[giglamesh]

I don't follow this rule strictly, but for most of my adult life I've limited most of my book reading to books > 10 years old. If it still seems remotely relevant and worth reading ten years later, it is far less likely to be a waste of my time. Now sure I'm a bit less prepared for water cooler conversations, but overall the policy has served me well.

> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle

because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.

[thewebguyd]

> reading to books > 10 years old

I've found myself applying this rule, sometimes unintentionally, to almost all media I consume. It's now a very rare occasion that there's something new that I want to read, watch, or listen to. It just isn't that good, tbh. My music library is full of music from ~2018 and older, most books I enjoy are even older than that, and I can't remember the last time a movie came out that I was dying to see since about 2016-ish.

It's not like I'm intentionally filtering out for old stuff, my own tastes just seem to prefer it. Not sure if its due to my own age (I'm not that old, mid thirties), or if we've just so over optimized media for revenue extraction that its become too formulaic and boring.

[WCSTombs]

In general old good stuff is easier to find than new good stuff, since over time the bad stuff becomes more irrelevant, but I feel there's also some truth to the over-optimization as you put it.

However, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, in my opinion there is some new good stuff (books, music, movies, etc.) still being created, even if it's harder to find in the sea of mediocrity.

[TFNA]

A significant amount of ebook reading now is romance/erotica or fantasy (or combined "romantasy") genres by readers for whom something a decade old won't appeal. An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time), or it isn't what one's peers are reading and one wants to connect with a community of other readers online or in school/university, etc.

Obviously if one doesn't read these genres, this is a whole foreign world, but it is increasingly the state of mainstream fiction reading, and AI slop is a problem for them that you may be asked to help avoid if you are the nerdy loved one of such a reader.

[wredcoll]

> An old book could seem socially "problematic" from a 2026 lens (especially for young people for whom that is before their time),

Or, you know, you've just read the old books already because they came out 10 years ago and that's a lot of time to read.

I doubt it has anything to do with "romantasy" as a genre, anything that has people actually reading books, on a regular basis (as opposed to the people who mean reading as consuming one "notable" novel a year).

In any case, epublishing has made a lot more books available and filtering through them was a difficult task even before AI increased the output dramatically.

I've been saying for a while now there's a large untapped market for actually effective recommendation systems (almost certainly human driven given the demonstrated limitations of computer systems so far), as mentioned it was a problem to find "the good stuff" even among just self-published pre-ai books, now it's way beyond that.

I guess to some degree it's the same basic problem as spam filtering, but considerably more nuanced and difficult.

[JAlexoid]

I think we underestimate how much of reading happens from the shallow romance section of the bookstores.

It's big business and is really not that deep. For someone who isn't part of that world(which is big business) to judge what is good or not is hard.

And now it's cheap to produce that "pulp romance" novels en masse. So people who have little clue about this genre can produce something that seems good, but doesn't appeal to the reader.

[bunderbunder]

Actually effective, human-powered recommendation systems already exist, and they’re great.

My favorite implementation of this is talking to the clerks at my neighborhood bookstore. But the New York Review of Books is an alternative that’s easier to enjoy from home. For romance novels I like the blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books. Also this is kind of cheating but I have a family member who reviews books for a library journal so a lot of the time I just let her tell me what to read.