Is goodreads a useful site, or is it all garbage? Any redeeming

>unironically posting here

The recommendation engine is hit and miss.
To me it's best if you find and follow a few active reviewers who post insightful stuff about books you didn't know about before -

some starters:

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4100763-hadrian

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/23385697-glenn-russell

(not sure why they both have a similar profile pic)

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/53165-warwick

and of course

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1834894.Manny_Rayner

>>8755755
You can find some great books on there

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23203843-the-legacy-of-totalitarianism-in-a-tundra

>>8755770
>(not sure why they both have a similar profile pic)
Easy, just like the fedora it is a social marker for intelligence and sophistication.

The problem with Goodreads is that it's pretty joyless. It turns books into little more than participation trophies, rendering the titles mere trinkets that adorn your list.

This seems to appeal to some people, but I don't know how.

>>8755770
>The recommendation engine is hit and miss.

In my experience, it's miss and miss.

>>8755755
It's nice if you want it for keeping track of what you were reading and adding lit people for trusty opinions on books.

>>8755786
>joy as a standard

>>8755755
I like the site because I like keeping track of the books I have read. The "want to read" feature is also useful.
I don't have any friends nor do I review books, though; that's all superfluous garbage.

>>8755755
It's horrible.

The community is bad and you can't hide or downvote obnoxious reviewers. It is slow. The programming is bad -- the autocomplete sometimes doesn't work even when you type in the whole name of the book. The recommendation engine is mystifying. The chart of books by publication date is cute until you read the Iliad, then it's just a line along the top in a graphing space defined by its outliers.

I should just track what I read in a spreadsheet, but I keep hoping they'll improve.

>>8755786
>This seems to appeal to some people, but I don't know how.
I am mostly a non-fiction reader, so I love it. I am anonymous on it so it isn't about participation trophies though I shall admit that seeing other people read more books as me tends to do bother me. But most of them read the wrong books in my opinion (for my personal goal).

Anyway, with goodreads by playing around with shelves and genres, I get useful recommendations for more non-fiction books. The amounts of books to read and that I am reading is increasing incredibly fast. If only I had more time and the internet wasn't such a distraction.

The engine does have a tendency for a kind of stereotype effect. I am trying to connect different books so they give me unique recommendations but that hardly seem to work. The algorithm seems to be based on generalizations.

But the "not interested" function helps me to eredicate all those stereotypical books. Even just looking at less popular books at the "other people also liked" enlarges my library.

I also have a kind of anti-library: those books I've yet to read or have low priority, which act as an indicator as to how much and what I still do not know.

>>8755822
>hide or downvote obnoxious reviewers.
You can hide

Downvoting is for redditors, and as stack overflow shows, is toxic for any community. I don't understand why you'd want to hide some reviewers - why are you following them in the first place?

>>8755846
Why is there upvoting but no downvoting? There is no balance to the reviews that rise to the top. I don't follow anyone. I want to autohide them because there must be a finite number of reviewers who bring nothing but ideology and animated gifs to the table and maybe it would be less obnoxious if I could start winnowing them out. But such reviewers always seem to get the most likes, and again, there's no way to tell if the balance of the community would prefer to push them down the stack.

Its ok only as a book tracker.
The community is absolute cancer.

>>8755822
Spreadsheets are okay to track things, but you lose the exploratory and participatory capabilities the site offers.
I have an alternative in mind which would discard different editions and focus on titles an author produced. Getting rid of ratings would also be a plus. Making the list function actually useful would blow other sites out of the water.

No, use LibraryThing

>>8755901
Because safe spaces, and hug boxes.

Tracking what you're reading is okay if you're an aspie with ocd.

>>8755963
Yep. That's what I use it for.

>>8755963
I often come across a book in my searches and ask to myself, "Have I read this or not?" Goodreads will tell me.

>>8755979
>>8755971
This is probably the silliest thing about Goodreads. You should already know whether you've read a book or not.

>>8755990
>I only read 5 books per year, the post

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if the recommendations and reviews you're seeing are bad, it's probably because you're a pleb 2bqh. gr places reviews by your friends above community ones. if those are bad, you've added a bunch of people with no taste which indicates that you don't have any either.

your recommendations are based on what you've read and how people who have read what you've read have reacted to different texts. it's not an editorial decision. the manga version of hamlet may appear in your recommendations if you haven't read many books and add hamlet, but by the time you've added fifty or so books they'll be as good as your taste in literature is. mine - pic related - are patrish.

the recommendations by shelf are especially useful if you shelf books by country, like i do.

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>>8756008
>tfw I'm not the only one who shelves by country and gets good recs

>>8756007
If you can't even remember if you've read a book, can you even count it as read?

Surely if you can't even recall if you ever read it at all, you won't remember any of the contents, either. This goes back to the "participation trophy" comment.

>>8756024
I assure you that you cannot list all the books you've ever read without help (except, as I presume, you've only read few). You may only remember that you read them when you read or hear their name, which I assume is what the anon above refers to. Especially mediocre books are easy to forget.

>>8756035
>you cannot list all the books you've ever read without help

There is no conceivable occasion where I would ever have to do this.

>>8756035
>You may only remember that you read them when you read or hear their name

How is this not sufficient? Or a minus?

>>8756035
>Especially mediocre books are easy to forget.

Ah, good thing GoodReads exists so that we may remember mediocre books...er, right?

>>8756018
>individual volumes of brodsky and pushkin
>gogol's short fiction
>non-fiction published by reputable univesity presses (yale and uchicago)

the recommendations i receive for a given shelf at a given time are superior to any chart dedicated to that country's literature I've ever seen here

>>8755822
>The community is bad and you can't hide or downvote obnoxious reviewers

Unless you scroll down the reviews are totally avoidable, and the reviews all average out on popular books to like 3.8 anyways. The only reviews worth scrolling down to are unpopular monographs.

> It is slow. The programming is bad
Never seen this

>The recommendation engine is mystifying
Your shelves are not organized or you are a pleb

>>8755963
If you don't track the books you've read, you haven't read them.
I've seen thousands of films and read hundreds of books and I always laugh at people who have nothing to base their knowledge on.
Anyone can say they read books or be into film. But when you get to it, yeah, they've read a book in high school and saw the latest blockbuster.

>>8756092
>getting triggered by obnoxious reviews

>>8756105
That way you'll get into patrician heaven.

goodreads is good if you follow good people. there aren't a lot of them but they're there.

>>8756105
I can't even tell if this is satire or in earnest.

>>8756121
Either way, it's funny.

>>8756119
>good is an objective trait in people

>>8756140
reading good books or bad books is objective

>>8756156
>turning yourself into a clone of the people you trust

>>8755755
Librarything is better

>>8756117
That way you will accumulate knowledge and have reference points for that knowledge. Unless your memory exceptional, you cannot rely on it. I can tell by the comment that you do not do much research where tracking lots of sources is of importance.

I'm not saying I berate people who do not track their intellectual activity, after all, it is a matter of choice. But this disdain is also a problem because what you see out there are people going after trends. Trends imply consumption. Reading and trying to get a better understanding of what it is you are reading, the importance of a work's historical context, how it relates to other works even thousands years on - all of this implies reflection. Tracking helps create a bigger picture of an era, of a literary movement, of a national literature as a whole, etc.

What do you base your worldview on? How do you form your opinions? Where do you get your information from? How do these things help you make decisions? If you addressed these questions to people you respect or those in positions in power, wouldn't it be embarrassing to realize they are not competent or that they are completely out of date in their respective field in this day and age? This is a particularly big problem in developing countries where public officials have no understanding about the decisions they are making.

I put a lot of emphasis on self-improvement, so it's a way for me to track my progress. There's no shame in that, but go ahead, judge me.

>>8756218
tl;dr

>>8756169
i just like book recommendations better than pop science and ya

>>8756218
why can't you reddit refugees lurk more before trying to shitpost

>>8756231
I knew I wouldn't get any serious replies, but at least I tried.

>>8756218
This guy is actually right, first time I did research, and also as I accumulated more information in general, I've realized the importance of archiving books and articles so you can consult them whenever you need, my focus shifted from retaining information to retaining where I can find the information I need when I need it.

>>8756250
>literature
>reference books of infornation

>>8756294
Fair enough, this does apply more to non-fiction, but I still apply the same concept to fiction.

>>8756303
>pretending you're a lit crit is the only way to read fiction
>>>/sci/

It's nice for keeping track of which edition of a book you want, and what to read next. Find a few reviewers you trust because most reviews are garbage. There are no other highlights.

I just use it as a have read/to read list.

>>8755755
it helps keep track of what you have read and one why or the other has helped me pick out my next book

The recommendations are complete trash. I use it to keep track of what books i want to read in future and it works fine for that.

>>8756050
Serious readers have always kept reading diaries for all of the reasons you seem to discard. This is still far preferable, but it is simpler scanning a webpage for a title that you suddenly half-remember a line from, because often it will be enough to remind you where it was from, and you will be able to find the book or your notes on it.