[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.