starts a better good reads right away. Then when founder A's
| handcuffs come off he goes and makes a new version of the
| most recent thing that sold to one of the FAANGs.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Unfortunately that's exactly why so many startups get
| bought.
|
| Everything that gets bought gets sold as well. The founders
| of the companies are willfully and eagerly selling the
| companies they created. Who are you to ban it? Then you have
| to chain them to their desks and force them to try to
| dedicate the rest of their lives to the business.
| tivert wrote:
| > Would stronger (and enforced) anti trust laws be a
| solution? I believe businesses would just lie and say they
| are going to be part of the business but then just bury them
| anyway.
|
| Stronger anti-trust laws would just block many of these sales
| in the first place (e.g. identify that Goodreads competes
| with Amazon's existing _dominant_ user book-review feature,
| and kill the acquisition for that reason).
| [deleted]
| ljm wrote:
| One version of that even got its own jargon: acquihire.
|
| One incredible journey later and the product is already on
| the sunset.
| rtbathula wrote:
| "should never have been allowed to acquire it?" It's very funny
| the way you put it. Already government has too much power and
| you want further they take over the economy and do pulls and
| pushes.
|
| Free market means, freely allowing people to trade using
| persuasions -- not government using its coercion. People also
| often forget other side of the picture.
|
| 1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to
| sell their companies to Amazon or Microsoft. 2. Why don't they
| ask government to put people in jail who are buying products
| from Amazon and making Amazon big?
|
| Recently EU also making plans to regulate the battery
| replacement. I covered that here briefly in my site political-
| ledger dot com
| f-securus wrote:
| Free market capitalism only works when there is competition.
| Big companies buying out the competition to limit consumer
| choices and effectively stall innovation is exactly the
| things the government should be protecting against to keep
| the 'free market' thriving.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| The free market elected a government with an FTC, so...
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| lkbm wrote:
| Ten years of no improvement and gradually getting slower and
| slower (perhaps because my "Read" lists is now several thousand
| items), and it's still the number one spot.
|
| I've tried a few other places, but my friends use Goodreads, so
| if I want to evaluate books based on ratings from friends whom
| I know have similar taste, Goodreads is the only viable option.
|
| Goodreads is the present of book reviews, and in the past it
| was the future of book reviews.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| It hasn't done nothing with it. Not nearly as much I'd like but
| when reading a book on my kindle, it's easy to hit the button
| to mark as currently reading and progress updates as you go
| through the book.
| bryan0 wrote:
| And this wasn't Amazon's only acquisition in this space. They
| bought Shelfari before this and also drove it into the ground.
| scrum-treats wrote:
| Same thing with Book Depository, AbeBooks, and Avalon Books.
| And more generally Whole Foods, Alexa Internet, IMDB,
| Fabric.com, Woot, Zappos, Evi, Graphiq...
|
| When will consumers have protection against this degrading of
| the marketplace already?
| paganel wrote:
| I'm still very bitter about what Amazon did to Book
| Depository.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| You skipped Audible which I would add to the list of give
| it just enough oxygen to stay alive but no innovation
| allowed strategies. You can't even connect your Audible
| account to your GoodReads. Audible is the app I would most
| like to replace that I use almost everyday.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| If you are based in the UK you may be interested in
| XigXag as a replacement for Audible:
| https://xigxag.co.uk/
|
| As a disclaimer, I have never used it myself but I have
| heard good things of it.
| scrum-treats wrote:
| We see this with Amazon Music offerings as well. Focus on
| acquisition and accumulation, not innovation.
|
| For Books, Amazon has (1) Kindle, (2) Kindle Unlimited
| (... a direct competitor to Audible), (3) Kindle Vella
| (somewhat of a Goodreads competitor), (4) Audible, (5)
| Amazon.com (retail), (6) Prime Reading, and externally
| (7) Abe Books, (8) Comixology, (9) Book Depository. And
| then there are Children's versions...
|
| For Music, Amazon has (1) Amazon Music Unlimited, (2)
| Prime Music, (3), Amazon Music Free, (4) Amp, and has
| just acquired (5) Wondery.
|
| I'm cool with checking out audiobooks from Libby, and
| whatever music app opens consistently when I want it to
| (i.e., not Amazon Music). Support your local libraries!
| majormajor wrote:
| The outcome we got is probably in the middle, badness-wise.
|
| Better would be an independent Goodreads with incentives to
| find features that fight spam and such.
|
| But it's hard to imagine them being able to make much money
| doing that, and them going under would be worse.
|
| And honestly I'd MUCH rather have a Goodreads that Amazon does
| nothing with than a Goodreads that chased growth from VC money
| or PE or whatever to try to turn into another retail site and
| abandoned the "your reading history" angle.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Goodreads was a profitable business based on affiliate
| marketing links mostly to amazon. Amazon bought them to save
| money (basically the profit that GR was making). It didn't
| just make sense from a protect our core business perspective
| it also made sense from a straight monetary perspective.
| garfieldnate wrote:
| As I recall, there were arguments at the time saying that it
| would be _good_ if Amazon did nothing with it. People wanted
| Amazon to leave the product alone and not mess with it. And I
| still feel that way. What would you have wanted them to do with
| it?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I see many startups claiming, and in fact starting their
| existence with the very declaration or on the pretext, that "We
| are not like X. We are not going anywhere. We are not for sale"
| et cetera, I am pretty sure most of those founders would have
| been spending sleepless nights giddy fantasising about the
| moment when X acquires them.
|
| So now any social network kind of service, which isn't legally
| non-profit and open source and preferably federated, doesn't
| get any cookie from me including the ones like LetterBoxd and
| StoryGraph.
|
| But the problem is federated services, where you have to
| "choose" an instance among other frictions and all, are kinda
| doomed to fail. So I just use the established ones until they
| are unusable and keep my data regularly exported if it's worth
| exporting, that is. It's just sad.
| rtbathula wrote:
| "should never have been allowed to acquire it?" It's very funny
| the way you put it. Already government has too much power and
| you want further they take over the economy and do pulls and
| pushes. Free market means, freely allowing people to trade
| using persuasions -- not government using its coercion. People
| also often forget other side of the picture.
|
| 1. Why don't they attack smaller companies who are ready to
| sell their companies to Amazon or Microsoft. 2. Why don't they
| ask government to put people in jail who are buying products
| from Amazon and making Amazon big?
|
| Recently EU also making plans to regulate the battery
| replacement. I covered that here briefly in my site political-
| ledger dot com
| adolph wrote:
| Or it could have gone the way of Wirecutter if NYT bought it.
| Nothing is permanent. Centralization is "better is worse."
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