If you want a non-corporate alternative to Goodreads, there's a Fediverse one, BookWyrm: https://bookwyrm.social/
(I don't know how many people are using BookWyrm, but Goodreads itself seems half-abandoned. Maybe most of the publisher attention is on TikTok influencing now?)
Thanks, this is neat. Goodreads seems to be get so little development attention these days that it's a miracle it still runs.
Interesting choice by BookWyrm to hide review ratings by default. I like it — I always felt that on Goodreads literature that's a little more challenging to tackle is reviewed very unfairly compared to easy-to-digest-but-content-light popular books or pulp fantasy. Making the default to have users read the contents of a review instead of glancing at an aggregate number seems like the right answer.
I've been tracking with bibliocommons through my local library, but it has it's flaws. I can add books that any bibliocommons library has indexed, but there's no convenient way to search outside my library.
I find goodreads sucks at book recommendations, but excluding the books that some random twitter replacement didnt read doesnt seem like its going to make it good at book recommendations either.
Goodreads however remains fun for keeping me accountable with my reading goals, and nothing else has replaced that.
DCC - Yeah this isnt great. Yeah the litrpg genre was infested from the beginning with 20booksto50K people, and then LLM people.
dungeon crawler carl is a great series. never read a litrpg in my life and i probably won't again but DCC is really fun. and calling it amenable to LLM is pretty reductive in a stupid way as the book absolutely could not be written by LLM
I personally didnt suggest DCC was written by an LLM but you only need to see its imitators to see the cheap slop targeting the area.
I mean the first LLMs targeted at authors were built as rpg simulators. NovelAI was founded by the AI Dungeon guys splitting off and doing their own thing. If I looked I am betting I could find community training modules to closely mimic DCC's style and they would be well supported.
That doesnt really make sense. If you are on twitter you are in the "community" but applying this methodology to twitter is unlikely to be a good recommendation engine for the twitter community either.
I know of a small regional community that I have occasional involvement in and maintain an interest in their socials.
A person who started an Escape Room in that community recently posted about how much money he has lost supporting that business.
I explained to him that Escape Rooms are a niche but intense interest and that you need a large population size to support them.
He was appealing to the wider community, of 9000 people, to come in and support his business, but realistically, there's maybe 40-50 people in that community who will actually engage with an escape room. Probably less, the community skews very old.
A "Community" is not a monolith. The only thing you can guarantee the community has in common is whatever forged them together. For a physical community its geography. For an online community its whatever brought them together.
Unless "Craig Mod" built his community around a specific set of shared reading interests, theres no way in hell that its a good general book recommendation engine for the participants.
Goodreads/Kindle/Amazon have shot their categories to hell and are barely more effective than a keyword author search, but for all its failings thats still going to have better book discovery than a random blob of people on a random twitter clone.
It’s good if you are part of that community which was built around specific shared interests including specific works of writing. He’s an author of books.
It’s like making the point that a cookout you saw while driving past a private event venue on the other side of town is not a good solution for everybody else wanting a restaurant to eat at - so what?
He is also a damn good writer, and it’s fine if he makes money with it. I loved his free posts so much that I bought his book, and it was also excellent.
This website can be incredibly hostile to creatives having an income, at times.
(I don't know how many people are using BookWyrm, but Goodreads itself seems half-abandoned. Maybe most of the publisher attention is on TikTok influencing now?)