[paxys]

This is great but I'm not going to sign up just to see what the site looks like. There's no reason for a large part of the functionality (book info, ratings, reviews) to be behind a login wall. As it stands right now Goodreads is a lot more open.

[drusepth]

I signed up. This is what the site looks like:

* Dashboard/feed: https://i.imgur.com/bUGZX27.png

* Book page (from search): https://i.imgur.com/9BQK7hF.png

* Bookshelves (adding a book is just a modal on this page): https://i.imgur.com/sHzorJE.png

* "Community": https://i.imgur.com/nzI9FNZ.png

* Profile: https://i.imgur.com/kcxitYb.png

There isn't a lot of content to showcase, but the screenshots on the homepage (at https://www.booqsi.com/) seem to show off each of the currently-available pages. It'd be nice to have some kind of search to see book search result pages for yourself without signing up, but honestly there's not much to see (yet?). You can see for yourself: https://app.booqsi.com/books/9781408865446

[costcofries]

Take my upvote :)

[yosito]

This 100%, if you can't show me your site/app without collecting my personal information, it's a dark pattern, and I'm not interested in using an app that leads with a dark pattern.

[justinberding]

To be honest, if you're looking just for book info, ratings, and reviews, Booqsi probably isn't the right site for you anyways. It's specifically meant to be a social platform, not a ratings or reviews site, which is why we don't actually have give users the ability to do either.

We built it to be a social platform for you to engage with your community about books, with the underlying motivation that a book recommendation from a friend (or seeing what their favorites are) is inherently more powerful than a random review online.

Having a login and simple profiles that represent your person seemed like the bare minimum for a social platform to function. Also worth noting... we're trying the magic link approach for logins, so a one-time email input is all that's required.

[drcongo]

You're going to miss out on a hell of a lot of organic search locking it away like that, and given your social platform goals, I would have thought growing the user base would be pretty important.

[coupdejarnac]

There's zero chance I sign up for this if I can't see it beforehand. It's not a good look for something that purports to be more open than goodreads.

[elefantastisch]

From what I can tell, there is literally nothing to show if you don't sign up. The site is entirely social. You have a feed and recommendations which are shared among friends. It's basically like saying there's zero chance you'll sign up for email if you can't see it beforehand.

[capableweb]

> From what I can tell, there is literally nothing to show if you don't sign up. The site is entirely social. You have a feed and recommendations which are shared among friends. It's basically like saying there's zero chance you'll sign up for email if you can't see it beforehand.

If people weren't able to understand how email worked before signing up to it, you damn be sure that no one would sign up for it. But email is ubiquitous enough today that people don't need to understand how it works before signing up, because they likely already understand it.

But "social media for books" is different. Show me how the feed looks, show of it looks when people are using it. It's likely I either ignore it because I can't understand what it would give me without viewable screenshots about how it works before, or I sign up and land on an empty feed, getting discouraged from even using it because it's so empty when I first arrive.

Showing people how a product works before asking them to sign up is not a big ask, and something vital especially when trying to get people to sign up and commit to a new social network, when there are new ones created everyday.

People just want to see how stuff works before, and it'll take a couple of hours tops to add to the landing page.

[coupdejarnac]

What an absurd thing to say.

[criddell]

What's the downside to letting people who are just checking out your site actually check out your site?

[justinberding]

No downside, it's just not something the site provides today as part of beta. An anonymous experience is something we're exploring.

[dymk]

A sign-up wall for a site which should be able to show me public book reviews and recommendations is a non-starter for me (and probably 99% of users clicking the link). I really don't need another social media platform, I would like a book discovery system though.

[drusepth]

I don't think reviews or recommendations are the goal of the site, as there is currently no way to add reviews or ratings, nor does the site provide any reviews or recommendations of its own. It's literally "just" a social network to talk about books on.

[criddell]

Most of the confusion would go away if they had read-only access for anonymous users. I suspect they chose to not do this because there just isn't much there yet.

[chiefalchemist]

Yes, something(s) as a 100% "free sample" just makes sense, especially if traction is a goal.

[Casteil]

Twitter doesn't make you create an account to see what other people are posting.

Pass.

[impalallama]

signed up and the rating system is borrowed wholesale from google books and there are no reviews at all; so rating and reviews are not even a feature (yet?). not a good look, i'd love an alternative to goodreads but not even having a basic rating system is kinda defeats whatever purpose this site might be going for

[justinberding]

The goal isn't to be another reviews or ratings site; that's been done before. The goal is to leverage the power of your personal book community to help you better decide what to read next. Drop book recommendations to each other, post about books to your feed and engage in discussion, see what your friend's favorites are by viewing their top 10 favorites shelf, etc.

[RobertRoberts]

But that is not an alternative to Goodreads' public view. It's only a copy of Goodread's social system.

Why are you more trustworthy than Amazon with my book reading habits?

NOTE: Your IP address for booqsi.com appears to be run on ... AWS ... seems ironic or shady, can't tell which.

[jeromegv]

Are you purposely trying to be in bad faith? It's fine to give ideas and suggestions, but you are being VERY antagonistic. They are using Heroku FFS, this isn't a "shady" service because of that.

[RobertRoberts]

You are very trusting of random people on the internet.

There is no evidence to support the claims this person makes that it's not a part of Amazon itself. (I don't believe it it is a part of Amazon either, btw) It's a huge en devour to make a social network and it's got a slick interface and design.

My gut says this is not a one man show (he says "we" alot), they have _legal_ pages on their site (evidence of their priorities?), but no details on who they actually are on their about page, (lowers my trust factor by a lot) unlike a lot of other projects around here.

So, there is more evidence to support skepticism than there is to support carelessly believing some marketing blurb.

(edit: for clarity)

[justinberding]

Yeah, we're using Heroku, which host all of their own services on Amazon's EC2 (meh), which was an unfortunately short-sighted tech decision early on that we're looking to remedy. We're hoping to transition to Azure or Google Cloud. Any recommendations?

[mtlynch]

I'm a happy fly.io customer. For small projects (i.e. you don't need 100 servers), I find them to be way better than any of the enterprise-focused players. They're like Heroku if Heroku had continued innovating.

[jrd259]

You can quite reasonably want to be independent of Amazon-the-online-retailer while being agnostic about cloud service providers. Speaking personally, I very much want local bookstores in my neighbourhood, but do not care whether there is a cloud data centre in my city or province, or which one it is.

[dymk]

Double ironic when the creator is saying things like:

> "... having Booqsi be independent of Amazon was one of the inspirations for wanting to build it in the first place"

[urthor]

It's not just a usability issue.

OP, you need to deliver lots of public value to customers who haven't converted yet.

Always remember. "3 free articles a week" isn't you giving your stuff away.

It's marketing that costs you nothing.

Free marketing. Keep repeating it to yourself. Free marketing.

[emsixteen]

Can't sign up without providing a surname, either. Literally the first step after the magic login link, and already at a hurdle I'm not going to pass.