So It's War Now - GoodReads RANT 

Yes! I've had to remove fanfic from so many profiles!

unpopular counter point. What stops an author from simply removing a poor or problematic work from their profile if they have ultimate control? I agree that a work needs to be confirmed to be an actual piece of work of that author and not a "poop tweet" or April Fools prank or some such. This would stop things like Fanfic from being attributed to authors. However I think there needs to be measures in place to stop the abuse of removal to maintain a higher profile rating or attempts to bury a problematic work. While I don't think what they did was correct I can see why the system is set up this way.

@@plata_draconic Sure but how often does it happen that an author is so embarrassed of their work that they try to erase it's existance. I can't think of an example except for maybe tiny authors in which case meh.

@@rasmus7493 I don't think that type of thing is common but I can see why a review site may want to limit the ability for an author to do such a thing. GoodReads may be attempting to present a position of honesty and transparency by essentially forcing authors to take credit for their works and ensuring all of an authors works are attributed to them for good or for ill. Stopping an exploit before it happens type of situation.

@@plata_draconic No. Honesty and transparency isn't in any way more common with author input or not. What Daniel and op is talking about happens far more often than authors taking their own works down(?). Transparency is much more expected from public authors, who would probably get a load of backlash for hiding their works(if they don't get backlash it really isn't a big deal as no one would even notice). Than an anonymous Goodreads librarian who can do whatever they wish in the shadows (misattribute fanfic, upload leaks as real books even get the year wrong). Authors have reason to care, volunteers do not.

Relateable

They thought a marriage would solve their problems and when that didn't work, they thought child would solve all their problems.

I think you mean Campfire.

They didn’t start the company. They bought it. Back when Goodreads first started, there were two major library management web sites, LibraryThing and Goodreads. LT (which still exists) is far more about your personal book collection while GR has had more social features. So, Amazon bought GR and has done nothing with it. It hasn’t changed since before they were bought. I'm one of the volunteer librarians, but I only really started because I was trying to clean up my book collection on GR. There were some hodgepodge of series names so it wasn’t clear that book 2 in one series was part of the same series as book 1. So, I went in and cleaned those up. But, I have never added a book that doesn’t actually exist, yet. I have only added books I actually own either physically or digitally.

@@tjl9458 I didn't know that! Thank you for informing me as well as helping out on the site!

@@DWPF17 You're welcome. Goodreads has been owned by Amazon for so long that a lot of people don't know about its history. The same thing applies to IMDB. It started as a community thing relying a lot on volunteers. Sadly, it got bought by Amazon too.

@@tjl9458 In all honesty I only got back into reading in general in late 2019. So I'm pretty unaware of most things in book culture. Bookdom if you will.

@@tjl9458 The Wikimedia Foundation has experience managing volunteer-driven reference sites, and they're fiercely independent and have hundreds of millions in money. Y'all should reach out and see if you can move in with them instead of putting up with Amazon.

Ever heard of Ballmer Peak?

There's a relevant XKCD comic about that

As someone who does small amounts of code, Heck that almost might work better...

@@carmeldavids8801 as someone who does large amounts of coke, I have no idea what's going on.

Wait, he used to code for a living?

A literary masterpiece. Unique storytelling by the esteemed Fuck Off. What a nice guy too.

@@Severian1 Oh yes truly.

The real goal now is to set up the Fuck Off epic fantasy. A massive 20 book series...

@@LightsOnTrees Why, but even Kept In Doubt will only be released in 7.568 years (and still has a 5 Star rating on Goodreads, mind you). To create a 20 Book fantasy series would take 151.360 years, since an acclaimed author such as Fuck Off takes 7.568 years per book, pondering over every word, and drinking a smoothie every time he finishes a sentence. Some say that authors G.R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss have taken inspiration from his technique. Of course, we intellectuals know that nobody can replicate the technique of a master like Fuck Off.

Utterly a master piece.

Something that annoys me which isn't the same because it's for books about to be published, is goodreads awards where a book can get to the finals without being released. Obama's book is probably very interesting but it had no place being nominated in 2020 when it was released the day final round started.

@@bluegreen5377 Yeah, Stormlight 4 was already in the top Fantasy ranking before it even came out. Love Sanderson but that's takin the limelight away from other authors.

Yes! I love that future books are on there so that I can see the future of a series/author's work, but reviewing being open before arcs are even out is bonkers!

Things that antithetically exist are the bane of existence.

This reminds me The King killer chronicles book 3, where everyone left reviews and comments and ratings for a nonexistent book. Patrick Rothfuss responded in a rather humorous comment, but that was 7 years ago. The reviews are still happening and still there. This nonexistent book has a 3.61 with 4175 ratings and a total of 187200 community ratings and reviews. I find the situational comical, but for an official social media site for books owned by AMAZON this is a joke. The book was never taken down (and thus was over 7 years ago now) nor ratings/reviews sponged and it's still on his author profile. You can say what you want about how long it's taken or him as an author, but for a site this is just unprofessional. For authors this should be the LinkedIn for books or at LEAST the Twitter (very very low bar) and it manages to feel like a poop website maintained solely by a 12 year old kid (all offense to Amazon, none to workers dealing with Amazon's crap).

What a savage

This is now one of my favourite comments.

So simple but I love it

Bugreads

Yeah! You told them.

I'm sure there's a few windmills involved here. ;)

@Tobias Nordbye Ok then, how about this? The mental image of Dan riding into battle against goodreads makes me giggle a bit. There we go, removed the hyperbole just for you, now have a lovely day my good sir!

With his pants around his ankles and a banner of toilet paper! Goodreads does desperately need to fix their shit so the toilet paper is appropriate.

have you tried The Storygraph? It's relatively new, only officially launched in January, but they have a feature to filter editions by language

There are so many missing features on Goodreads

@@MsBlulucky THEY DO????

@@petra1995 They do!

@@MsBlulucky Thank you!!

I'm sorry for you, but this is hilarious 😂😂😂

That honestly sucks but at the same time, why am I not surprised 😂

I'd honestly love to read a Little Mix / Mamma Mia musical fanfiction, if you have a link for it? That sounds amazing :D

I am beyond glad that my fanfics were written so long ago and on such an obscure platform that they were never added to Goodreads 😂

God I hope no one added my cringe marble hornets fanfiction from wattpad on goodreads

I wonder if his book will get stuck at number 2?

@@stephenneville4776 i tip my hat off to u ser that was well done

We need to keep the furnaces burning day and night!

It's time to let loose the wolves of war.

Bring me an army worthy of Mordor?

I bet there's a Grima somewhere out there in Goodread's Management corrupting it from within

Daniel comes from the Big Lebowski school of schedule making

Oddly, this actually worked for me because my vacation ended yesterday, so today is my Monday 😆

This works for me since my work week always begins on Thursday

Thursdays are the start of the week for me ☺️

What’s your books name? I’d love to check it out!

Have you written to the other author, if you can find their contact info?

All you have to do is join the Librarians Group on Goodreads and ask them to move the book to your profile. It's that simple. You don't need to send any emails or "support requests." A volunteer librarian will move the book for you.

@@joralemonvirgincreche It shouldn't happen to begin with, genius. It's a pretty simple thing to avoid happening. Goodreads just sucks and doesn't care.

@@LethalByChoice Clearly you know nothing about how it works. Books are imported automatically from databases like Ingram or Amazon. Multiple authors have the same name, so their works are grouped under that name. If they're books by different authors, then the author profiles need to be disambiguated. If there are 300 authors named John Smith, they can't all be called that because then they'd all be under the same profile. So one is John A Smith, one is John G. Smith, etc. Someone has to notice and make the correction. It's simple to correct, but it's not simple to avoid from happening.

have you tried Storygraph? They have quarter stars! and are better than goodreads in general.

@@MsBlulucky yes! I like it a lot! They have so many cool things!

@@MsBlulucky wow quarter stars?? That's amazing but I also feel like Goodreads has given me low standards 😂

I get frustrated when I can't give half stars. Like there's a huge difference between star ratings for me. 1 means I hated it, 2 means I merely disliked it, 3 means I liked it, but it was just okay, 4 means it was very good, but there were things I didn't love about it, and 5 is near perfect. There is so much that falls between those!

ur canadian lol

He said he can make a 'big stink' because of his large platform. I thought he invented 'pweet', turns out he did not...

Round these parts we call it twumping.

Pweet you mean

I keep thinking about Slaughterhouse Five "The Bird Who Says “Poo-tee-weet?”"

maturity is highly overrated.

I can’t find it in the Apple App Store :(

@@daniellelibertini6138 It's only online for now, but they're working on the app.

@@daniellelibertini6138 you can download the beta app off the website.

Please. Make. Sure. Whereever. You. Go. Uses. Copyleft. Licenses. The nice thing about Wikipedia (and the other WMF projects) is that everything on it is basically under Creative Commons/GFDL. So even if it goes under or they make dumb policy choices, it's not all bad because anyone can take all the data and make their own version. If that had been the case with GoodReads from the start, you probably wouldn't be having these problems for so long.

It shouldn't need an email* But how the system currently exists, it does.

The e-mail would probably be much easier on a technical level, actually- Hence why I think it's the example he went to.

ikr, that was such a weird move 😂

Is this it? Is this all you can conjure Goodreads?

^^

I want to love StoryGraph but it has its own kind of problems and until they're fixed I'm going to use both goodreads and storygraph. It's a shame because I was hoping to leave goodreads for good this year.

@@bluegreen5377 can i ask what problems you are finding? from my perspective im loving it, just interested :)

@@seraphina2690 From the top of my head, a lot of editions are missing, when they are there too often some info is missing (number of pages, is it digital, physical, audio etc.). Different editions are not always connected to the original version but are added as a different book. In one instance when I was browsing editions of a specific book in the series, alternate editions were actually completely different books from that series. When I want to switch edition I have to first go to the exact edition I clicked I wanted to read. Adding books by ISBN is useless or at least it is if when I try to add them in my language. It'd be nice if they just added a disclaimer that unless they are from USA/UK/Canada and whatever else place they have access to, adding by ISBN won't work. They had a good start, their additional functions are amazing but I find them lacking in the basic stuff. In the end with as many books as there are, they rely on librarians and regular users a ton just like goodreads (and just like on goodreads anyone who has an account can add a book so people criticising goodreads for it should know storygraph is not different in this aspect though they will delete it if the author asks so they have that going for them).

@@bluegreen5377 have you forwarded these concerns to the devs? I see them on twitter all the time, they're very responsive. They seem to be interested in improving the layout for ease of use :)

I cannot read that Thanos quote without hearing his voice saying it lol

I’m a GR librarian. I signed up when I was 16 specifically to add a bunch of my grandparents ancient books that weren’t on there, then never used it again. But if I wanted, whenever, I could just go add 30 books to an author. That’s also why there’s a million versions of every book on there, because they don’t know how to add different covers or languages under the same banner

Funny that. Wikipedia actually has very robust policies, processes, and community culture in place that keep stuff mostly accurate and legitimate. They have staff, admins, developers- They even have an arbitration noticeboard that functions as a kind of court system, and they hold democratic elections for positions of power. Vandals get discouraged quickly and don't last long, and the decentralized bureaucracy does a pretty good job catching and fixing any mistakes from the rest of us. It's not random people- It's random people who like reading pages full of writing policies and digging through old articles and papers just to find a source for a mundane fact, and it's (in the long-term) the consensus of what all those nerds with diverse backgrounds can agree upon. And on top of that, everything on Wikipedia is under copyleft licenses. If they piss off the community, the community's literally free to copy the entire site and every article and image on it, and start their own Wikipedia. So basically I'm saying is: It sounds to me like if GoodReads were *more* like Wikipedia, then this probably wouldn't be such a problem.

@@neolexiousneolexian6079 thank you! I took a screenshot of this comment because Wikipedia gets unfairly dragged by academia as "unreliable." For a profession that is all about factual accuracy, you would think that they would take the time to research Wikipedia's policies, processes, etc. It's much more reliable than academic leadership thinks.

@@j.g.9045 Yes, but in academic terms, 'reliable' means having a non-volatile chain of provenance and review that will allow that same specific source to be re-examined later. Being able to show sources is only half the equation; the other important part is having those still be available to someone else, maybe ten years down the track, who is trying to trace the working you did in your own paper that is citing that source. 'You can trawl through ten years' worth of edit history, if the server still exists and has those records' is not the same thing as 'the relevant publication's archives will have a copy, and the institutions who published papers citing the source may have obtained copies for themselves as well, for the convenience of the relevant department's research' No, it's not a perfect system, but there is a reason for it being the way it is. And if this were communicated a little more clearly, maybe people wouldn't keep getting so confused over what is and is not considered to be an appropriate source for their bibliographies. For what it's worth, when I was at university there was a debate ongoing as to whether sites like Wikipedia could be used as references in a bibliography, and what format that would need to take. From what I remember, the fact that a page would need a time-stamp in order to establish which exact version of the page was being viewed, and the fact that this did not take into account the potentially complex nature of website content (which is an understatement; having multiple HTML frames was enough of an issue and that was web 1.0 stuff) ultimately were not huge points in its favour. I think we ended up being able to cite simple-text HTML documents, provided they had a time and date stamp and were archived somewhere that could reproduce the content shown at that time and date with reasonable accuracy.

Lol, it’s almost as if libraries have solved some of the issues with cataloguing books in the past already 😂

Heck yeah!

Goblins and foot soldiers unite!

What are our orders?

@@TulilaSalome Raid Goodreads HQ Battle of Pelennor style

Nay, the multiverse.

Most famous goblin*

Have you found any since the comment was written? I'm actively searching for replacements lol

@@MolotovBg It was mentioned in the comments few times, but Storygraph is a good replacement, It's the new platform, so It's not perfect, but still better than Goodreads^^

my dad and i use LibraryThing. its waaay less meme-y but its pretty good!

Will check that out, thanks

Not really. I checked it out and its the same just with better management. The reviews are all the same you would expect. Like Throne of Glass has "This book is amazing 5/5" sorry but thats like saying Twilight is a great book

Hahaha I just commented the same. Definitely second this opinion! Use Storygraph!

+

@@ninjablack4347 I think the reviews being the same could largely be a result of importing your old goodreads data. I have to admit, that my taste in books and the way I rate them has drasticly changed over the years but I haven't gone back and changed my ratings on most of them, since there are too many. And since I imported my goodreads data they can be found there too. What I realy like about the StoryGraph is that they are very receptive when it comes to user feedback and as a big mood reader their search filters are incredibly helpful as well as the statistics of your own reading habits

Jeff Bezos 15,134th house isn’t gonna pay for itself

Lowkey probably their mindset with Amazon Prime Video. That UI though...

If Daniel never writes a novella entirely about goblins he will miss a huge opportunity.

True, or have goblin mascot characters. Like a clan of goblin characters, or making it meta, use them in reviews. And fanarts exist, and artists. He needs a goblin fanart mascot(youtube needs a goblin or at least troll emote)

also not assigning "Goblin" as the author when goodreads asked for one was a missed opportunity.

Wow! That's nuts. You'd think if Goodreads saw the messages they'd be able to fix it. But I can also understand why they'd be hesitant to remove bad reviews at the author's request...

@@dragonfireink139 - From what I can tell, Goodreads seemed really unconcerned about their site being used to extort money. I don't know what the solution could be from their end, but there's not even a motivation to try and come up with one. It makes sense if their people really aren't paid. How saintly (or foolish) does a person have to be to do volunteer work for the richest man in the world.

I'm not an author but I saw some inaccuracies on a book listing, contacted StoryGraph and within a day they had checked to be sure I was right, and corrected the information.

That's great!!! Just start using The Story Graph so you don't waste your precious time learning how to use Goodreads

Maybe I'll go add that new book title "Rage of Goblins" in Goodreads to Evan Winter because it's simply that easy...

"Celebrity" lol

^^

I seriously never needed an app for that. A glance at my library suffices.

@@ChristmasLore I have a notebook as well to keep track but I find using an app very convenient. Plus the stats options on Storygraph have been enlightening.

^^

Mike?