[jonasmerlin]

Psss. Please don't ruin Librarything by getting more people on there. Its recommendation algorithm is pure perfection—basically magic—and I fear it's mostly because it's only used by a very particular group of people.

[metadaemon]

ew gatekeeping.

[jonasmerlin]

That's really not what I'm doing, at all.

My point is that recommendations that are based on social networks become less and less useful as that network grows. And LT seems to have hit the perfect size for its recommendations to be useful. I'm actively dreading the day that they either get worse (i.e. the network gets too big), or that LT goes away entirely because it has no place in the modern internet anymore, multiple times a week, to the point where I'm thinking about ways to preserve its current form in some way or another.

If more people would be on there it wouldn't be as useful too anyone anymore, instead of being as useful to more people. So instead of gatekeeping it's more like preservation of something that would otherwise vanish. Librarything is basically one of the few national parks the internet has left.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, my original comment was really meant as a light-hearted comment on the magic of LT with some of the thoughts I have on the matter sprinkled in. But I should've known that HN would interpret it in the least favorable way.

[metadaemon]

I'm also a fan of LT, but most importantly I'm a fan of spreading the wonderful feeling you get from reading. If LT's recommendation algorithm is only good because of its pool size, then it's bound to fail at some point in the future. Rather than delaying this inevitability -- which effectively sweeps the issue under the rug -- the better solution would be to ensure that their recommendations stay high-caliber regardless of scale. I'd imagine the only way to perform this test would to be for them to actually grow in scale, so they should be advertised as much as possible.

[flir]

I really think it's the depth, not the breadth, that makes the recommendations work. I've been a member since 2005, and SciFi was pretty good right out of the gate. Now, everything's pretty good. If it hasn't been harmed by its growth up to this point, I honestly doubt a little more will hurt it.