the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

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dog
@dog

I've seen a lot of people talking up Storygraph, so I decided to try putting in a review for the book I just finished, and... I don't know about this. Questions like "did you find the characters loveable" just feel so alienating. It feels like I'm talking to an algorithm in English instead of, like. Communicating to another human, even indirectly. I get that recommendations are supposed to be one of its things but I don't feel good about a recommendation made to me based on data like this?


the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi
@the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

Algorithmic recommendations to find who is the most loveable? Oh baby, books are finally having their eharmony moment


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in reply to @dog's post:

I agree that the vibes are weird... I use storygraph but pretty much just as a tracker, and don't engage with this page almost ever. I've added some content warnings for nonfiction with unexpected content, but otherwise this page really feels not-for-me. (Also I'm largely logging nonfiction so it feels less relevant anyway.)

Yeeeeah, I tried Storygraph for a while because I wanted to move away from Goodreads, but that review process was a huge turnoff. They ask a lot of those same kinds of questions if you want to add books to its library, which I had to do a lot since there are basically no non-English books in there. I ended up just going back to a spreadsheet to track my books, lol.

Yeah, this is my problem with Storygraph— they’ve fixed some things over the past year or so (when I last tried it in 2021 I couldn’t find publication dates anywhere and you couldn’t skip the trigger warnings at all) but it still implies that there’s an agreed upon definition for a “lovable character” or “diverse cast” that they quite literally put before “is the book any good or not.” Add that to a set of tags that don’t talk about the actual prose and the way they hide any actual reviews and the whole thing feels really hostile to the concept of critical engagement.

It gives me the creeps, honestly

I get that inherently a recommendation algorithm has to be doing SOMETHING like this under the hood, but this a la carte, consumer attitude towards fiction is diametrically opposed to what it means to me to be a reader. The point of reading is to be opened up to new ideas, feelings, and perspectives, especially the unfamiliar and unexpected. It's not to pull up to the Drive Thru and say "One adventurous, lighthearted book with fast pacing, please."