Hopefully. Join Bookwyrm!
https://joinbookwyrm.com/ looks great! Since it’s an ActivityPub service, could it also connect with Lemmy? If yes, how?
I don’t think it can because Lemmy only federates article type objects. It does federate with Mastodon, Kbin (except I had a problem following my Bookwyrm account - not sure if that was fixed), etc - basically the microblog supporting ActivityPub services.
While there are really bad things about goodreads, the article/interviews give me a vibe of “boohoo, we want to decide what people like and now they decide it themselves and we don’t like that.”
There is definitely an element of that from the article and I agree it’s ridiculous. Some authors and their followers attack those who give poor reviews (because they can’t accept criticism, instead arguing that a ‘professional’ review would give them a much better score) and on the other side you have people reviewing books that aren’t even out. In many cases it’s no longer a place to find genuine reviews, but an unmoderated wild west with crap at both extremes (a bit like Twitter in that respect). It’s a shame because there are plenty of people leaving great reviews, but it’s becoming much harder to find them.
I think sorting out actual quality reviews is harder than people think. Even something like Steam, where the cumulative user rating is relatively respected, surface a lot of junk reviews, because people respond to meme-ing and jokey shitposts more than actual high quality reviews. The signals even for a behemoth like Amazon to train an AI on just really aren’t amazing. I know fakespot looks for outright fraud Amazon doesn’t, but I think part of their success is that they’re not the benchmark cheaters are trying to beat. In any case, “genuine” reviews and “quality” reviews aren’t the same thing, and the latter is really hard to measure.
I think a more robust set of curation tools would have some value. Flipboard has been mentioned a bit lately for articles, and while I haven’t used it, my impression is that the premise is that you subscribe to curated lists of different interests. Something like that for reviewers who catch the eye of curators could be interesting for a federated book platform.
My main issue with the article is the premise that “professional” reviewers are objectively any higher quality on average than user reviews. A sizable proportion of them are very detached from what real people care about. I absolutely critically read non-fiction, and am somewhat judgy if a certain rigor isn’t applied, but for fiction? How is that fun? It’s OK for a story just to be cheap fun. It’s OK for different authors to have different writing styles and different levels of attention to detail and different levels of grittiness to their stories. There is absolutely actual bad writing out there, and some gets published, but a story not being for you doesn’t mean that voice doesn’t connect with someone else. A lot of book critics are huge snobs.
Seriously. I’d love an alternative that’s anywhere close to basic functionality, but this article is beyond stupid.
Yes, allowing people outside whatever stupid circle to review books and have their reviews considered by other people is a good thing.
Now, a lot of the reviews are trash because a lot of people have stupid opinions on books. Some people just want something to trash and have reviews that reflect that. But that’s equally true of “real critics” and their opinions are often just as bad.
Edit: I wonder if I could make a browser extension that recognizes book objects on one of the alternatives and lets you bulk select and make changes that way, replicating the flow or function calls they use now.
I’ve tried it.
It doesn’t have lists at all, and while the tag sorting is nice, adding your own tags in bulk to replicate a list is entirely untenable.
I don’t consider anything short of Goodread’s table of all your books to select and make bulk changes remotely viable, and even that took me well over an hour the first time.
Bookwyrm sounds great, but actually using it to organize past reading and just re-make lists that already exist is absolutely brutal.
As a longtime Goodreads user I’m kind of smitten with Hardcover. It offers nearly everything I want: good database, lists, status, searching. Also has responsive developers and a promising roadmap. The one thing it’s missing is, sigh, my friends. hashtag-networkeffect. I’m a paying supporter.
I’ve been a paying supporter of Storygraph since its beta days, but I just don’t really get it. Its social aspects are awful. Maybe it’s great for automated book recommendations, but I have zero interest in that. I just want to see what my friends are reading, have read/reviewed, want to read. And I want to keep track of my books.
Bookwyrms looks promising but each time I try it I run into new stumbling blocks. I will keep playing with it, but for now my efforts are all on Hardcover.
I am sad that we have to start over with all these things.
