“BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next.”
Recommendations from people, not algorithms
I mean, if an algorithm can recommend me books I might enjoy based on things I’ve previously read, that’s not a bad thing?
Algorithms aren’t always bad.
To each their own, but I’ve been using bookwyrm for a few months now, and I like that it doesn’t use an algorithm because I have yet to receive a suitable recommendation from one. It’s a much cleaner, refreshing experience.
Plus people apparently don’t know what „algorithm“ means. Sorting by average rating is an algorithm. Filtering by genre is an algorithm. Anything that takes an input (a database of books), performs a discrete set of steps and produces an output (an ordered list of books) is an algorithm. Even if it’s not performed by a computer but yourself standing in front of your bookshelf.
This is true, but colloquially when people say “I dislike algorithms,” we are referring to any system that automatically sorts or elicits information, apart from responding to user input. I like having the ability to sort and filter things manually, but I dislike unsolicited recommendations and things of that nature. I think most people know the technical meaning of the word.
I do not think most people know about the computer science definition of algorithm involving discrete steps. For average people I feel like your definiton of “any system that automatically sorts or elecits information, apart from responding to user input” is the only one known.
You may be right, I’m not really sure. And in this case, this is still what people are referring to colloquially.
It sounds good on paper, but after a decade of having Netflix and Spotify recommending stuff to me that I “like” but leaves me spiritually pigeonholed, I’ve really come around to appreciating the value of “organically” encountering media that is more varied and challenging.
To give an example: when a friend recomends a book to me, even if it’s not my “taste” the experience becomes much more rewarding (and I have a friend to talk about it with!). Being recommended media by a software program is impersonal and honestly it gets kinda lonely.
What about an algorithm so that you get relevant book recommendations from people? Would that count?
+1, I get a lot of very good recommendations from chatgpt.
Book recommendations from people are fine, but I find that about half of them are just echoes of whatever’s popular in that particular forum.
r/printsf gives very good recommendations most of the time but you’d better be ready to read Blindsight.
I don’t get it why I should have to create an account there. Doesn’t social and ActivityPub mean I can participate from somewhere else!?
Yes and no.
The main benefit of activitypub is facilitating communication between many instances running the same software. Sometimes services are different but do the same thing so work well together (e.g. mastodon and firefish).
When there is overlap between services it can work, such as how you can read lemmy communities from mastodon, but it’s not the same and doesn’t display as nice because they are different content types (microblog vs link sharing and discussion).
Bookwyrm is quite different. Tracking the books you’re reading is not really a fediverse thing and I’m not sure that’s even federated between bookwyrm instances. Reviews on books, well on bookwyrm you can follow users. I guess it’s possible you can follow a bookwyrm user from mastodon? Have you tried? It wouldn’t give you the same experience though, so sometimes it’s nicer to make a new account per service type.
It seems like it would be super helpful if the fediverse offered oauth between instances doesn’t it?
I’ve used it for a few months. I enjoy the idea of updating my progress after each reading session, so that hypothetically, I can see how fast I read.
Kinda like the idea. Might give it a go.
Was this not the purpose of Literature.cafe? Did they not close down due to lack of users and merge into .world? Not sure how you’re going to break that streak, given that Lemmy’s numbers are going down and not up.
Literature.cafe is very much still here and we didn’t merge into .world nor close down, this software is for book tracking and book reviews :P
Oh. Sorry. Read on! (since I clearly cannot)
Practice makes perfect
This software is specialized for book reviews
