Sarah Manavis at New Statesman has a piece on
The StoryGraph, a still-in-development recommendation site that aims to avoid mistakes made by previous attempts at taking on GoodReads. Seeking an alternative to the market leader, which hasn't changed that much since Amazon's takeover in 2013, Manavis received numerous prompts on Twitter to give this up-and-coming challenger a try.
Quote:
The StoryGraph has spent the past year fine-tuning an algorithm that throws up books its users will genuinely enjoy [...] through a survey tool called Ordered For You. As each reader joins the platform they are prompted to choose from a detailed list of features, explaining what they do or don’t like. Genres, plot features, types of characters, turn-offs such as “flat characters”. Users can also fill in their own reading preferences (they give suggestions such as “family sagas” or “LGBTQ+ authors”). And Goodreads users can import their account data, so they can add all the books they’ve already read into their StoryGraph profile.
(...)
“You will be able to specify in your survey that you’re sensitive to certain triggers and we would be able to flag books with that content”
“If we get the mood right, the pace right, the topic and theme right, the type of author, the type of story you want to hear about – does it matter if the 100 people who read it before you rated it two stars? What if it’s actually a five-star read for you? And that’s what we’re trying to do,” she says, “uncover books for people, because we present them in a different way and show different information upfront.”
(...)
“We’re trying empower readers to say what they’re looking for, to talk to the recommendation system,” Odunayo says. “Almost like when you go into a bookshop or a library and you say ‘hey, this is what I’m feeling’. We’re trying to recreate that experience.”
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Quote:
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But Tom Critchlow (Note: founder of ill-fated 7books) argues that a “better Goodreads”, with functionality such as The StoryGraph offers, must avoid falling for the “seductive and imaginary ideas about social networks” that doomed a long list of previous competitors, including his own. “So many people dream of disrupting Goodreads,” he says, “[but] focus on the wrong things, myself included.”
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more at the
source: https://www.newstatesman.com/science...rygraph-amazon
BoingBoing takes a stronger stance:
Goodreads must be destroyed (
some Latin reference for the uncultured like me), and its comments section seems to concur.