Does one really get anything meaningful out of saying this was a 6-star book vs a 7-star book?
Personally I think 4 levels is sufficient. Either it's rather bad, not bad but not good, good but not great or it's great.
Anything beyond that will have to be written in words.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3082241
One of the main frustrations I have with Goodreads is how limited the API is nowadays, and how there appear to be no measures against brigading and other campaigns. One of the core issues with ratings services.
Personally I'm hoping Open Library by the Internet Archive grows more in popularity, given how most websites come and go:
If I'm trying to pick a movie, I don't care what its score for rewatching is, I care about what its score is for watching it the first time.
And once I've watched a movie, I don't care about whether other people say I should watch it again, I care about whether I want to watch it again.
A movie is different from buying a board game. If I'm shelling out $50 for a game, I'll want to know if it's still fun the twentieth time I play. But that isn't a consideration when picking a new movie to watch, the experience may be worth it even if I never watch it again. And ditto with books. I'm probably not going to read that 800-page book again, but that shouldn't stop me reading it once.
It's also a genre independent quality metric. That's not to be underplayed. Some examples of films that successfully passed it for me: Casablanca; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Hereditary; Under the Skin; My Neighbor Totoro; The Fifth Element. I'm pretty sure most people would agree at least half of these movies are good.
It turns out most of the things I consider worth revisiting at least once are also things other people would consider that way. So for me a Rewatchability rating is a positive signal.
These movies are some of the most impactful that I have ever seen, but by no means would I rate them highly rewatchable. They are gut wrenching, and some people can only stand to watch them once, few want to rewatch them, but they are also incredible.
I also gain a lot from a rewatchable piece of content, but you might be shorting yourself by always watching things designed to tickle the dopamine receptors.
>I also gain a lot from a rewatchable piece of content, but you might be shorting yourself by always watching things designed to tickle the dopamine receptors.
Now this I just do not understand. Things designed to be good on primarily the first watch, and allowed to degrade on future experiences, seem much worse for this.
I think we are coming from different feelings about rewatchability.
If you asked me to rate movies as to their artistic merit, their excellence as films, I would say that those all fall into “instant classic” territory. However, I would not want to rewatch them in the same way that I might want to rewatch a Coen brothers film, for example.
That's fine by me, of course. The more signals I have, the better my decision can be made on what to watch next on average.
For example, I just watched the Gorge. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't rewatch it. I don't think it necessarily deserves a bad grade though.
Now, some great movies I wouldn't rewatch. La vita e bella and grave of the firefly are beautiful, I just cannot rewatch them.
It's definitely a limited metric tho.
Not dissimilar to what Steam implemented, which is basically Bollinger bands for ratings.
It doesn't matter how many times you down vote Mexican soap operas or singing talent shows. If you keep watching they're gonna keep suggesting them.
Netflix recommendation system just does not work. It does not allow me to find movies I can like, it allows me to see the same thing I seen once before.
I am not in the mood for serious documentary evey day of course, it takes more concentration. But when I am in mood for one, I should be able to find it.
For clarity I'd replace rating systems with "was it a good spend of my time?" yes/no question. Then just show percentages. Could not be clearer.
I don’t think this system is right for everyone, but I like it. Depending on the platform I may even use a rating system of 1, which represents the starring and everything else is just read/watched.
The difference between 1 and 2 on a 5 point scale is not useful.
It’s hard to come up with a nice visual for it though, you just have to use the numbers themselves (or rather ugly emojis)
Suggestion off the top of my head: down arrow / thumb down; circle / horizontal dash; up arrow / thumb up; star / heart.
The circle / horizontal dash could be ambiguous in isolation but should be clear in context.
The actual questions is: Whom can you recommend this book? Even mediocre books can be very useful for the right people.
There is a general problem with a 5 or 10 star voting system, consider a [malicious] user who only gives a 1 or 10 star vote, thus ending up with more voice than one that votes in the range of 4-6 which would be what the majority of the content deserve. Therein lies another problem too, while the scale would imply 5.5 to be average [out of 1-10 with no 0 option], most people tend to consider 7-7.5 to be average instead, there's a very natural bias on the scale.
This idea isn't actually uncommon however, as platforms tend to work with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, and a `favorite` action of sorts. Some platforms tend to respect favorites in recommendations and some don't. I have found that YouTube doesn't care all that much about my... let alone favorites, it doesn't even care about my votes. TikTok however did this well, I had downloaded it one day and at the end of the day my feed consisted of neat programming tricks and lessons on color theory. Which kind of revealed something my own prejudice too, as I had expected TikTok to show me the worst content and it was the platform that respected my choice the most. That said these things change a lot so it wouldn't surprise me if the same test shows the opposite results a year from now on.
When you grade by competency (not by knowledge), you also assign a written description for each grade. That helps a lot. I think those platforms are keenly aware of those facts I just described, and are trying to boil them down to simple actions for users, that impart large signal, and that respect the cultural norms of evaluation. That's why Letterboxd has a 5-star with half-stars rating system, but also has a like button.
That said perhaps multiple binary dimensions would be better. Good story yes/no, interesting/unique premise yes/no, overall good acting yes/no, good cinematography yes/no etc etc.
I rate for myself, and not others. And for over 20 years I've used a 10 point system.
10 = Easily amongst my favorite
9 = Awesome, but not in all time favorites
8 = Really liked it, and would recommend
7 = Liked it, was worth my time, but not so much that I would happily recommend to others
6 = Liked it, but wasn't worth my time
5 = Neutral
And below 5 I don't distinguish. I randomly pick to indicate I didn't like it.
(Actually, 7 points as someone else pointed out - by my point stands even with a 7 point system).
5: I enjoyed sections of this book but as a whole I didn’t like it
4: had some cool ideas and there were moments when I got excited but the execution wasn’t there. Basically an amateur with a good idea
3: readable but unsatisfying. I finished it but was roasting it in my head the whole time
2: garbage. Bad story idea and bad writing. Nothing good to say except that it seemed like the author was trying
1: offensive. Celebrity cash grabs, polemics, etc. no artistic value whatsoever, author was not trying to write a good book. “Book” is just a format here
- books i wish i hadn't lost time with
- books i've read and were probably ok
- books i would give/recommend
I rarely give 1 or 2 - in vast majority of cases it means I stop reading them, out of respect for my time.
What is nice, but underused (since most platforms want us to be excited, because of sales and adverts) is some kind of slider with mean at 0, for expected quality.
Even better, tags to choose from "awesome", "insightful", "well-researched", "funny", "cringe", "inaccurate" etc. I mean, there are tags, but I mean ones explicitly displayed next to rating.
It also means that 4% of critics did not recommend the movie. In a theater of 60 people, you and your friend would fit into that 4%. So there's nothing wrong with RottenTomatoes.
5 - This book was so good that it’s life-changing
4 - This is a really good book
3 - I enjoyed this book, it was good.
2 - It’s alright.
1 - I hated this book with every fiber of my being, because it somehow tricked me into finishing it despite my hatred of it.
Reasoning: number ratings are subjective. My 4/5 is not the same as yours... or even the same as mine 2 years ago.
If one really feels the need for the "meh" category, I'd say go for a 3-level system: bad, meh, great.
Of course there are plenty of monetisation and engagement reasons for that UI item to be awkwardly placed…
Kaguya seems a little better here, but it too starts with a huge 'MAKE AN ACCOUNT OR FUCK OFF' message in mid screen, with the search field in the navigation bar on top. If you want become the Goodreads alternative, start with realising that a lot of people just want to see if the reviews are any good before committing to creating an account and contributing in turn.
It's just a bunch of basic usability problems like that that they've never bothered addressing.
There are other corners of it that could be nicer. It's not so much about modern tooling as much as it is about using modern tooling to achieve better flow and more pleasant presentation.
I have the same complaint about BoardGameGeek. If it was super snappy to go with the dated design, I wouldn't bat an eye, but it is also kind of a slog.
Both are things I use for discovery a little bit more than I use to record my thoughts about my previous experiences, so my browsing behavior is very breadth-first search and that makes the slow loads more of an acute problem for me.
Less optimized for farming my attention and ads, more optimized for me discovering things, and not being shoehorned into choices.
I was actually trying to determine the best free source of metadata for books. I was hoping for something like MusicBrainz.
The best I could find seemed to be https://openlibrary.org. There is https://isbndb.com, but it is paid.
https://annas-archive.org/blog/
This may well be a great opportunity to seed a Goodreads alternative.
Since the metadata is contributed by volunteers in the first place, it only seems fair for it to be freely available rather than locked down.
If this site takes off, you'll need a moderation strategy. Goodreads has been plagued by extortionary negative reviews.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/17/1219599404/goodreads-review-b...
Goodreads does that though. Reviews from friends and people you follow are shown first
Besides, I wouldn't even know who to 'friend' or 'follow' on a site like this. What's the point? Chances are I'd just end up in some bubble, which defeats the whole point of reading.
I can't say I've ever thought of reading as a way to fight against a "bubble", nor am I sure that being in a "bubble" is inherently a bad thing. I don't think my life is any worse for identifying that I'm not into fantasy smut or steven pinker or self-help neuroticism and in fact my life is better without these authors in it.
They also de-emphasize reviews, hiding them under a button. There are no likes or comments on reviews, and they don’t have shelves like Goodreads.
But to me, a big part of Goodreads is the community, library organization, and reviews, so I want to emphasize those on Kaguya.
Also, I just think our design is much better.
1. It doesn’t have any information about pricing or the business model. “Get started for free” — does it mean there are paid plans after I sign up? Does it mean it’s on best effort and might disappear suddenly if the person running it doesn’t have time?
2. I scrolled down all the way looking for a pricing link, and thought that the Help and Support link in the footer may help. But it goes to a Discord link.
I’m not signing up to find what “free” means and I’m definitely not going to sign up for Discord to get help or ask basic questions. If you cannot put up web pages for support, there at least ought to be an email address. Everybody (well, most people) has an email address. The percentage of people having an email address and willing to jump through another hoop (Discord) is going to be quite low.
2. Noted. We'll put up a proper email address. I just figured Discord would be faster.
Backend: Elixir & Phoenix
Database: PostgreSQL with Supabase (originally CockroachDB, big mistake)
Auth: Supabase
Frontend: Next.js
UI Components: shadcn
GraphQL API: Absinthe
Hosting: Fly.io (Phoenix) + Vercel (Next.js)
Storage: Cloudflare R2 + CDNOxide and Friends did a great episode on it at the time [1].
[0] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/licensing-faqs
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/whither-coc...
Little note: It seems the search is only by book title, not by author and not resilient to typos.
Yeah, search is currently by book title and series name. It should handle typos pretty well—Meilisearch allows for up to two—but I still need to tweak it further
Do you use supabase’s api interface to do the queries? Or do you use supabase for other features?
For queries, we don’t use Supabase’s API interface—we interact with Postgres directly through our backend
It's also quite slow, but I suspect that's just part of it being a smaller site.
Rotten Tomatoes' system has a lot of positives and I see a ton of signal in Rotten Tomatoes scores. It only works with a critical mass of people rating a given piece and I don't think anyone could get that critical mass for books aside from Goodreads.
I had an idea of a rating system where people would have to create a ranked list of the movies/books. Their rating for a given piece would be based on where it is in their list, linearly. Then ratings would be relative to other content. I think this would be much harder to get off the ground than a Rotten Tomatoes system.
So if I rate Feature Film I II & III as 30 50 70, and you rate them 70 80 90, we would basically "agree". It's a neat system that I wish other rating systems would use.
In harsher words: women don't read sci-fi, and are your target audience. Make sure your landing page surfaces things other than sci-fi and fantasy, or you'll never grow past that niche.
- maybe users do not want a "modern" alternative to Goodreads per se? I know, I am not saying people are looking for a website from the 90s but one might want to keep in mind that this is a community that still reads books (and a lot of them actual paper books). This looks like standard website interface that get inherited from one of those nuvo web frameworks looks. The "feel" from the home page is very bland. Like a standard landing page of some sort.
- And sadly I do not want to create an account to explore the features and then hope that there is an easy delete a/c option. In fact even if I'd know I could delet the a/c I would be not inclined to create an a/c
- No, please don't do the 10 point rating. That's all over. 4 is the best with half stars. Hell, even 2 or 3 would not be bad. I'd have said 5 with half stars but that's essentially 10. 0, 0.5,…, 3.5, 4 is really the best imho. Even after Mr Ebert is gone and a lot of the later reviewes on his site are just, let's say not what he was even remotely, I still like rogerebert's 4 star rating system.
- Since I have not tried it, I hope you have an easy way to import everything from Goodreads.
Some feedback:
- Visually pleasing!
- It seemed to have failed to import some books from StoryGraph for me (e.g., "The Hive" by Camilo José Cela and "The Epic of Gilgamesh"), and as far as I could tell it did not notify me anywhere. I had no idea until I noticed that they were missing from my "Read" library.
- The book "Zone" by Mathias Énard seems to be completely impossible to find via searching, despite existing on the website (https://kaguya.io/books/zone).
- Adding a feature that allows clicking on 'Read Books' or 'Want to Read' on a user's profile to directly view their complete library in that category would be nice.
- Only five "Similar Books" seems rather low, would love to have a "See more >" option there!
- A "Neighbours" feature similar to what Last.fm has for finding other users would be great.
- This is a minor nitpick, but the grey box that represents a missing book under "Favourite Books" on a profile is taller than the actual covers.
I still use Goodreads almost exclusively.
Goodreads is still the competition. If you mean competition specifically between alternative to Goodreads, I think LibraryThing is the most popular by a fair bit. After a quick look around Bookwyrm, it definitely doesn't look like the one I'd choose. I'm mostly seeing "some rando's list of books they read in 2025" and "some rando commented on some random book".
Maybe once it finishes importing my Goodreads list it'll be more useful, but it's taking a while (kaguya was very quick), and my initial impression is that I'm not impressed.
However, its strongest point on it's favor is that anyone creating content on AP automatically has a potential reach of a few million users.
Maybe out of context, but the real value of Goodreads is the sheer number of content (books, reviews, lists, users, etc). If something _works_ there's not always a reason to break it and/or update it just for the sake of updating. Look at hardcore Salesforce tools, they look like they're from 90s, but they work perfectly fine. If that's your only motivation, it's impossible to win me over as a user.
Side-note: create a new book list and call it DNF, add the books that you didn't finish to that list and get it done with.
After decades of reading, there are probably only four fiction ratings for me:
Recommend - to a specific reader or genre
I read it multiple times over years
It's OK, but at this point it's bookshelf filler
I sold it.
There's usually a good thing in every book. I mean, the first 8 Stephanie plum books were fun...but it gets old. The hobbit/LOTR? I'd never recommend those today. I loved thr Thomas Covenant stuff back in the day, but today? No. But The Black Company and Garret PI series are the gifts that keep on giving.
Capturing that in a one dimensional measure is impossible...but it's been Good Enough for years. But you can try to make it better.
What will make a site like this useful though is:
1) How many people use it -- for this usage needs to be as frictionless as possible. You might want to consider at least being able to view it (though perhaps not post reviews, to avoid spam), without signing up for an account.
2) The quality of the reviews. If they're Amazon product level garbage, they become useless. One thing that might help is being able to filter by range of reviews -- i.e., see 2-4 star reviews only; or filter by books with an average rating computed _without_ taking 1 and 5 star reviews into account.
3) Not sure about 10-star rating system. I think that's harder for users to keep in their head. I'd suggest 5-star but allow 1/2 star ratings.
My biggest missing feature: I can't see what series a book is in. For instance, if I look up the Three Body Problem, I can see the author, the rating, reviews, pub date, etc; but nowhere does it tell me this is Book 1 of the Remembrance of Earth's Past series. That's pretty big for me; I commonly use these sites to click on the series, and see a full listing of all books in that series, so I know what to read next.
I don't mind this at all, but I do mind the extremely slow servers backing the site. It's overloaded, either through inadequate hardware or poor software or both.
> 10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars)
10 star rating is an anti-feature. I just don't have that level of granularity in how I feel about books. The only real feature you need is data migration / portability -- if I can't get my extensive records out of Goodreads, there's no point.
> Import your library from Goodreads/StoryGraph
So that's good. Does it include ratings? Can you continue to sync over time or is it a one-shot?
Interesting to see the deep tagging system as the categorizations for books are tricky (as an author I know this from a few failed attempts to pigeon hole my first book in kindle) so say If an amazing romance book was accidentally categorized as an adventure or Sci-Fi as it had a bit of action or future tech in it, it would likely get 1 star from the romance genre readers, and vice versa if it was categorized as Sci-Fi or adventure. It is why you rarely get well rated cross-overs. A better category manager would be good for readers.
A browser extension called Dissenter briefly allowed this, got too popular too fast, had a data leak, and then they rolled it into a spyware browser. It also only had popularity among one extreme of politics.
1. Moderation: you need to moderate content that people create and moderation is hard. If you don't, the service will be abused.
2. Order: Goodreads has "Librarians" to create some order in the chaos. I think that a meaningful search through "every tokenizable piece of human content" is very non-trivial and would require much work.
3. Monetization: ads are possible. Are they sustainable? I don't know enough of profitability to say something about that. The more specific the type of content is, the more options you have for monetization. For classical music scores my ideas were to make deals with sheet selling companies and make ads for (classical) concerts.
4. Market share: isn't Reddit pretty much a superset of this, minus a built-in rating system?
I love the initiative but my experience tells me these things tend to die out after 2–5 years, and I'd hate to lose my reading history then.
2) However, the UI density is not good for me.
I have a 23" monitor and I can only see 2,5 items of the "Trending Review This Week". I should be able to read 5 of them (even though there are only 3 items displayed).
The "landing screen" is also too big, I should be able to see some content that make me want to have a look and sign-in, not just sign-in to have a look.
3) As a personal opinion I prefer Bad/Neutral/Good rating system + review for the nuance.
I'm working on importing my library from a simple checklist app I made years ago. I posted one review.
Any idea why The Metabarons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabarons) isn't in the library? I guess comic books aren't in the data source.
Is there a reason Pandemic (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/710698.Pandemic) and The Rift (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/271167.The_Rift) aren't in Kaguya?
https://kaguya.io/books/pandemic-6 https://kaguya.io/books/the-rift-1
Thanks!
Ever since then, Amazon has cared very little about all the things it bought related to the old strategy.
A couple questions:
- where do you get your book data from? To my knowledge Amazon has a de facto monopoly on this and there's nothing more frustrating than missing latest or niche books, its covers, etc. or having wrong data/duplicates.
- do you plan on offering a migration path? I've got years worth of data on Goodreads.
Is there anyway to sync with Audible? Even if it's a hacky chrome extension reading off the audible website?
Also - I am a bit afraid that it either falls into obscurity or gets sold to Amazon. Any ideas why it wouldn't happen? In particular - if it is not open source, then there needs to be some monetization mechanics - which one do you favour?
You're relying on a whole mix of people, from tweens to teens to old goats, who may, or likely don't, have similar tastes.
A pointless exercise imo. Similar to going to reddit for reviews. It's not what you really want.
I want to move on from GoodReads, but one thing that it does have is polished recommendations. I did my best to “import” a lot of my reading history into TSG and then asked for recommendations and it gave me a bunch of -extremely- similar choices, very homogenous, and narrow.
There isn't a good way of sorting through all the stuff out there and I feel like I am missing a bunch of content worth reading as a result.
Out of curiosity how did you initially populate your site?
But if someone could make this work in a way that it's like a "if you liked this you might like" version of HN/lobste.rs it could be really useful.
It would also be nice to be able to record when you read the book so that you can go back and see like a history of the books you've read chronologically!
I didn't use Goodreads, but I'm considering Bookwyrm now, because it supports ActivityPub, which is awesome, because I want to avoid vendor/network lock-in if possible.
Its probably my device specifically, but the way the screen rendered, it wasn't immediately obvious I could scroll to see a skip button
They're always nice, and always have an achilles heel: the moat of kindle integration. Goodreads is unassailable.
Is it good or bad? Would you eat it again or not? Are they hot? Would you? etc
Every thing else can be expressed with words on the side.
The book I'm currently reading does not appear when searching.
This doesn't need to be better than StoryGraph. This just needs to be different, cater to different persons, needs. Maybe not even that. It can just be there next to StoryGraph.
My gripe with GoodReads is not that it didn't evolve, or that the UI is dated. My gripe is that it's owned by Amazon. So to the new kid on the block: Godspeed.
As far as features, the things I value about Goodreads / would like from replacements:
* I can see what my friends have read and rated books. (I specifically care about a tiny handful of friends who I know have similar tastes to my own.)
Obviously, this will be very hard for you to replicate.
Note that I do not care about the social feed. It doesn't matter that my friend is currently reading xyz. All that matters is that when I look at book X, I can see that [friend with very similar taste] read it (don't care when!) and whether they rated it highly or poorly.
* Goodreads recommendations are bad.
Related to the above point. Goodread's "Reads also enjoy" wavers from "moderately useful" to "fundamentally broken". Lists are okay, but broad lists are dominated by super-popular books that came out post-Goodreads, and there aren't enough specific lists (or not specific in a useful way; so many pointless lists for "books with an X on the cover".)
After importing my Goodreads books to Kaguya, and checking the recs on my latest read, you have roughly the same issue that Goodreads has with obscure books: the "similar books" are...other recent books I recently read. (On Goodreads I'll see this when my brother and I read an obscure scifi novel and something 100% unrelated. He and I will dominate the data set for that book.)
I recently discover that LibraryThing's similar books system is actually much better than anything on Goodreads for finding similar books. That's the thing to beat. I suspect they're able to do better because they've built up a large dataset from deep tagging similar to what you're planning. A tagging system isn't enough; you'll have to tag things! That requires a lot of users, copying an existing data set, or some clever LLM use. (Maybe not so clever; it's probably been trained on a lot of these books.)
* Libby integration
I have a Chrome extension (Available Reads) that will hit the Libby API for each book on a page. This lets me quickly see which books on my To Read list are currently available as ebooks or audiobooks at my local library. It's useful enough that I open up Chrome (not my primary browser) just to use that extension from time to time.
* Filters and sorting on genre
I have a big "want to read" list. When I want to pick my next book to read, I usually am thinking "I want to read scifi" or "I want to read about history" or whatever. In Goodreads, my Want To Read list doesn't even let me filter or sort fiction from non-fiction.
What would be cool would be if I could filter "1980s scifi that I haven't read that my brother has read and rated at least four stars". Or "middle-grades scifi that I read 10+ years ago and rated 4+ stars" for when I want a nostalgic read.
The "more stats" I think could be interesting, albeit not particularly useful. I do like the "date read / date published" graph on Goodreads stats. (The "date published" axes gets squashed to uselessness if you read "The Odyssey", though.)
1. Friends reviews on book is actually not that hard at all. We will implement it right after we get the friends and follow system working.
2. This one will take a decent number of users and ratings. We need a lot of data before we can make recommendations using ML.
3. Noted.
4. We will add that in the next few weeks. Filtering TBR seems to be a common request.
I mean it's hard because you have to get my friends to join. Goodreads has the network effect going for it.
People aren't sticking around for shiny features or slick UI—they stay because Goodreads has a critical mass of users and reviews.
The value isn't in half-stars or fancy shelves; it's in the network effects. Unless you have a way to bring over millions of active reviewers (and their reviews), you're just building another pretty ghost town.