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by hombre_fatal 1574 days ago
It's hard to imagine ideas like this living as a stand-alone idea rather than a feature in a more general book-tracking platform.

Maybe I'm just uncreative, or maybe I'm too tempted to always generalize everything, but it seems like as soon as you implement a user log-in system for any sort of interactivity, you would then be tempted to import a book dump into your database, and the next thing you know you're now a Goodreads, Storygraph, Librarything, Booqsi, Bookwyrm, Booksloth, Oku.club, etc. competitor.

After all, most of the magic was in the community users creating and sharing fun quests and the natural curating effect of being able to sort by the most popular quests. And as you can imagine, most quests were generic and bad. "chuck123's sci-fi quest"

It was also fun to see how many quests you started by completing a single quest. Due to overlap, you'd be one book away of completing other quests, usually a book you would have never read otherwise which was part of the fun, and then you'd be another book away from finishing even more quests.

Too bad Goodreads' API is dead, else you could at least build interesting things on top of a "Login with Goodreads" button without recreating an entire platform. Kind of like how health apps on iOS get read/write access to HealthKit instead of all of them building their own pedometer and asking you to constantly reenter and update your data.