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.
teamspirit 774 days ago [-]
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.
fsckboy 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
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?
fsckboy 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
notfromhere 774 days ago [-]
That’s how antitrust enforcement worked before we decided to only care about consumer prices. It worked pretty well.
But right now we let the market consolidate to the point where major industries have 2-4 major players with 80-90% market share between them.
fsckboy 774 days ago [-]
>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.
kbenson 773 days ago [-]
There are no "financial markets" and "goods and services markets" beyond arbitrary groupings people make to talk about sectors and types of commerce. It's all the same thing, and companies make use of various aspects of it as they see fit.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
turmacar 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
> What M&A are you familiar with that they can typically happen in a 6 day timeframe?
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.
freddie_mercury 773 days ago [-]
> What M&A are you familiar with that they can typically happen in a 6 day timeframe?
Virtually every single bank failure that happens results in an M&A that is negotiated over a weekend.
Most recently Credit Suisse collapsed in March. UBS bought it on Monday, March 19, after negotiations began on Friday, March 16. UBS offered a price that was 60% lower than the Friday closing price. The deal was accepted.
alex028502 773 days ago [-]
Interestingly in this case an "approval" similar to the one we are talking about did happen over that weekend didn't it? I think the approvers brokered the deal.
abenga 773 days ago [-]
Regulators were concerned about a collapse causing contagion that results in a financial crisis. Would they care to do that for a little startup with a few dozen employees?
pclmulqdq 774 days ago [-]
An M&A negotiation can take a matter of hours, in theory. Only for public/very big companies does it get weird.
flangola7 774 days ago [-]
The FTC had no problem running FTX on less notice.
ClumsyPilot 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
parineum 773 days ago [-]
Explain how that is related.
mtsr 773 days ago [-]
I’ll try to explain:
Clearly there are serious scenarios outside M&A where we accept terrible failures due to regulations. Why not accept some in M&A as well?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 773 days ago [-]
Admittedly, I read the other comment as a whataboutism. This explanation seems to help.
I think one could argue that the business failure is likely to affect more people, therefore it’s a greater impact. Still, I ultimately agree with this stance (in the context of business survival, not personal); failure is an inherent risk of business.
mtsr 773 days ago [-]
Agreed. The number of people affected is a big difference. But I think the comparison does make clear that isn’t necessarily a principled reason not to accept a few failures as part of otherwise useful regulation.
omniglottal 772 days ago [-]
A "few failures as part of otherwise useful regulation" sounds an awful lot like some innocent victims exists, treated as guilty.
Treating the (presumed) innocent as though guilty, by regulation even, doesn't sound all that good. In fact, seems there in fact are profound and relevant principles to not accept that.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 771 days ago [-]
> some innocent victims exists, treated as guilty
The context in this discussion is comparing the hypothetical of a homeless person dying due to a systemic failure to the hypothetical of a business going bankrupt (without being acquired) due to a systemic failure.
This concept of presumed innocence ought to apply to this hypothetical homeless person: why not give them shelter (analogous to allowing M&A) by default, until someone decides it’s a problem? If a society is willing to accept this personal death, they should be willing to accept a business failure.
fsckboy 774 days ago [-]
I like the way you think.
wussboy 774 days ago [-]
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.
kortilla 774 days ago [-]
They can still go bankrupt and company buys the assets without employees ever losing pay. Many bankruptcies work this way.
herval 774 days ago [-]
So the rule would be that companies can only get acquired after they go bankrupt?
Would anyone ever invest in startups, in that scenario?
TeMPOraL 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
meepmorp 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
collaborative 773 days ago [-]
I don't know, my experience is that there is a group of people who don't mind paying for things online. I can generally group them in "people who own a mac, an iphone or an ipad"
I still am clueless as to how to generate a network effect without giving things away for free. And as you said, once it's free, it's expected to remain free
The cynical me says that some people are able to generate a network effect because of fame or because of an existing network to which they belong (i.e. being chosen at YC or published in a newspaper). For example, FB was promoted to death in all US campuses for free during the 2000s. I wonder how that happened (honest question)
ClumsyPilot 774 days ago [-]
> Getting $100m for two years of work is a lot more lucrative than working hard for a decade to build a self-sufficient company
Are we discussing drug cartels? Because this reads literally like it could apply only to a highly criminal business.
floren 773 days ago [-]
Drug cartels? No!
We're just talking about a situation where some existing large interests have a lucrative business peddling some pretty addictive stuff, and they want to make sure nobody else encroaches on their turf. To that end, they're willing to spend a lot of money to "make the problem go away". Sometimes that means bringing the upstarts into the fold!
Not at all like drug cartels.
mcphage 770 days ago [-]
> Sometimes that means bringing the upstarts into the fold!
Sometimes it means asking the upstarts to say hello to your little friend.
eichin 774 days ago [-]
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.
sigstoat 774 days ago [-]
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.
fsckboy 774 days ago [-]
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.
jacquesm 774 days ago [-]
> 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).
774 days ago [-]
hcal 774 days ago [-]
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.
ClumsyPilot 774 days ago [-]
> not be able to cash out when the time comes for me to retire
You can perfectly cash out by selling your business to private equity, or to anyone really.
Ban on M&A just means you cant sell a social network to Facebook, but you could sell it to Microsoft, to Autodesk, to Berkshire capital, etc.
abenga 773 days ago [-]
Coul Berkshire Capital buy two social networks and merge them? Could Facebook form a capital holding company and buy a social network anyway?
Curvature5868 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
traviscj 773 days ago [-]
Possible, yes, and frequently used I’m sure, but entangles the retirees financial future with the business’s future — the retiree loses if the new owners make bad decisions, overleverage, and end up defaulting / bankrupting themselves. I don’t think it’s reasonable to force all businesspeople to retain this risk after disposing of the business concern.
autoexec 773 days ago [-]
> 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.
If Company A was providing a service that people found helpful, someone else who is more competent at running a business will step in to fill that need. Employees will flock to the new better run business or move to some other better run business.
When new companies have to step up to provide popular goods and services that were previously being provided by failing, poorly run companies, it results in innovations and new ways of doing things instead of just letting bloated industry giants continue to be propped up artificially by restricting consumer choice.
Having more players in a market also increases resiliency and improves stability. If one company runs into problems, the others in that space can pick up the slack. No more "Too Big to Fail".
itsrobforreal 774 days ago [-]
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.
TeMPOraL 774 days ago [-]
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.
Its capitalism. Companies must die rather than become merged zombies(Soviet Style). Since this is hypothetical. Maybe the employees shall then start their own startup and get success or maybe the company was shitty anyway in the first place.
kibwen 774 days ago [-]
FWIW, this is also the conclusion that I've come to. Mergers only make markets less competitive, and the mere existence of acquisitions creates perverse incentives that distort the startup market into utter uselessness. The experiment has failed, ban it all, and ignore the protestations of the get-rich-quick crowd. Of course, to fix the overall market you'll also need to break up all the existing megacorps in the process, and I wish you luck with that.
nl 773 days ago [-]
But... mergers really do not only make markets less competitive at all!
May mergers of huge companies often have negative impact. Firstly most mergers do not involve multi-billion dollar companies at all, secondly many mergers occur when one company is is trouble, and thirdly good takeovers increase distribution of the smaller companies brand.
Good examples of successful mergers/takeovers like this include:
Halotop bought by Wells Enterprises
Geely buying Volvo
SAIC buying MG
Most acquisitions by Proctor & Gamble
Most acquisitions and mergers in the markup and beauty space.
throwaway2037 773 days ago [-]
Most acquisitions by Proctor & Gamble
That is quite a broad statement. Can you explain more?
nl 773 days ago [-]
In the FMCG space that P&G is in most of their takeovers improve distribution for the company that is being acquired, and P&G generally seems to prefer to leave the brand and management of the company alone.
I'm sure there have been some that haven't been successful, but most that I'm aware of have gone very well.
autoexec 773 days ago [-]
> Good examples of successful mergers/takeovers like this include:
How are you defining "good" or "successful" here?
nl 773 days ago [-]
There hasn't been a significant negative backlash, availability of the products increased, and revenue increased for the acquiring company.
The improved availability via better distribution is a win for consumers and the increase in revenue is a win for the company and shareholders.
crazygringo 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
fsckboy 773 days ago [-]
a supplier for 65% of the market is already a problem. Were the any acquisitions on the way to that market position?
even if there weren't, it's still too big, break it in half. Shareholders will still own what they owned before, 65% of the market, and all the IP that is contained therein, but the companies will have to compete.
idopmstuff 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
idopmstuff 774 days ago [-]
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.
ClumsyPilot 774 days ago [-]
> Now instead of having to buy out the little guy, they just wait for it close and then buy all the assets
Thiz is a fantasy, these businesses were not going bancrupt - they were challanging big business and making a killing. Your scenario is detached from reality
Apocryphon 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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?
TeMPOraL 773 days ago [-]
Well, fine. So maybe banning M&As is not the right way. But what is, then? Because the problem is real and severe, and it's also just another case of a more general problem - how to stop the market from creating a class of specialists gaming a single metric?
It's prevalent everywhere you look. As you say, M&As let small business owners retire or move away, without being prisoners of their own business. But the failure mode is companies being built with exit in mind, existing to be flipped - this is doing huge damage to the markets and peoples' lives right now.
Or take housing: it's nice that individuals have a way to sell their house and recover some of the money and effort put into it, when their kids leave the nest, or they retire, or they just want to move to some other location. But the failure mode of this is flipping - people and companies who buy properties, "improve" them to maximize resale value, whether the "improvements" make any sense or not for future tenants, and sell them to various actors. This creates a huge distortion on the real estate market, to the point that housing is now built for flipping, not for living.
(There's also a secondary and equally socially bad effect of owners opposing anything whatsoever that could lead to drop in (growth of) housing prices in their area.)
Or take finance: it's not hard to see the failure modes created by professional finance class, that's busy optimizing money flows in isolation from everything they relate to in the real world.
Or, take corporate management, and the rise of MBA class: specialists in running business as an abstract profit-generating machine, in complete isolation of what the business does and means in the real world.
Etc. etc.
This is the big problem I think we're facing: stopping over-optimization.
Apocryphon 774 days ago [-]
Fortunately in a democratic society, the hoi polloi need not actual experience to have a say- nor to have a vote on changing policy.
autoexec 773 days ago [-]
> 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
Assuming that they close. If it continues to be successful and they can find someone else to run the business when they retire than Big Business never gets a chance to move in. If they don't, Big Business can buy their assets and try to open a new store there just like anyone else could.
Either way, everyone is happy. The owners of the store still retire, and the Big Business gets a chance to outbid everyone else who wants to move into a market that's already proven itself to be a success. That happens enough right now and it's not caused the collapse of society.
> Now the mom and pop lost a bunch of money and the big company got a new location at a big savings.
Why would Big Business acquire the store by paying Mom & Pop more money than M&P would have made letting it close and putting the assets up for sale to the highest bidder? Seems like the smart move for Big Business in that case is to wait it out anyway. If Big Business can convince Mom & Pop to let them be absorbed for less money than Big Business would have had to pay them at auction then M&P still loses money.
idopmstuff 773 days ago [-]
> If it continues to be successful and they can find someone else to run the business when they retire than Big Business never gets a chance to move in.
The way you typically do this is by selling the business to someone who wants to continue operating it.
> Either way, everyone is happy. The owners of the store still retire
Owning a business that is managed by somebody else in retirement is not the same as selling the business and retiring. If you still own the business, you are still responsible for it. If you have a great manager and just collect your checks from it, great! But what if that person quits suddenly/dies/etc.? Now you're managing the business again. If the manager of the business needs to work in it (e.g. retail store manager) and you moved away, now you've gotta get back there and start running it again.
Lots of answers in here speaking from very theoretical perspectives with a clear lack of understanding of the actual day-to-day reality of what owning a small business looks like.
thomasahle 773 days ago [-]
> Now the mom and pop lost a bunch of money and the big company got a new location at a big savings.
Why did the big company save money this way? If it's cheaper for them to just wait for bankruptcy, why don't they just always do that?
It seems the only answer is that they are counting on continuing the popular "brand" of the independent store. But that brand is exactly tied up to this store not being part of the big chain, so continuing it would be pure deceit.
Or as ClumsyPilot says, the business wasn't going bankrupt at all. Bit chain just wanted it, and now they can't.
yibg 774 days ago [-]
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?
wyre 774 days ago [-]
>shut their doors
Yes, that’s usually what happens if they don’t have family to take over the business or employees to sell the business too.
>business owners just wouldn’t start businesses.
Maybe in the VC world but those aren’t small businesses are they? Are people really starting restaurants and yarn shops solely so they can sell the business later down the road? Or is it because they have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to build a business the community is lacking in.
It’s hard to believe you honestly think people only start businesses so they can sell it later on.
idopmstuff 773 days ago [-]
> Yes, that’s usually what happens if they don’t have family to take over the business or employees to sell the business too.
No, believe it or not, most people with small businesses, which are worth hundreds of thousands or single digit millions of dollars, don't just let the asset disappear for no value when they can find a broker and sell it.
> Maybe in the VC world but those aren’t small businesses are they?
What are you talking about? The first sentence of my post that you're responding to literally says "mom and pop hardware store" - where do you see anything about VC funding?
> It’s hard to believe you honestly think people only start businesses so they can sell it later on.
At no point did I say that. I would wager heavily that you've never owned a small business.
Most people don't start businesses for the sole purpose of selling them, but the fact that you can sell your business is important for all kinds of reasons. Businesses generally require startup capital, much of which is provided by small business loans that the owner must personally guarantee. If you're not allowed to sell your business, you're trapped under those loans. Need to move somewhere? You can't. Want to get out and get a job? You can't.
Think of it like buying a house. If you couldn't sell a house, how do you think that would affect the market? I'll tell you how - more people would rent, because otherwise most of them would be trapped in their home for the life of the mortgage. Does that mean that most people buy homes solely so they can sell them later down the road? It does not.
Yoofie 774 days ago [-]
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.
somenits 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
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.
uptime 773 days ago [-]
In the dry cleaning scenario, private equity gobbles those up to make a defacto large corp. Not exactly M&A but close?
parineum 773 days ago [-]
> Nobody wins except the monopolist, and monopolies are already bad, so why help them?
You are obviously entitled to the opinion that monopolies are bad but, fwiw, the ftc is a lot more concerned with anti-competitive behavior than it is with monopolies. Those get conflated because they frequently occur together but a lot of companies have monopolies that most people don't really have an issue with because they aren't anti-competitive.
Sometimes a monopoly is a monopoly because they are better than everyone else.
pyeri 773 days ago [-]
>> Sometimes a monopoly is a monopoly because they are better than everyone else.
There is also the case of "natural monopolies" in economics, these are railways, postal services, etc. where it wouldn't make sense for multiple players to waste resources and the one player can benefit from economies of scale. It'd be hilarious if 2-3 rail companies tried setting up their own tracks, stations, signals, etc. in a small town for example. So much redundancy all going waste.
Another example is multiple telecom companies trying to erect their own towers in vicinity of a little town where only one is enough to provide coverage. It's a collosal waste for the whole society, not just those companies.
morepork 773 days ago [-]
More than railways, imagine if roads were privatised and you had 2-3 roading networks trying to get to as many homes/business/etc. as possible
autoexec 773 days ago [-]
> imagine if roads were privatised and you had 2-3 roading networks trying to get to as many homes/business/etc. as possible
This would never happen. If roads were privatized they wouldn't care about connecting as many homes/business as possible, they'd only care about building roads where it was the most profitable for them and even then any roads that made less money would be left in increasingly poor condition.
It wouldn't leave taxpayers off the hook either. Governments would have to spend taxpayer money to incentivize private companies to build out in "unprofitable" areas, but those roads would be kept in the worst conditions of all (assuming that companies didn't just repeatedly promise to build them, only to pocket the taxpayer's money while providing nothing)
Some services are worth enough to the public good that profit shouldn't be the only consideration, and some are worth so much that profit shouldn't be the goal at all and instead those services should simply strive to do the job required for every citizen with as little genuine waste as possible.
libraryatnight 774 days ago [-]
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.
londons_explore 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
> "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 774 days ago [-]
> 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?
cwp 774 days ago [-]
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.
ClumsyPilot 774 days ago [-]
> If the only possible outcomes are "beat Amazon" and "fail hard",
If you start a car company, are your only two options 'beat Wolkwagen" and fail hard? How many car companies do we have?
cwp 773 days ago [-]
No, because M&A isn't banned. I don't know how many car companies we have, but I do notice that there are a bunch of new ones recently. Just off the top of my head: Tesla, Lucid, Rivian, Cruise.
kortilla 774 days ago [-]
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.
dustingetz 774 days ago [-]
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.
tooltower 774 days ago [-]
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.
PaulRobinson 773 days ago [-]
I agree with much of your premise, but there is an unintended consequence: blocking a significant exit opportunity for investors.
This would potentially kill the VC industry.
You might not care, but it’s enough of a problem that a lot of entrepreneurs would side with the monopolists and stop this dead in its tracks.
ymolodtsov 773 days ago [-]
> That's where my pet antitrust solution succeeds where others fail: ban all M&A.
Such a weird take.
Most of the acquisition the big tech does is acquihires. Basically, a way to keep a team employed and return some of the money to the investors and make the team's stock worth something at least.
perryizgr8 773 days ago [-]
> ban all M&A
Let's think through this. Company A wants to buy Company B. M&A is banned.
1. A pays B's owners $X for all IP and other properties of B.
2. B fires everyone.
3. A hires whoever they want out of B's former employees.
A "ban" will simply not work as long as your country has a concept of property rights and ownership.
datavirtue 773 days ago [-]
So require an employee vote?
spoonjim 774 days ago [-]
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.
brianwawok 774 days ago [-]
Every member of this forum that has sold a company has had a life changing benefit from selling. It’s not just billionaires.
golergka 774 days ago [-]
I don't even need to know what unintentional consequences of this will be, but I know that they will be catastrophic.
zeroonetwothree 774 days ago [-]
This would reduce consumer value quite a bit in some cases. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.
enriquec 774 days ago [-]
Nothing about this would succeed. Do only monopolies perform mergers?
fsckboy 774 days ago [-]
> Do only monopolies perform mergers?
companies merge to concentrate market share, i.e. eliminate competition, i.e. increase prices, i.e. monopolize. Let's not ban just monopolies, let's also ban monopolize.
unreal37 774 days ago [-]
Unprofitable companies get bought out to simply continue existing.
Like Twitch and YouTube.
ethbr0 774 days ago [-]
Companies also acquire and merge to vertically integrate.
fsckboy 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
mminer237 773 days ago [-]
They "buy" the ads only on internal accounting. There's no tax deduction for that. For you to actually recognize an expense, you would also have to recognize the gain.
gAI 774 days ago [-]
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.
ardacinar 774 days ago [-]
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.
paulddraper 774 days ago [-]
> ban all M&A
That makes about as much sense as banning marriage.
M&A is fundamental and important.
Joker_vD 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
Same reasons it's involved in medicine, housing, education, etc etc.
ClumsyPilot 774 days ago [-]
Medicine kills people. I never saw someone die from marriage
Joker_vD 773 days ago [-]
"Marital discord was significantly and positively associated with suicidal ideation and suicide attempt, and these associations remained significant when controlling for demographics and 12-month prevalence of mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders" [0].
I'm sure lots of people have committed suicide because they were stuck in bad marriages (esp. before divorce was legalized).
Lots of women get murdered by their husbands (and sometimes the reverse).
ClumsyPilot 774 days ago [-]
M&S is not fundamental, I didn't ecen exist as a concept untill fairly recently in the history of Capitalism.
tivert 774 days ago [-]
> 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).
774 days ago [-]
ethbr0 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
HWR_14 773 days ago [-]
> I believe businesses would just lie and say they are going to be part of the business but then just bury them anyway.
There are two main parts of this.
Antitrust laws don't typically concern themselves with bury vs incorporate. Even if Goodreads had been incorporated into Amazon, it still would have accomplished their major goal (prevent them from partnering with another company). And keeping them alive would have been just another part of Amazon's cost of acquisition. I wonder if it would have resulted in a lower offer.
Secondly, the government doesn't take companies at their word. When, for instance, Microsoft promises that Activision Blizzard titles will remain on Playstation for at least a decade, the government gets that in an enforceable contract.
quxbar 773 days ago [-]
Regardless of our understanding of them, antitrust laws are powerless without enforcement. It seems the only entities with standing to prevent these actions by massive corporations are other massive corporations.
hinkley 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
Well, the owners win. That's usually who they're referring to when they say "our", "us", etc.
hinkley 774 days ago [-]
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.
dexterdog 774 days ago [-]
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.
smcin 774 days ago [-]
Not really because any acquisition is going to have a non-compete to prevent that obvious scenario.
Goodreads' Otis Chandler in 2021 invested [0] in BookClub [1] ("building actionable learning cultures through books, for teams").
And Elizabeth Khuri [2] and Chandler both also invested in Looped [3] (a more engaged and interactive livestreaming event service for concerts, comedy and other entertainment)
>Not really because any acquisition is going to have a non-compete to prevent that obvious scenario.
This applies even without the non-competes - it takes time to set up a new company and gain marketshare, so even without non-competes the monopoly is successfully kicking the can down the road. And every extra year of monopoly is another years' worth of price-gouging profits, so repeatedly buying out competitors can be worthwhile.
smcin 773 days ago [-]
Sure, but if you combine the overall time and market-share advantage due to the non-compete, golden handcuffs/earn-out clauses and non-hireaway, the acquirer gets a big first-mover advantage.
I wondered why noone else had since tried to do a book discovery engine at an industrial-scale to compete with Amazon.
Here's one 2019 list of book-discovery sites:
"Broke By Books: 20 Great Book Websites for Finding What to Read Next" [0]
and here's one analysis [1] of the key things Goodreads added value for Amazon: Kindle integration (social, ratings), a storefront that lets them push Kindle as the preferred version for purchases (or else Audible, or Prime and Kindle Unlimited subscription programs), data that can be mined from user reviews and ratings to power ML for better recommendations, understanding users' book- and reading-habits, rich content to increase interaction and hold user attention...
I also wondered why the Goodreads cofounders hadn't gone and founded other companies, in other sectors.
But essentially Amazon dwarfed other online book retailers, then moved on to much bigger and more profitable sectors (Kindle, digital music, streaming, Alexa, AWS itself, and tons more).
Which is why the founder that succeeded and got the sale is not the one building the new version. He is going off and re-doing an unrelated acquisition.
smcin 768 days ago [-]
No, I pointed out that Goodreads' Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri did not go anywhere after the 2013 acquisition. They stayed, for years. Khuri is still there; Chandler continued as Goodreads' CEO till 2019.
I was surprised neither of them left sooner than that to do anything new, in any sector.
dexterdog 761 days ago [-]
Sometimes golden handcuffs are very comfortable because of the aforementioned gold.
afterburner 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
reaperducer 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
We don't need stronger laws - just the enforcement part.
hbarka 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
carlosjobim 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
ClumsyPilot 774 days ago [-]
> Who are you to ban it?
this is a terrible argument.
Some people sell their kidneys.
Some people sold their own children. Some people even sold themselves into slavery. Who are you to judge?
carlosjobim 774 days ago [-]
What are you talking about? If you ban people from selling their business they will just shut it down if they don't want to continue. Who is better off from that?
Or you have to force people to continue with their businesses, which is akin to trying to force an artist or athlete to continue to be at top level. You can't force that, no matter how many hackers agree with you.
berkes 774 days ago [-]
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.
ljm 774 days ago [-]
One version of that even got its own jargon: acquihire.
One incredible journey later and the product is already on the sunset.
hgsgm 774 days ago [-]
That's also why many employees get hired! Talent denial.
TheSpiceIsLife 773 days ago [-]
It’s exactly why many startups are conceived of in the first place.
yankput 774 days ago [-]
[flagged]
crossroadsguy 774 days ago [-]
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.
garfieldnate 774 days ago [-]
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?
threecheese 773 days ago [-]
Better API support, better moderation, evolution of product features instead of their deprecation, maybe some stack improvements to what I think is an ancient php codebase. Amazon has removed some features in the last year - with little notice - that cause a lot of us to rush and download data before it was killed off. As a side gripe, the “download” they offered was completely useless on its own, and some folks (like me) had to write code to augment it with more site data - which wasn’t available in an API (see above) and had to be scraped. Almost intentionally bad, a json file filled with internal IDs and URLs that anyone with more than a handful of books would be screwed. The feature I relied on was the ability to mark certain books as “owned”, with the specific edition and cover in my personal library. As an example, I have a 2nd printing of The Two Towers with this beautiful cover art, and I could use goodreads as my online virtual library for friends/etc.
In good news though, a number of other products are starting to fill that feature gap, but because they simply don’t have the massive amount of title, edition, and cover data (which was community-sourced), it’ll be a very long time before those products will have parity with Goodreads circa 2015.
cratermoon 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
DPReview was bought and saved, at least. So let’s not label them late and lamented yet!
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 774 days ago [-]
That purchase would not have been allowed to go through in the pre-Reagan monopoly legal era.
jurassicfoxy 774 days ago [-]
Whaaat I didn't know they owned AbeBooks. I love AbeBooks. I wonder how much of a cut they take from booksellers?
cratermoon 773 days ago [-]
I love AbeBooks, too. I started to go there as Amazon's listings got more enshittified. Rather than fixing their product, they just bought the competition.
lkbm 774 days ago [-]
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.
weego 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
edgyquant 773 days ago [-]
I really don’t think so. It’s been awhile since I was on there but there recommendations was the same thing you’d get anywhere (e.g. audible.)
Maybe the reviews were better, but I think in general the trend of trying to replace discussing things with people with an automated service or social network leads to a poorer result. I read a ton and have never used a recommendation tool to find them, I just read books, go to bookstores and talk to people about them.
773 days ago [-]
BaseballPhysics 774 days ago [-]
You mean like what you're doing right now?
pfdietz 774 days ago [-]
You do realize that's both an ad hominem argument and an admission he's correct, right?
BaseballPhysics 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
grecy 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
mattm 774 days ago [-]
This is really all there is to it. I believe I recall reading that Goodreads was Amazon's largest affiliate.
bryan0 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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?
jimmySixDOF 774 days ago [-]
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.
scrum-treats 774 days ago [-]
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!
Mordisquitos 774 days ago [-]
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.
paganel 774 days ago [-]
I’m still very bitter about what Amazon did to Book Depository.
AlbertCory 774 days ago [-]
I think this is correct. The acquisition was anti-competitive, and Lina Khan's FTC would probably challenge it.
TheRealPomax 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
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.
tzs 773 days ago [-]
To be fair to Pai, he was Chair of the FCC not the FTC. He didn't have much say in FTC rule enforcement.
TheRealPomax 772 days ago [-]
If you're being fair to Pai, you have no business being on the internet.
crossroadsguy 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
Verb tense. Should have said "would have."
mattm 774 days ago [-]
It's not true that Amazon hasn't done anything with Goodreads....they have sunset their API.
nemo44x 774 days ago [-]
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!
majormajor 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
matthewfcarlson 774 days ago [-]
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.
abc_lisper 774 days ago [-]
Can this not be reversed. Force amazon to spin it out?
biggoodwolf 774 days ago [-]
And who would do that? Even if technically possible, there is no one willing to do it.
RoyGBivCap 774 days ago [-]
FTC, if they weren't captured.
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RoyGBivCap 774 days ago [-]
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.
sdfghswe 774 days ago [-]
Why do you think that Amazon is concerned that a database is enough to threaten their business?
tivert 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
SoftTalker 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 773 days ago [-]
I'm just saying I don't really rely on Amazon for reviews. I know what books I want, based on recommendations from people I trust, or sites like this one. I presume that any review on a seller's site is fake.
sdfghswe 774 days ago [-]
> 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?
tivert 773 days ago [-]
> You think that to start an Amazon competitor you need a book database?
Obviously.
I can't conceive of a modern-day online bookseller not having a book database, and one pre-populated with human-written reviews gives you a head start in that area.
andsoitis 774 days ago [-]
On Goodreads, the Buy button allows you to buy from:
- Amazon
- Audible
- Barnes & Noble
- AbeBooks
- Walmart
- Libraries
tivert 774 days ago [-]
> 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).
scrum-treats 774 days ago [-]
Amazon, Audible, and AbeBooks are owned by Amazon.
mikestew 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
It pains me to learn that I'm so dumb you can't even conceive I'm asking in good faith.
michaelmrose 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
Its not database but customer gateway that matters. If Goodreads has B&N link prominently some customers will move.
atlasunshrugged 774 days ago [-]
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.
rtbathula 774 days ago [-]
"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
bobbylarrybobby 774 days ago [-]
The free market elected a government with an FTC, so...
f-securus 774 days ago [-]
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.
ClumsyPilot 773 days ago [-]
> Free market means, freely allowing people to trade using persuasions
Have you ever heard of market manipulation, wash trading, self dealing, and other kinds of fraud in the 'free market'?
canadianfella 774 days ago [-]
[dead]
rtbathula 774 days ago [-]
"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
dendriti 773 days ago [-]
The government is deeply involved in the "free market", like when it defends trademarks, copyrights, and contracts by force or threat of force.
fastball 774 days ago [-]
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".
tecleandor 774 days ago [-]
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".
yurishimo 774 days ago [-]
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.
MandieD 774 days ago [-]
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.
avgcorrection 773 days ago [-]
> When I lived in America, it seemed the consensus of anything under a 9 is killing puppies.
I also get the impression that American grades are like this:
- A is good. You made an effort.
- A [however modified with +/++]: great job!
- C is terrible. You skipped all classes or fell into a coma.
autarch 774 days ago [-]
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".
ahartmetz 774 days ago [-]
I've noticed that many decent German TV productions (I'm talking about somewhat positive outliers here, like the best few Tatort episodes in a year) get scores of 6 to 7 on IMDB - especially the ones that are only shown in Germany. So, the Netherlands and Germany are pretty similar about that.
user_7832 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
dahwolf 774 days ago [-]
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.
yurishimo 774 days ago [-]
Sure. I was looking up energy price comparisons last night and came across this.
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.
throwaway290 773 days ago [-]
I very often go to places that are 3/5. I was burned too often bad 4 or 5 places. The more important favtor is number of reviews and what exactly recent reviews say.
About skewed ratings:
0) there is no objective point of reference, every rating is about the reviewer more than the place.
1) google knows about it. they have weighed rating of some sort so 2/5 rating is not going to kill.
2) people in some cultures can give low rating without explaining what they didn't like. either it is complicated to explain what it is or it may be misinterpreted or not publicly acceptable.
cratermoon 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
grujicd 773 days ago [-]
Why 5 if your sleep was miserable (I assume)? Host has full control over that and should be held responsible if made a poor choice which affects guests. You're polite to host, but not polite to future guests.
CamperBob2 773 days ago [-]
It was easy enough to fix by taping a washcloth loosely over the sensor, and obviously my opinion regarding it being a terrible idea isn't universally shared, or he wouldn't have installed it there in the first place. So I didn't feel good about dropping a score near 100% to one near 80% just for that one thing.
There was also a massive foam rubber pad on the mattress that made the first night a rough one... but again, some people who are wrong prefer those, and again, it was easy enough to remove. Or at least, it would've been if my partner hadn't already been asleep on it when I came to bed. The resulting tossing and turning was what made the motion-sensing night light a problem.
Basically I didn't want to go full Karen on the landlord because everything else about the house was comfortable and thoughtful. I felt that a four-star rating would have been projecting a combination of my personal preferences and comically-bad luck on his other potential renters.
selcuka 773 days ago [-]
It would be interesting to find out the mean and standard deviation for various review sites, and write a browser extension that normalizes them.
JohnFen 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
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sundvor 773 days ago [-]
Yeah in Australia anything under a 5 out 5 may seem like grounds for a defamation lawsuit.
It's a complete farce.
fourmajor 774 days ago [-]
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.
LVB 774 days ago [-]
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.
kortilla 774 days ago [-]
“Normal distribution” doesn’t mean evenly distributed. Most being in the middle is a normal distribution.
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hospitalJail 774 days ago [-]
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.
yurishimo 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
yurishimo 774 days ago [-]
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.
mcpackieh 774 days ago [-]
> 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?
mcphage 770 days ago [-]
> Complaining about a few enemies, copypaste world, etc.
It's important to review a game as it exists, and not a game that you imagined in your head that would be better.
> Imagine you got rid of the Zelda skins and Zelda name, released it on Xbox. What would it get then?
Well, in the case of Genshin Impact: lots and lots of money.
Seriously, though. If Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom had been released by a company other than Nintendo, people would be singing its praises to the high heavens. You'd see a lot of "Why can't Nintendo come up with this" type articles about it.
delecti 774 days ago [-]
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.
afterburner 774 days ago [-]
> 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+
ohlookcake 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
Retric 774 days ago [-]
You missed #3 all books get rated.
Terrible books likely have fewer readers, thus fewer and likely zero people would post a review.
therealdrag0 774 days ago [-]
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.
thebigspacefuck 774 days ago [-]
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.
bstpierre 774 days ago [-]
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.
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
Zampa 773 days ago [-]
> 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".
We've done exactly this with Flickchart - https://www.flickchart.com - presenting the user with two movies at a time and letting them choose what, in their opinion, is the better film. We then aggregate everyone's rankings to generate a combined chart of the best films of all-time that's always in flux and changing.
We take into account each user's total number of rankings (refinement), and the total number of movies they've ranked (breadth of knowledge). We also use time as a factor - given that something that just came out has had less time to be "an all-timer" than something that has existed in the world longer and had the time to be experienced by more people.
We created this way back in 2009 and are currently building the next-generation of it on a modern web stack. This new iteration is also more modularized so we can expand more easily from just movies to other domains (books, games, music, TV, etc.).
dreamcompiler 774 days ago [-]
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.
aleksiy123 774 days ago [-]
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.
MrVandemar 774 days ago [-]
> I don't think it would be possible for someone to change their rating but that may be a feature.
It should definitely be possible. Take films. I had a friend who would go see a film. On the day he saw it: "OMG THE BEST THING EVER". Next Week: "Yeah, that was a good film". A month later: "Yeah it was okay I guess". Six months later: "A bit ordinary really"
In 1990 if you'd asked me to rank the Alien films, I would have put ALIENS first, and ALIEN second. These days, I reverse those rankings.
People's tastes change over time. It would be inaccurate to "fix" a rating in stone.
helges 773 days ago [-]
Yeah, I think what was meant is that the Elo rating system might make it difficult to account for changes in the rating.
People change their minds all the time (and it's a good thing), I agree.
aleksiy123 773 days ago [-]
Yes, this is what I meant. Changing the rating would require storing every rating and recalculating all dependent ratings which could be quite a large DAG.
While not impossible I don't think it would be particularly scalable.
mahoho 774 days ago [-]
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.
jsmith99 774 days ago [-]
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.
berkes 774 days ago [-]
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.
MrVandemar 774 days ago [-]
In which case the system would need to continually challenge you about your historical choices, perhaps based on recent choices and detecting possible paradoxes (you liked A more than B, and you liked B more than C, but you also liked C more than A).
berkes 773 days ago [-]
Very good solution indeed!
Maybe also allow ratings to be a list over time rather than one, single data point. That'll make calculating an average more involved, but also more realistic.
throw0101a 774 days ago [-]
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.
tim-fan 774 days ago [-]
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.
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.
pessimizer 774 days ago [-]
> 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).
kmos17 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
Agree. Except for Indian movies. Their ratings aren’t trustworthy. Lots of 8+ movies they’re mediocre or bad (despite high production costs).
Gtex555 773 days ago [-]
This reminds me of my favourite scene from the social network when movie Zuck gets the idea for facemash:
Billy Olson’s sitting here and had the idea of putting some of these next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on who’s hotter. Yea, it’s on. I’m not gonna do the farm animals but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very “Turing” feel since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The first thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures.
merdaverse 773 days ago [-]
Agree completely. Scoring is mostly a cultural thing, I presume based on how the person experienced grades in school and their social pressures to attain certain grades. As a child I moved from a country where getting any grade below 9/10 was a shame to one where 7 was good enough, a 9 was very rare.
Because of this all the review systems like IMDB are flawed by design.
Steam reviews are the most trustworthy for me. While they are not perfect, the binary choice normalizes these scoring differences, and can be read as a "probability that you will enjoy X if your are interested in this sort of thing" which is the best one can hope for.
mattmanser 773 days ago [-]
First only IMDb TV shows hover around 8, films hover around 6.
And it is still useful. For example, from my perspective I can quickly judge a movie from an imdb score.
Anything less than 6.1 is bad. 6.1-6.3, ok, 6.3-6.8 good, 6.8+ excellent.
Apart from movies starring star trek characters, add one to all those scores.
Goodreads is similar but tighter, anything less than 3.9 is a red flag, over 4.2 and you start getting into excellent.
Though in my opinion steam seems to have got it done best with "overwhelminly positive", "very positive", "positive", "mixed", "mostly negative", etc. but occasionally gets review bombed.
TRiG_Ireland 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
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.
MrVandemar 774 days ago [-]
I don't think it makes much sense to compare a fiction book to a non-fiction book. There's not enough points of comparison. While both can be compared on quality of prose, the fiction might be judged on characters and plot, and the non-fiction book on accuracy and detail.
You might as well ask the question: Who is the better Tennis player? Roger Federer or Garry Kasparov?
A system would need to draw some kind of boundary conditions so you are comparing things that have more in common than "printed on paper and bound".
foysauce 771 days ago [-]
I don't think I'm alone in that if I'm reading something that is anywhere near a 1-star, I don't finish it. And then go on to not leave a review. This skews my ratings indeed, because not every book I start is between 3-5 stars, but almost every book I _finish_ is.
> 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.
gmiller123456 774 days ago [-]
I don't find the average rating very useful. I do, however, find reading 1 and 2 star reviews quite helpful.
It wouldn't be very helpful to read a review as to why someone thought Fundamental Calculus was better than Moby Dick. Without the star rating system, you lose the ability to filter on the reviews from people who think the product is bad.
774 days ago [-]
Gtex555 773 days ago [-]
Couldn't you do this implicitly if I rate book A an 8 and book B a 7 then I have technically said book A is better than book B, so ignore the numerical value and take the better reading. Now put the rating out of 100 as out of 5 or 10 would lead to too many ties.
774 days ago [-]
laurels-marts 773 days ago [-]
> For IMDB the rankings all hover around 8ish.
That's definitely not the case. 8 is neither mean nor median for titles on imdb. If a film scores anywhere above 8.0 they are already in the top 250. Most titles average between 5 and 7.
waspight 774 days ago [-]
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.
bart_spoon 773 days ago [-]
It seems like it would be easy to just normalize scores. Rather than a book’s score being the average rating they’ve received, it should be a z-score based on all ratings.
ROTMetro 774 days ago [-]
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?
moneywoes 772 days ago [-]
> aggregated personal Elo
Interestingly that seems reminiscient of data apps. What are your thoughts on their ranking philosophy?
cratermoon 774 days ago [-]
> Humans
There's the problem there – assuming human input makes up an important part of the rankings.
CalRobert 774 days ago [-]
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.
Leires 774 days ago [-]
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.
dudul 773 days ago [-]
Next time just refuse to dance and end the interview on the spot. I do that and it feels great to see the light dying in their eyes when they realize you're the one "dumping" them.
ZhadruOmjar 773 days ago [-]
Feels good for 15 minutes while you burn a bridge and don't proceed at the interview. Presumably they have other candidates, they probably don't even remember you a couple of days later.
pm3003 773 days ago [-]
It's a matter of not wasting each other's time and energy on futile things. If it's not going well for one reason or another, better to politely end it and let each other do something else with their day.
dudul 773 days ago [-]
Yeah, the way I see it it's the stupid company using brain teasers like these that just burnt a bridge.
Presumably you have other interviews.
pauby 773 days ago [-]
If terminating an interview early 'burns a bridge', then I've 'dodged a bullet'.
tasuki 773 days ago [-]
I for one think that logic puzzles are a reasonable filter for many positions.
I used to be very good at logic puzzles and have steadily been getting worse. Yes I have wider perspective now, but my raw problem solving ability has deteriorated. I can understand if a company wants to maximize problem solving for certain roles.
hospitalJail 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
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.
athst 773 days ago [-]
Amazon bought Goodreads in 2013 - if you had interviewed after the acquisition, you'd have encountered Amazon's style of interviews, which is much more professional and better than the experience you describe.
CalRobert 773 days ago [-]
I wouldn't have minded getting some equity before the purchase, though!
registeredcorn 774 days ago [-]
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! :)
dopa42365 774 days ago [-]
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).
kawera 774 days ago [-]
Not to mention reviewers with 3k+ reviews. Who in their right mind properly read and review 3k books?
qingcharles 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.)
xhevahir 773 days ago [-]
I've read 56 books this year--keeping track of them is pretty much all I use GoodReads for--and it's feeling like too much. Not many of them stand out in my memory.
I've seen people on GoodReads reading 200+ a year, which sounds insane to me.
therealdrag0 773 days ago [-]
I’ve pulled back to like 25 a year and another 10 I start and don’t finish and I’m happy at this balance.
reactor 773 days ago [-]
Just curious, did that (reading 900 books) make any significant impact in your life/thought process/mental model etc?
qingcharles 773 days ago [-]
It's a great question. It's hard to retain the information from so many books and when I looked at the list of books I'd read there were many that I had absolutely no recollection of. And some of them where I just had a vague feeling of how wonderful they were to read and how sad I was that they ended, but no recollection of the plot.
I tried to read as many non-fiction books as I could, but these were almost non-existent in the jails I was housed in. The ones I got sent in about business and languages were a god-send and I find the information I gained from those to be very useful to me; especially the books on Japanese and Arabic which gave me a great grounding in those languages, although you can't easily learn pronunciation from a book!
reactor 772 days ago [-]
Thanks for that. I can imagine, if you don't get an avenue to take the learnings from books, it may fade away. Glad that you are out.
Retric 773 days ago [-]
What’s your reading speed like? I can easily read 2 books a day if I’ve got nothing better to do.
Averaging just 2 per week hits 3k books in 29 years which doesn’t sound far fetched to me. Call it ~14 hours a week reading, plenty of people spend more than that playing video games or watching Netflix etc.
sixstringtheory 773 days ago [-]
It’s unimaginable to me that anyone can read two books in a day and retain any significant amount of its information. Not calling you a liar, I just literally can’t understand how.
Is this a skill you developed over time, did you learn some particular tricks, were you just born that way? How long have you been reading adult literature? Are you skimming or painting images in your mind? What kinds of books?
I have so many books I want to read but I can only get through about 10-15 per year. Some of it probably comes down to where I choose to spend my free time, but I still feel like I crawl through pages. I spend a lot of time/energy painting that mental imagery I asked about, of what is being described.
Retric 773 days ago [-]
I started reading adult literature at about 14 or so and just read a lot. I find I retain more if I read faster where if I slow down I tend to drift off more.
Now this is just novels, technical information is a lot more dense and it can take me weeks to read a new programming language book cover to cover because I need to set it down after a while and think about it then go back and reread sections etc.
Speed reading is an entirely different thing, but I did spend a little while learning to read faster. The average person speaks about 180 words per minute at that pace a 120,000 word novel takes 11 hours. If you want to read a little faster don’t sub vocalize individual words just hear them in your head.
I will often set YouTube videos to 2x speed which is easily understandable and about the pace I tend to read. It’s bizarre but if you change the YouTube settings from 2x/1.5x to 1.0x it suddenly feels like most people are incredibly slow but those same videos feel fine when you start at 1.0x speed.
qingcharles 773 days ago [-]
Ah, depends on the book! If it was something I really enjoyed like The Martian or The 3-Body Problem, then I would devour the thing in a day.
I remember reading this and it was so uninspiring (the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature) that it took me an entire month to finish:
Once upon a time, GoodReads was great at tracking down reviews from individuals(typically other authors) that provided very high quality reviews. Finding one of these high quality reviews was always nice when investigating a new book. They made engaging with GoodReads worth it.
With all of the low quality reviews out there these days, even the idea of finding a quality review can’t get me back on the site.
doh 774 days ago [-]
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.
774 days ago [-]
pessimizer 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
Preventing fraud, not censorship. Writing a fake review of a book that hasn't even been finished written yet is fraud.
pessimizer 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
That’s only true for extremely small values of “censorship”.
pessimizer 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
mcpackieh 774 days ago [-]
> are meant to
Maybe review scores ought to be an aggregate of the opinions of people who read the book, but that's not what they actually are. They're an aggregate of how people feel towards a book (for any reason). Such reviews might even be against the rules and guidelines set out for reviews; reviews ought to follow the rules but that doesn't mean they will.
The utility of review scores derives wholly from how they actually work, not from how they're meant to work. So devalue them accordingly.
jillesvangurp 774 days ago [-]
Given that the article is on the Washington post, it's worth pointing out that that is another thing that Jeff Bezos owns.
yankput 774 days ago [-]
It’s stated in the article.
tasuki 773 days ago [-]
I think that shows him in a positive/neutral light rather than in a bad light.
ryzvonusef 774 days ago [-]
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.)
ausp 773 days ago [-]
May I suggest that you try TheStoryGraph? I've found it fills that need for me nicely and, as a bonus, offers an import service for Goodreads data - no need to start over.
The recommendation engine hasn't steered me wrong yet, and the roadmap/developer interaction and feedback are very good indeed.
ZacnyLos 774 days ago [-]
Now Bookwyrm is the future of book reviews. Because it's FOSS and federalised with ActivityPub protocol.
nologic01 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
> 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.
agloe_dreams 774 days ago [-]
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.
fn-mote 774 days ago [-]
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.
MrVandemar 774 days ago [-]
So ... what about second hand copies. Who is the "authenticated buyer" in that scenario?
AlbertCory 774 days ago [-]
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.
AlbertCory 774 days ago [-]
Good idea. Maybe YCombinator would back it.
atlasunshrugged 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
What does that last sentence mean?
Edit: the current comment is not what I was responding to. It's clearer now after editing.
prox 774 days ago [-]
I changed the wording. Basically you get noname brand authors quotes next to really legendary figures quotes because it’s all gamed.
arvidkahl 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
> 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 774 days ago [-]
Making the best of it :D
meesles 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
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.
mighmi 774 days ago [-]
Do you know of any good forums or discussion places about books overall, or is literal good for it?
manuelmoreale 774 days ago [-]
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.
crossroadsguy 774 days ago [-]
I don’t think GoodReads has any real alternative. Amazon knew that. That’s why they bought it.
manuelmoreale 774 days ago [-]
It’s been 10 years since Amazon bought it. Maybe it’s time for alternatives to go online.
sidmitra 774 days ago [-]
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.
>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 774 days ago [-]
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?)
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 774 days ago [-]
I've been liking the recommendations from https://thestorygraph.com a lot. They can import your goodreads reviews.
phillipcarter 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
garfieldnate 774 days ago [-]
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!
sidibe 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
>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)
CaptainZapp 774 days ago [-]
> 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?
garciansmith 774 days ago [-]
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."
deanCommie 774 days ago [-]
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.”
unethical_ban 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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
cratermoon 774 days ago [-]
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.
deanCommie 773 days ago [-]
When journalists quote CopSpeak, and only report the cop's side of the story, that is propaganda. Unquestionably.
When the entire premise of the story is hyper-critical of Amazon, and Amazon's defense is half-hearted, vacuuous, and informationally background, you don't need advanced media literacy to think "Wow, that response from Amazon does NOT pass the bullshit sniff test, huh, I wonder what that means."
How much spoonfeeding do we expect to our readers?
This isn't "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him" <and we burned zero calories to validate that point>".
This isn't "99.9% of scientists think one thing. 0.1% think the opposite. But we're not going to tell you that, we'll just interview 1 scientist from each position and let you decide."
This is a super critical piece of Amazon that achieves the mandatory standards of reaching out to Amazon for comment, and the comment they got speaks for itself in contrast to the story so clearly that to editorialize on it any further insults the reader's intelligence.
cratermoon 773 days ago [-]
Cops don't say "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him", they say things like "officer-involved shooting" and "The teen was also a part of the incident and was hit in the abdomen by the one shot fired from the deputy’s gun, he said."
The framing is what matters, and the WaPo story, the frame doesn't question whether or not Amazon's purchase was anti-competitive, just whether or not Amazon did a good job running it
dragonwriter 773 days ago [-]
> Cops don't say "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him",
No, they say “I saw that he had a weapon”, even if the reality is that some other cop said it.
> they say things like "officer-involved shooting"
That's not what the involved cops say, that’s what the department’s public affairs office says as a lead paragraph summary to discourage engagement with the details. (The details will then be whatever story the cops involved say.)
archgoon 774 days ago [-]
[dead]
monktastic1 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
batch12 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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”.
goodthrowreads 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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?
tracerbulletx 774 days ago [-]
No. Most of the political and corporate apparatus communicates as an occupation, what they believe has no correlation with what they say.
Lolaccount 774 days ago [-]
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.
JohnFen 774 days ago [-]
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.
hospitalJail 774 days ago [-]
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'.
JKCalhoun 774 days ago [-]
Greetings, fellow customer!
JohnFen 774 days ago [-]
> 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.
CatWChainsaw 773 days ago [-]
That's remarkably honest of him.
CatWChainsaw 773 days ago [-]
On one hand I hate it, but on the other hand since I use the presence of even a single buzzword as a snake-oil alarm, I'm willing to ignore a few false positives in exchange for remarkably less technological bullshit in my life.
Compare that to astroturfing. Bill Hick's opinion is very relevant for them especially.
hospitalJail 774 days ago [-]
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.
Nemo_bis 773 days ago [-]
That sentence means: "By joining Amazon, GoodReads was not sued to death by Amazon for using book catalog data from Amazon".
CrampusDestrus 774 days ago [-]
Amazon's resources and technology to display a static web page with a few low resolution images and a bunch of text.
bacchusracine 774 days ago [-]
>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.
boxcarr 774 days ago [-]
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.
I wasn’t a Good Reads user but Amazon purchased and then shuttered my favorite music discovery site, Amie Street. They simply redirected the site to Amazon’s MP3 store. This happened back in 2010 and I still miss the ability to discover and buy music from the independent artists who published there.
steedsofwar 774 days ago [-]
Bezos also owns the Washington Post. Make of that what you will.
moomin 774 days ago [-]
I think large corporations are typically fine with criticism that doesn’t affect their bottom line.
zerkten 774 days ago [-]
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.
774 days ago [-]
karaterobot 774 days ago [-]
Librarything has always been better than Goodreads, with a better community, better leadership, a better mission, and a more confusing UI. You can import your library from Goodreads, or pretty much anywhere else.
maximinus_thrax 773 days ago [-]
Librarything is partially (40%) owned by AbeBooks which is an Amazon subsidiary. Spalding has the lion's share and I'm sure this matters for the direction of the product while he holds it, but I'm skeptical about the whole thing in general. It takes just one person to change their mind and the enshittification starts.
> Certain content that appears in on this site comes from Amazon Services, LLC. This content is provided "as is" and is subject to change or removal at any time.
Ugh..
karaterobot 773 days ago [-]
Do you think either of those facts affect the site in any way? I'll be honest, it just sounds like problematizing to me.
Guthur 774 days ago [-]
The case in point highlights that this is not a problem specific to online media, it's just made it more obvious.
There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict.
I like Iain McGilchrist thesis that we seemed that have become overly left brain dominated and so are starting to exhibit an increasing inability to process nuance.
lisasays 773 days ago [-]
There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now.
An excellent analogy, as applies to the current Russian state having dragged its population into a senseless, expansionist war against its southern neighbor (and erstwhile "brother" nation). And its skill at turning ordinary citizens into instruments of genocide.
Guthur 773 days ago [-]
Really, so the russians are referring to Ukrainians as some dehumanising term as orc?
_kbh_ 773 days ago [-]
Yes? they refer to them in ways that says there people, culture and history don't even exist.
Thats way more dehumanising than referring them as monsters because they continually act like monsters.
Guthur 773 days ago [-]
Sorry, they say they don't exist as human beings? that would be the dehumanising equivalent.
Nations, culture, history etc are ideas and perceptions that it's clear we don't all agree on.
_kbh_ 773 days ago [-]
> Sorry, they say they don't exist as human beings? that would be the dehumanising equivalent.
No it wouldn't, no one said the Russians don't exist.
> Nations, culture, history etc are ideas and perceptions that it's clear we don't all agree on.
Yeah and it's way more dehumanising to say they don't exist then to call someone a monster for being a monster.
Do you think the Russian army should be invading Ukraine?.
lisasays 773 days ago [-]
The topic is entirely moot.
What is "dehumanizing" is the unprovoked war of racist, colonial aggression, enacted by the Russian Federation upon Ukraine - and conducted from the start with a policy of terror, directed at civilians. If you care at all about the subject, that is what you should be focusing on.
If a bunch of assholes came into your neighborhood, started raping people and shooting randomly at whoever was walking on the street - you wouldn't have the kindest words for them either.
_kbh_ 773 days ago [-]
> There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict.
You must have the thinnest skin to imaginable to actually think this.
And the irony of this palatable considering how the Russians are acting similar to actual Nazis and mirroring some of their rhetoric.
Insulting a fascists invading force committing some of worst crimes imaginable is not the same as what the Nazis did.
Guthur 773 days ago [-]
Dehumanising is Dehumanising, nothing to do with my skin, I'm not Russian or Ukrainian.
_kbh_ 773 days ago [-]
> Dehumanising is Dehumanising, nothing to do with my skin, I'm not Russian or Ukrainian.
Regardless of what your background is saying someone making light of fascists invaders is dehumanising requires you to have a super thin skin.
If they didn’t want to be called orcs maybe they should stop acting like them.
cf141q5325 773 days ago [-]
Or maybe dehumanizing people is wrong no matter who does it. Just like Fascism. As long as its the same mechanisms at play, this is only a discussion about palpable degrees. Which when judged only by who does it always end on the worse part of the spectrum.
I believe its worth pointing out, that both Ukraine and Russia are using conscripts. As in innocent men that get murdered by their government for "reasons". So no, dehumanizing them is not acceptable. The cognitive dissonance necessary to justify this by citing fears of fascism is quite something.
It might also be worth pointing out, that this is lesser evil logic. Which if you recall is how we got fascism in Germany, by scaring people enough with the threat of the Bolsheviks.
edit: Also, just because OP is trolling doesnt mean that dehumanization is acceptable. Especially if that is the expectable reaction.
Guthur 773 days ago [-]
You really believe that's how it works? that russians can just choose not to be involved. Like the east Ukrainians can just choose to be autonomous?
_kbh_ 773 days ago [-]
> You really believe that's how it works? that russians can just choose not to be involved.
Yes. The Russians chose to invade, they choose to continue to occupy Ukraine and they choose to both commit terrible war crimes and act like idiots.
> Like the east Ukrainians can just choose to be autonomous?
This is a false equivalency.
Do you think it was wrong to call the Nazis monsters?, a Orc is merely a monster, calling someone a Orc is no less dehumanising than saying someones particularly heinous actions were monstrous.
What do you think of the Russian talking points that dehumanise the entire country of Ukraine and talks about them in a way that pretty much precludes that they are fake people and should be genocide'd if need be?.
Guthur 773 days ago [-]
How is it false equivalency, you seem to think that individuals can choose whatever they individually believe is right i.e. an individual in Russia can some how chose not to be involved in the ongoing conflict. And so if that is true it must be just as simple for someone within Ukraine to chose a different path and not be part of the country we call Ukraine.
Orc is non-human, it is dehumanizing. And I'm not sure we both agree what the Nazi ideology is. For me Nazi is someone who follows a race based ideology that aims to dehumanize or otherwise segegrate elements of humanity as being of a lower category.
Fake country and fake human is a false equivalency. Humans are living conscious beings of a category that we all belong to. Countries are a further category we've invented for...reasons. I've not seen evidence that the people in the area we call Russia have claimed that the humans in the area we call Ukraine are some how non-humans. But in contrast none of us are here denying that Ukriane openly refers to Russians as a non-human category.
_kbh_ 773 days ago [-]
> How is it false equivalency, you seem to think that individuals can choose whatever they individually believe is right i.e. an individual in Russia can some how chose not to be involved in the ongoing conflict.
Yes there is an always free will, regardless of the consequences.
"I was just following orders" as an excuse for doing terrible things didn't fly with the Nazis and it shouldn't fly now.
> Orc is non-human, it is dehumanizing. And I'm not sure we both agree what the Nazi ideology is. For me Nazi is someone who follows a race based ideology that aims to dehumanize or otherwise segegrate elements of humanity as being of a lower category.
Monsters are non-human, it is dehumanising.
Calling Nazi's monsters is dehumanising right?.
> I've not seen evidence that the people in the area we call Russia have claimed that the humans in the area we call Ukraine are some how non-humans. But in contrast none of us are here denying that Ukriane openly refers to Russians as a non-human category.
It has happened plenty, from government officials.
> Russian officials claimed on Monday that Ukrainian soldiers have been turned into "monsters" in "secret experiments" in biological laboratories in Ukraine funded by the United States government.
You didn't look very hard did you?.
You also never answered the question if you think Nazi's are monsters.
pentagrama 774 days ago [-]
I hope no corporation buys https://letterboxd.com which is currently similar to the good old Goodreads but for movies.
The problem at Goodreads is not that they haven't made any improvements over the past decade that Amazon bought it. The problem is that they've only made technical improvements and other changes under the hood that no user ever notices. They weren't able to drive a strong product vision forward under Amazon because of poor product vision and poor organizational incentives. It should be a cautionary tale to the people who always complain about not working enough on tech debt - too much of that can be fatal too.
frankfrank13 774 days ago [-]
WaPO covering Amazon's Goodreads acquisition is really something.
synetic 774 days ago [-]
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.
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?
stevebmark 774 days ago [-]
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 774 days ago [-]
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.
stevebmark 772 days ago [-]
As a non-useful aside: That's funny to me, the painful UI of Goodreads smelled like Rails to me. It's engineers trying to solve problems "the Rails way" which leads to poorly designed forms, UX, errors reported to the user, etc. It feels similar to Basecamp, which was notoriously so hard to update that they made version 3 and 4 instead of just improving the existing site.
Another victim of a Rails monolith, nice. And a victim of Ruby and Rails' horrific magic that sounds like it's very dangerous to refactor. Unlike Github, I'm guessing Amazon doesn't have core Ruby and Rails maintainers on staff to help keep the thing afloat.
iamsomewalrus 773 days ago [-]
^ I can vouch for this. Worked at Goodreads from about 2013 to 2017 ish. I’m sure my name haunts git blame now.
javier_e06 774 days ago [-]
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.
charles_f 774 days ago [-]
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.
gkanai 773 days ago [-]
Same thing with DPReview- the digital camera review site. Amazon bought it, ran it for a number of years, and then shut it down a few months ago. Owner of the site exited. Employees got a few years of salaries.
hnburnsy 774 days ago [-]
I've always suspected that journalists get story ideas from Hackernews top posts...
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.
vvpan 774 days ago [-]
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.
birdymcbird 774 days ago [-]
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.
electroagenda 774 days ago [-]
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.
Nicholas_C 774 days ago [-]
There are certainly ways, I switched to a Kobo reader instead of a Kindle and haven’t bought a book off Amazon in years.
jamilton 774 days ago [-]
There's Smashwords. I wish more authors used it, I don't know why they don't.
chiefalchemist 774 days ago [-]
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?
adolph 774 days ago [-]
Or it could have gone the way of Wirecutter if NYT bought it. Nothing is permanent. Centralization is "better is worse."
Amazon buying it is one problem. But the other is the users, review-bombing books they haven't even read
triangleman83 774 days ago [-]
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.
dvt 774 days ago [-]
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.
NotYourLawyer 774 days ago [-]
But Amazon is otherwise so good at rooting out fraudulent reviews!
cpncrunch 773 days ago [-]
Exactly. The same problem happens on amazon all the time. The only difference is that amazon shows who has a verified purchased the book, but still, it is very easy to review-bomb a book on amazon, and they do absolutely nothing about it. So, I don't really see this as an issue with goodreads per se. It's just a general problem with moderating user generated reviews, or at least it's a problem with large companies such as amazon moderating (or not) those reviews.
intesars 774 days ago [-]
Agree, it was a preemptive buy to keep the competition out.
HeavyStorm 773 days ago [-]
Nobody finding it strange that wp is slamming Amazon?
CatWChainsaw 773 days ago [-]
Not really. Although I live in the DC area and subscribe to the Post, and every article that has so much of a whiff of conflict of interest includes a parenthentical aside that Bezos owns the Post. We're used to it.
This isn't likely to do financial damage such that Bezos would care, and both Bezos and WaPo "win" if WaPo looks "impartial" enough to criticize Bezos - WaPo gets to show that off for journalistic credibility and Bezos gets to show off that the media org he owns is totally willing to speak truth to power, which makes him One Of The Good Billionaires.
Washington Post was the future of news then Jeff Bezos paywalled it
francisangus 772 days ago [-]
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AniseAbyss 774 days ago [-]
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ar_lan 774 days ago [-]
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
But right now we let the market consolidate to the point where major industries have 2-4 major players with 80-90% market share between them.
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.
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.
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.
Virtually every single bank failure that happens results in an M&A that is negotiated over a weekend.
Most recently Credit Suisse collapsed in March. UBS bought it on Monday, March 19, after negotiations began on Friday, March 16. UBS offered a price that was 60% lower than the Friday closing price. The deal was accepted.
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.
Clearly there are serious scenarios outside M&A where we accept terrible failures due to regulations. Why not accept some in M&A as well?
I think one could argue that the business failure is likely to affect more people, therefore it’s a greater impact. Still, I ultimately agree with this stance (in the context of business survival, not personal); failure is an inherent risk of business.
The context in this discussion is comparing the hypothetical of a homeless person dying due to a systemic failure to the hypothetical of a business going bankrupt (without being acquired) due to a systemic failure.
This concept of presumed innocence ought to apply to this hypothetical homeless person: why not give them shelter (analogous to allowing M&A) by default, until someone decides it’s a problem? If a society is willing to accept this personal death, they should be willing to accept a business failure.
I support the "no M&A" policy.
Would anyone ever invest in startups, in that scenario?
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.
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.
And, hey, if the business is successful, you own part of a successful business.
I feel old and you goddamn kids better be off my lawn by the time I get back with the shotgun.
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.
I still am clueless as to how to generate a network effect without giving things away for free. And as you said, once it's free, it's expected to remain free
The cynical me says that some people are able to generate a network effect because of fame or because of an existing network to which they belong (i.e. being chosen at YC or published in a newspaper). For example, FB was promoted to death in all US campuses for free during the 2000s. I wonder how that happened (honest question)
Are we discussing drug cartels? Because this reads literally like it could apply only to a highly criminal business.
We're just talking about a situation where some existing large interests have a lucrative business peddling some pretty addictive stuff, and they want to make sure nobody else encroaches on their turf. To that end, they're willing to spend a lot of money to "make the problem go away". Sometimes that means bringing the upstarts into the fold!
Not at all like drug cartels.
Sometimes it means asking the upstarts to say hello to your little friend.
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.
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).
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.
You can perfectly cash out by selling your business to private equity, or to anyone really.
Ban on M&A just means you cant sell a social network to Facebook, but you could sell it to Microsoft, to Autodesk, to Berkshire capital, etc.
If Company A was providing a service that people found helpful, someone else who is more competent at running a business will step in to fill that need. Employees will flock to the new better run business or move to some other better run business.
When new companies have to step up to provide popular goods and services that were previously being provided by failing, poorly run companies, it results in innovations and new ways of doing things instead of just letting bloated industry giants continue to be propped up artificially by restricting consumer choice.
Having more players in a market also increases resiliency and improves stability. If one company runs into problems, the others in that space can pick up the slack. No more "Too Big to Fail".
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.
So while possible in theory, if it's impossible to happen in practice, it's not a valid counterargument to a practical proposal.
May mergers of huge companies often have negative impact. Firstly most mergers do not involve multi-billion dollar companies at all, secondly many mergers occur when one company is is trouble, and thirdly good takeovers increase distribution of the smaller companies brand.
Good examples of successful mergers/takeovers like this include:
Halotop bought by Wells Enterprises
Geely buying Volvo
SAIC buying MG
Most acquisitions by Proctor & Gamble
Most acquisitions and mergers in the markup and beauty space.
I'm sure there have been some that haven't been successful, but most that I'm aware of have gone very well.
How are you defining "good" or "successful" here?
The improved availability via better distribution is a win for consumers and the increase in revenue is a win for the company and shareholders.
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.
what is actually good for consumers is fierce competition spoiling the sleep of capitalists.
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.
even if there weren't, it's still too big, break it in half. Shareholders will still own what they owned before, 65% of the market, and all the IP that is contained therein, but the companies will have to compete.
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.
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.
> 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.
Thiz is a fantasy, these businesses were not going bancrupt - they were challanging big business and making a killing. Your scenario is detached from reality
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?
It's prevalent everywhere you look. As you say, M&As let small business owners retire or move away, without being prisoners of their own business. But the failure mode is companies being built with exit in mind, existing to be flipped - this is doing huge damage to the markets and peoples' lives right now.
Or take housing: it's nice that individuals have a way to sell their house and recover some of the money and effort put into it, when their kids leave the nest, or they retire, or they just want to move to some other location. But the failure mode of this is flipping - people and companies who buy properties, "improve" them to maximize resale value, whether the "improvements" make any sense or not for future tenants, and sell them to various actors. This creates a huge distortion on the real estate market, to the point that housing is now built for flipping, not for living.
(There's also a secondary and equally socially bad effect of owners opposing anything whatsoever that could lead to drop in (growth of) housing prices in their area.)
Or take finance: it's not hard to see the failure modes created by professional finance class, that's busy optimizing money flows in isolation from everything they relate to in the real world.
Or, take corporate management, and the rise of MBA class: specialists in running business as an abstract profit-generating machine, in complete isolation of what the business does and means in the real world.
Etc. etc.
This is the big problem I think we're facing: stopping over-optimization.
Assuming that they close. If it continues to be successful and they can find someone else to run the business when they retire than Big Business never gets a chance to move in. If they don't, Big Business can buy their assets and try to open a new store there just like anyone else could.
Either way, everyone is happy. The owners of the store still retire, and the Big Business gets a chance to outbid everyone else who wants to move into a market that's already proven itself to be a success. That happens enough right now and it's not caused the collapse of society.
> Now the mom and pop lost a bunch of money and the big company got a new location at a big savings.
Why would Big Business acquire the store by paying Mom & Pop more money than M&P would have made letting it close and putting the assets up for sale to the highest bidder? Seems like the smart move for Big Business in that case is to wait it out anyway. If Big Business can convince Mom & Pop to let them be absorbed for less money than Big Business would have had to pay them at auction then M&P still loses money.
The way you typically do this is by selling the business to someone who wants to continue operating it.
> Either way, everyone is happy. The owners of the store still retire
Owning a business that is managed by somebody else in retirement is not the same as selling the business and retiring. If you still own the business, you are still responsible for it. If you have a great manager and just collect your checks from it, great! But what if that person quits suddenly/dies/etc.? Now you're managing the business again. If the manager of the business needs to work in it (e.g. retail store manager) and you moved away, now you've gotta get back there and start running it again.
Lots of answers in here speaking from very theoretical perspectives with a clear lack of understanding of the actual day-to-day reality of what owning a small business looks like.
Why did the big company save money this way? If it's cheaper for them to just wait for bankruptcy, why don't they just always do that?
It seems the only answer is that they are counting on continuing the popular "brand" of the independent store. But that brand is exactly tied up to this store not being part of the big chain, so continuing it would be pure deceit.
Or as ClumsyPilot says, the business wasn't going bankrupt at all. Bit chain just wanted it, and now they can't.
Yes, that’s usually what happens if they don’t have family to take over the business or employees to sell the business too.
>business owners just wouldn’t start businesses.
Maybe in the VC world but those aren’t small businesses are they? Are people really starting restaurants and yarn shops solely so they can sell the business later down the road? Or is it because they have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to build a business the community is lacking in.
It’s hard to believe you honestly think people only start businesses so they can sell it later on.
No, believe it or not, most people with small businesses, which are worth hundreds of thousands or single digit millions of dollars, don't just let the asset disappear for no value when they can find a broker and sell it.
> Maybe in the VC world but those aren’t small businesses are they?
What are you talking about? The first sentence of my post that you're responding to literally says "mom and pop hardware store" - where do you see anything about VC funding?
> It’s hard to believe you honestly think people only start businesses so they can sell it later on.
At no point did I say that. I would wager heavily that you've never owned a small business.
Most people don't start businesses for the sole purpose of selling them, but the fact that you can sell your business is important for all kinds of reasons. Businesses generally require startup capital, much of which is provided by small business loans that the owner must personally guarantee. If you're not allowed to sell your business, you're trapped under those loans. Need to move somewhere? You can't. Want to get out and get a job? You can't.
Think of it like buying a house. If you couldn't sell a house, how do you think that would affect the market? I'll tell you how - more people would rent, because otherwise most of them would be trapped in their home for the life of the mortgage. Does that mean that most people buy homes solely so they can sell them later down the road? It does not.
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.
Also, this is easily circumvented by just buying the crucial assets of a competitor, like trade secrets, factories, offices, patents, etc.
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.
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.
You are obviously entitled to the opinion that monopolies are bad but, fwiw, the ftc is a lot more concerned with anti-competitive behavior than it is with monopolies. Those get conflated because they frequently occur together but a lot of companies have monopolies that most people don't really have an issue with because they aren't anti-competitive.
Sometimes a monopoly is a monopoly because they are better than everyone else.
There is also the case of "natural monopolies" in economics, these are railways, postal services, etc. where it wouldn't make sense for multiple players to waste resources and the one player can benefit from economies of scale. It'd be hilarious if 2-3 rail companies tried setting up their own tracks, stations, signals, etc. in a small town for example. So much redundancy all going waste.
Another example is multiple telecom companies trying to erect their own towers in vicinity of a little town where only one is enough to provide coverage. It's a collosal waste for the whole society, not just those companies.
This would never happen. If roads were privatized they wouldn't care about connecting as many homes/business as possible, they'd only care about building roads where it was the most profitable for them and even then any roads that made less money would be left in increasingly poor condition.
It wouldn't leave taxpayers off the hook either. Governments would have to spend taxpayer money to incentivize private companies to build out in "unprofitable" areas, but those roads would be kept in the worst conditions of all (assuming that companies didn't just repeatedly promise to build them, only to pocket the taxpayer's money while providing nothing)
Some services are worth enough to the public good that profit shouldn't be the only consideration, and some are worth so much that profit shouldn't be the goal at all and instead those services should simply strive to do the job required for every citizen with as little genuine waste as possible.
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.
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.
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.
How many of those cases produce an outcome that is beneficial to the public?
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.
If you start a car company, are your only two options 'beat Wolkwagen" and fail hard? How many car companies do we have?
Agree on scrutinizing M&A of competitors.
But I agree that the vast majority of mergers that make the news are not good for consumers.
This would potentially kill the VC industry.
You might not care, but it’s enough of a problem that a lot of entrepreneurs would side with the monopolists and stop this dead in its tracks.
Such a weird take. Most of the acquisition the big tech does is acquihires. Basically, a way to keep a team employed and return some of the money to the investors and make the team's stock worth something at least.
Let's think through this. Company A wants to buy Company B. M&A is banned.
1. A pays B's owners $X for all IP and other properties of B.
2. B fires everyone.
3. A hires whoever they want out of B's former employees.
A "ban" will simply not work as long as your country has a concept of property rights and ownership.
companies merge to concentrate market share, i.e. eliminate competition, i.e. increase prices, i.e. monopolize. Let's not ban just monopolies, let's also ban monopolize.
Like Twitch and YouTube.
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.
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.
Shuffle here, shuffle there, viola! Tax evasion.
All joking aside, supply chain shenanigans are a nightmare.
That makes about as much sense as banning marriage.
M&A is fundamental and important.
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?
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/sltb.12157
Lots of women get murdered by their husbands (and sometimes the reverse).
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).
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.
There are two main parts of this.
Antitrust laws don't typically concern themselves with bury vs incorporate. Even if Goodreads had been incorporated into Amazon, it still would have accomplished their major goal (prevent them from partnering with another company). And keeping them alive would have been just another part of Amazon's cost of acquisition. I wonder if it would have resulted in a lower offer.
Secondly, the government doesn't take companies at their word. When, for instance, Microsoft promises that Activision Blizzard titles will remain on Playstation for at least a decade, the government gets that in an enforceable contract.
It breaks something precious.
Old programmers are discriminated against because they point out when you're taking managerial shortcuts or, as in this case, outright lying.
Goodreads' Otis Chandler in 2021 invested [0] in BookClub [1] ("building actionable learning cultures through books, for teams").
And Elizabeth Khuri [2] and Chandler both also invested in Looped [3] (a more engaged and interactive livestreaming event service for concerts, comedy and other entertainment)
[0]: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/otis-chandler
[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bookclub
[2]: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/elizabeth-khuri
[3]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/looped-6aae
This applies even without the non-competes - it takes time to set up a new company and gain marketshare, so even without non-competes the monopoly is successfully kicking the can down the road. And every extra year of monopoly is another years' worth of price-gouging profits, so repeatedly buying out competitors can be worthwhile.
I wondered why noone else had since tried to do a book discovery engine at an industrial-scale to compete with Amazon. Here's one 2019 list of book-discovery sites: "Broke By Books: 20 Great Book Websites for Finding What to Read Next" [0]
and here's one analysis [1] of the key things Goodreads added value for Amazon: Kindle integration (social, ratings), a storefront that lets them push Kindle as the preferred version for purchases (or else Audible, or Prime and Kindle Unlimited subscription programs), data that can be mined from user reviews and ratings to power ML for better recommendations, understanding users' book- and reading-habits, rich content to increase interaction and hold user attention...
I also wondered why the Goodreads cofounders hadn't gone and founded other companies, in other sectors.
But essentially Amazon dwarfed other online book retailers, then moved on to much bigger and more profitable sectors (Kindle, digital music, streaming, Alexa, AWS itself, and tons more).
[0]: https://brokebybooks.com/20-great-book-websites-for-finding-...
[1]: "Who owns Goodreads?" https://bookriot.com/who-owns-goodreads/
I was surprised neither of them left sooner than that to do anything new, in any sector.
It's also why so many startups get started in the first place. Buyout being the goal.
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.
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.
this is a terrible argument.
Some people sell their kidneys. Some people sold their own children. Some people even sold themselves into slavery. Who are you to judge?
Or you have to force people to continue with their businesses, which is akin to trying to force an artist or athlete to continue to be at top level. You can't force that, no matter how many hackers agree with you.
One incredible journey later and the product is already on the sunset.
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.
In good news though, a number of other products are starting to fill that feature gap, but because they simply don’t have the massive amount of title, edition, and cover data (which was community-sourced), it’ll be a very long time before those products will have parity with Goodreads circa 2015.
> incredibly anti-competitive.
A description of Amazon in general.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409566
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.
Rose tinted view.
Maybe the reviews were better, but I think in general the trend of trying to replace discussing things with people with an automated service or social network leads to a poorer result. I read a ton and have never used a recommendation tool to find them, I just read books, go to bookstores and talk to people about them.
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.
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.
When will consumers have protection against this degrading of the marketplace already?
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!
As a disclaimer, I have never used it myself but I have heard good things of it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-29/amazon-ma...
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
I have found and read a fair few from that method.
You think that to start an Amazon competitor you need a book database?
Obviously.
I can't conceive of a modern-day online bookseller not having a book database, and one pre-populated with human-written reviews gives you a head start in that area.
- Amazon
- Audible
- Barnes & Noble
- AbeBooks
- Walmart
- Libraries
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).
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.
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
Have you ever heard of market manipulation, wash trading, self dealing, and other kinds of fraud in the 'free market'?
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
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".
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".
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.
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.
I also get the impression that American grades are like this:
- A is good. You made an effort.
- A [however modified with +/++]: great job!
- C is terrible. You skipped all classes or fell into a coma.
Huh, could you give an example of it? I am new to the Netherlands and hadn’t realized this yet.
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.
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.
About skewed ratings:
0) there is no objective point of reference, every rating is about the reviewer more than the place.
1) google knows about it. they have weighed rating of some sort so 2/5 rating is not going to kill.
2) people in some cultures can give low rating without explaining what they didn't like. either it is complicated to explain what it is or it may be misinterpreted or not publicly acceptable.
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.
There was also a massive foam rubber pad on the mattress that made the first night a rough one... but again, some people who are wrong prefer those, and again, it was easy enough to remove. Or at least, it would've been if my partner hadn't already been asleep on it when I came to bed. The resulting tossing and turning was what made the motion-sensing night light a problem.
Basically I didn't want to go full Karen on the landlord because everything else about the house was comfortable and thoughtful. I felt that a four-star rating would have been projecting a combination of my personal preferences and comically-bad luck on his other potential renters.
I have a simpler heuristic. I ignore all customer ratings entirely, and refuse to leave any.
It's a complete farce.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It's important to review a game as it exists, and not a game that you imagined in your head that would be better.
> Imagine you got rid of the Zelda skins and Zelda name, released it on Xbox. What would it get then?
Well, in the case of Genshin Impact: lots and lots of money.
Seriously, though. If Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom had been released by a company other than Nintendo, people would be singing its praises to the high heavens. You'd see a lot of "Why can't Nintendo come up with this" type articles about it.
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.
Did you mean the industry people? Plenty of user reviews are 1/10. It's the industry guys that are always rating stuff 7+
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.
Terrible books likely have fewer readers, thus fewer and likely zero people would post a review.
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.
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.
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
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.
We've done exactly this with Flickchart - https://www.flickchart.com - presenting the user with two movies at a time and letting them choose what, in their opinion, is the better film. We then aggregate everyone's rankings to generate a combined chart of the best films of all-time that's always in flux and changing.
We take into account each user's total number of rankings (refinement), and the total number of movies they've ranked (breadth of knowledge). We also use time as a factor - given that something that just came out has had less time to be "an all-timer" than something that has existed in the world longer and had the time to be experienced by more people.
We created this way back in 2009 and are currently building the next-generation of it on a modern web stack. This new iteration is also more modularized so we can expand more easily from just movies to other domains (books, games, music, TV, etc.).
This is of course Goodheart's Law in action but I don't have any ideas for fixing the problem.
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.
It should definitely be possible. Take films. I had a friend who would go see a film. On the day he saw it: "OMG THE BEST THING EVER". Next Week: "Yeah, that was a good film". A month later: "Yeah it was okay I guess". Six months later: "A bit ordinary really"
In 1990 if you'd asked me to rank the Alien films, I would have put ALIENS first, and ALIEN second. These days, I reverse those rankings.
People's tastes change over time. It would be inaccurate to "fix" a rating in stone.
People change their minds all the time (and it's a good thing), I agree.
While not impossible I don't think it would be particularly scalable.
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.
With eg movies a much greater investment is required to tell if it's terrible.
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.
Maybe also allow ratings to be a list over time rather than one, single data point. That'll make calculating an average more involved, but also more realistic.
* 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.
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
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).
Billy Olson’s sitting here and had the idea of putting some of these next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on who’s hotter. Yea, it’s on. I’m not gonna do the farm animals but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very “Turing” feel since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The first thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures.
Because of this all the review systems like IMDB are flawed by design.
Steam reviews are the most trustworthy for me. While they are not perfect, the binary choice normalizes these scoring differences, and can be read as a "probability that you will enjoy X if your are interested in this sort of thing" which is the best one can hope for.
And it is still useful. For example, from my perspective I can quickly judge a movie from an imdb score.
Anything less than 6.1 is bad. 6.1-6.3, ok, 6.3-6.8 good, 6.8+ excellent.
Apart from movies starring star trek characters, add one to all those scores.
Goodreads is similar but tighter, anything less than 3.9 is a red flag, over 4.2 and you start getting into excellent.
Though in my opinion steam seems to have got it done best with "overwhelminly positive", "very positive", "positive", "mixed", "mostly negative", etc. but occasionally gets review bombed.
I can't wait to compare The Pickwick Papers against The Unfolding of Language.
Constraining pairings within their genres might suffice, if possible. There are several standard ontology for books, and it's not a trivial problem.
You might as well ask the question: Who is the better Tennis player? Roger Federer or Garry Kasparov?
A system would need to draw some kind of boundary conditions so you are comparing things that have more in common than "printed on paper and bound".
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.
It wouldn't be very helpful to read a review as to why someone thought Fundamental Calculus was better than Moby Dick. Without the star rating system, you lose the ability to filter on the reviews from people who think the product is bad.
That's definitely not the case. 8 is neither mean nor median for titles on imdb. If a film scores anywhere above 8.0 they are already in the top 250. Most titles average between 5 and 7.
Interestingly that seems reminiscient of data apps. What are your thoughts on their ranking philosophy?
There's the problem there – assuming human input makes up an important part of the rankings.
Presumably you have other interviews.
I used to be very good at logic puzzles and have steadily been getting worse. Yes I have wider perspective now, but my raw problem solving ability has deteriorated. I can understand if a company wants to maximize problem solving for certain roles.
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.
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.
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.
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).
(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.)
I've seen people on GoodReads reading 200+ a year, which sounds insane to me.
I tried to read as many non-fiction books as I could, but these were almost non-existent in the jails I was housed in. The ones I got sent in about business and languages were a god-send and I find the information I gained from those to be very useful to me; especially the books on Japanese and Arabic which gave me a great grounding in those languages, although you can't easily learn pronunciation from a book!
Averaging just 2 per week hits 3k books in 29 years which doesn’t sound far fetched to me. Call it ~14 hours a week reading, plenty of people spend more than that playing video games or watching Netflix etc.
Is this a skill you developed over time, did you learn some particular tricks, were you just born that way? How long have you been reading adult literature? Are you skimming or painting images in your mind? What kinds of books?
I have so many books I want to read but I can only get through about 10-15 per year. Some of it probably comes down to where I choose to spend my free time, but I still feel like I crawl through pages. I spend a lot of time/energy painting that mental imagery I asked about, of what is being described.
Now this is just novels, technical information is a lot more dense and it can take me weeks to read a new programming language book cover to cover because I need to set it down after a while and think about it then go back and reread sections etc.
Speed reading is an entirely different thing, but I did spend a little while learning to read faster. The average person speaks about 180 words per minute at that pace a 120,000 word novel takes 11 hours. If you want to read a little faster don’t sub vocalize individual words just hear them in your head.
I will often set YouTube videos to 2x speed which is easily understandable and about the pace I tend to read. It’s bizarre but if you change the YouTube settings from 2x/1.5x to 1.0x it suddenly feels like most people are incredibly slow but those same videos feel fine when you start at 1.0x speed.
I remember reading this and it was so uninspiring (the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature) that it took me an entire month to finish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_(Pamuk_novel)
With all of the low quality reviews out there these days, even the idea of finding a quality review can’t get me back on the site.
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.
"Fake" and "fraud" are words that you're adding to the article.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe review scores ought to be an aggregate of the opinions of people who read the book, but that's not what they actually are. They're an aggregate of how people feel towards a book (for any reason). Such reviews might even be against the rules and guidelines set out for reviews; reviews ought to follow the rules but that doesn't mean they will.
The utility of review scores derives wholly from how they actually work, not from how they're meant to work. So devalue them accordingly.
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?
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(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.)
The recommendation engine hasn't steered me wrong yet, and the roadmap/developer interaction and feedback are very good indeed.
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.
My profile is here, as an example: https://bookwyrm.social/user/sidmitra
It's not FOSS, my other comment on the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36578294
"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.
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.
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.
Edit: the current comment is not what I was responding to. It's clearer now after editing.
A lot of Amazon's publishing-related acquisitions tend to stray from what they were intended to be.
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.
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.
Not affiliated, just a happy user of the site.
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.
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.
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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.
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
I don't know that a minority stake in a company counts as "that's Amazon" in any meaningful sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibraryThing#Ownership
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.
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.
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.
Did you try enabling "Show reference view" setting? (Account Settings -> Content Settings)
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?
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.”
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
When the entire premise of the story is hyper-critical of Amazon, and Amazon's defense is half-hearted, vacuuous, and informationally background, you don't need advanced media literacy to think "Wow, that response from Amazon does NOT pass the bullshit sniff test, huh, I wonder what that means."
How much spoonfeeding do we expect to our readers?
This isn't "A cop said the suspect had a gun, and that's why he shot him" <and we burned zero calories to validate that point>".
This isn't "99.9% of scientists think one thing. 0.1% think the opposite. But we're not going to tell you that, we'll just interview 1 scientist from each position and let you decide."
This is a super critical piece of Amazon that achieves the mandatory standards of reaching out to Amazon for comment, and the comment they got speaks for itself in contrast to the story so clearly that to editorialize on it any further insults the reader's intelligence.
The framing is what matters, and the WaPo story, the frame doesn't question whether or not Amazon's purchase was anti-competitive, just whether or not Amazon did a good job running it
No, they say “I saw that he had a weapon”, even if the reality is that some other cop said it.
> they say things like "officer-involved shooting"
That's not what the involved cops say, that’s what the department’s public affairs office says as a lead paragraph summary to discourage engagement with the details. (The details will then be whatever story the cops involved say.)
Publishing what was said is more "just the facts, please" than editorializing the response, as shitty PR-speak as it is.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Compare that to astroturfing. Bill Hick's opinion is very relevant for them especially.
"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.
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.
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.
Also, see https://www.librarything.com/privacy
> Certain content that appears in on this site comes from Amazon Services, LLC. This content is provided "as is" and is subject to change or removal at any time.
Ugh..
There is nothing different between how NSDAP whipped up a nation to go on a 6 year rampage across Europe than what's happening now. I've witnessed otherwise reasonable people justify the description of Russians as Orcs as a reasonable dehumanising racial slur in light of the Ukraine Russo conflict.
I like Iain McGilchrist thesis that we seemed that have become overly left brain dominated and so are starting to exhibit an increasing inability to process nuance.
An excellent analogy, as applies to the current Russian state having dragged its population into a senseless, expansionist war against its southern neighbor (and erstwhile "brother" nation). And its skill at turning ordinary citizens into instruments of genocide.
Thats way more dehumanising than referring them as monsters because they continually act like monsters.
Nations, culture, history etc are ideas and perceptions that it's clear we don't all agree on.
No it wouldn't, no one said the Russians don't exist.
> Nations, culture, history etc are ideas and perceptions that it's clear we don't all agree on.
Yeah and it's way more dehumanising to say they don't exist then to call someone a monster for being a monster.
Do you think the Russian army should be invading Ukraine?.
What is "dehumanizing" is the unprovoked war of racist, colonial aggression, enacted by the Russian Federation upon Ukraine - and conducted from the start with a policy of terror, directed at civilians. If you care at all about the subject, that is what you should be focusing on.
If a bunch of assholes came into your neighborhood, started raping people and shooting randomly at whoever was walking on the street - you wouldn't have the kindest words for them either.
You must have the thinnest skin to imaginable to actually think this.
And the irony of this palatable considering how the Russians are acting similar to actual Nazis and mirroring some of their rhetoric.
Insulting a fascists invading force committing some of worst crimes imaginable is not the same as what the Nazis did.
Regardless of what your background is saying someone making light of fascists invaders is dehumanising requires you to have a super thin skin.
If they didn’t want to be called orcs maybe they should stop acting like them.
I believe its worth pointing out, that both Ukraine and Russia are using conscripts. As in innocent men that get murdered by their government for "reasons". So no, dehumanizing them is not acceptable. The cognitive dissonance necessary to justify this by citing fears of fascism is quite something.
It might also be worth pointing out, that this is lesser evil logic. Which if you recall is how we got fascism in Germany, by scaring people enough with the threat of the Bolsheviks.
edit: Also, just because OP is trolling doesnt mean that dehumanization is acceptable. Especially if that is the expectable reaction.
Yes. The Russians chose to invade, they choose to continue to occupy Ukraine and they choose to both commit terrible war crimes and act like idiots.
> Like the east Ukrainians can just choose to be autonomous?
This is a false equivalency.
Do you think it was wrong to call the Nazis monsters?, a Orc is merely a monster, calling someone a Orc is no less dehumanising than saying someones particularly heinous actions were monstrous.
What do you think of the Russian talking points that dehumanise the entire country of Ukraine and talks about them in a way that pretty much precludes that they are fake people and should be genocide'd if need be?.
Orc is non-human, it is dehumanizing. And I'm not sure we both agree what the Nazi ideology is. For me Nazi is someone who follows a race based ideology that aims to dehumanize or otherwise segegrate elements of humanity as being of a lower category.
Fake country and fake human is a false equivalency. Humans are living conscious beings of a category that we all belong to. Countries are a further category we've invented for...reasons. I've not seen evidence that the people in the area we call Russia have claimed that the humans in the area we call Ukraine are some how non-humans. But in contrast none of us are here denying that Ukriane openly refers to Russians as a non-human category.
Yes there is an always free will, regardless of the consequences.
"I was just following orders" as an excuse for doing terrible things didn't fly with the Nazis and it shouldn't fly now.
> Orc is non-human, it is dehumanizing. And I'm not sure we both agree what the Nazi ideology is. For me Nazi is someone who follows a race based ideology that aims to dehumanize or otherwise segegrate elements of humanity as being of a lower category.
Monsters are non-human, it is dehumanising.
Calling Nazi's monsters is dehumanising right?.
> I've not seen evidence that the people in the area we call Russia have claimed that the humans in the area we call Ukraine are some how non-humans. But in contrast none of us are here denying that Ukriane openly refers to Russians as a non-human category.
It has happened plenty, from government officials.
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-soldiers-monsters-se...
> Russian officials claimed on Monday that Ukrainian soldiers have been turned into "monsters" in "secret experiments" in biological laboratories in Ukraine funded by the United States government.
You didn't look very hard did you?.
You also never answered the question if you think Nazi's are monsters.
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?
>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.
Another victim of a Rails monolith, nice. And a victim of Ruby and Rails' horrific magic that sounds like it's very dangerous to refactor. Unlike Github, I'm guessing Amazon doesn't have core Ruby and Rails maintainers on staff to help keep the thing afloat.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36533153
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.
I'm sure a truly critical post about Amazon's cash maker wouldn't make it past the editors.
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.
This isn't likely to do financial damage such that Bezos would care, and both Bezos and WaPo "win" if WaPo looks "impartial" enough to criticize Bezos - WaPo gets to show that off for journalistic credibility and Bezos gets to show off that the media org he owns is totally willing to speak truth to power, which makes him One Of The Good Billionaires.