SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Becky wrote: "This is already happening to me... After the Great Homepage Split of 2016, the homepage became MUCH less useful to me for following friend updates. (I pretty much stopped using the site for a long time because of it.) Obviously I came back, but I still have issues with my homepage updates. It seems to want to show me updates from my friends based on some logic or algorithm, which results in me missing a ton of friend updates unless I specifically go looking for them (or get reviews emailed to me).

For instance, the homepage used to just show me everything in order. But now, it tries to "curate" my feed for me, as well as limiting the page to 10 or so posts before loading the next batch. I don't know if you've ever used the random shelf order here, but if you use it with infinite scroll on a shelf, you'll find that each "reload" randomizes the entire list - so you'll have books repeat if you have a large shelf that has to load multiple times.

I have that issue with my homepage, only with friends. So I have I'll have 3-4 updates in a row from one friend, then a few updates from another friend, someone else in between, one or two single updates from people, and then a repeat of friend 1, then a few new ones, then more repeats. It's like it's SORT of based on recent activity, but where it used to just show me all of the updates they've made in order and I could scroll back as far as I wanted, now it's like it tries to show me "relevant" updates over just... all of them.

I have to use the Top Friends filter, keep it to around 20 or so people, and curate who is on it frequently because otherwise I'll miss updates unless I want to LEAVE this site and go check my email. Very frustrating. "

QFT

I hate the homepage with a passion.

The home page isn't that useful for me, either. I treat it much like I do twitter and kind of skim through it a couple of times a day, but what I primarily depend on to keep up is the daily friends' review mail and discussion group mail.

(Never have gotten the hang of keeping up with groups in real time, but I need less incentive to park on this site rather than more, so am not inclined to do so.)

The feed on the home page frustrates me, even though I usually review it once or twice a day.

If I correctly remember some of the discussions in the old Feedback forum about this, I believe GR staff confirmed that the feed algorithm doesn’t show all your friends’ reviews once you have more than a certain # of friends? I never saw that “certain #” specified, and I don’t think I’m anywhere close to that yet since I’ve been cautious about going on intentional Friending Sprees, but just knowing I might miss my friends’ reviews annoys me. Even now, when I scroll back down past the place where I know I stopped reading last time, once in a great while I’ll see reviews that should have been there when I last checked my feed but that I don’t remember seeing. It’s possible I just missed them, but I feel like I’m pretty thorough. I also make it a point to scroll down until I’ve seen a few familiar and/or previously-liked posts, plus I watch to make sure the timestamp is well past when I last reviewed the feed.

I’ve also had issues with the “Top Friends” feature. One friend was constantly reposting old reviews to the feed, possibly just doing some sort of long-running editing project and not bothering to uncheck the checkbox. This had been going on for months (or longer?) and it finally drove me over the edge but unfriending them seemed a bit drastic, so I decided to try out the “Top Friends” feature. I deselected them from “Top Friends” and it seemed to work fine, but then I realized I was no longer seeing reviews from a couple friends who I particularly like to watch for. I went to my Friends list and found that a handful of my other friends had also been removed from “Top Friends” even though I’m 99.99% certain I did not do that myself and one of them was pretty much the last person I would have wanted to deselect. I had only taken one person off intentionally, and they were still deselected, so it’s not like I mis-clicked. Since then, I’ve added a few new friends and found that sometimes (but not always) a newly-added friend would automatically be deselected as a “Top Friend”. It took me longer to catch that because I wasn’t used to their activity on my feed, so at first I didn’t know I was missing anything. I’ve been meaning to double-check the next time I accept a Friend request whether there’s some sort of checkbox at the time of acceptance that can be used to determine how they get added, but I don’t remember seeing anything like that. It seems like GR just chooses it randomly, or maybe it was just a limited issue that has been resolved. It’s something I know to watch for now, at least.

One of my other big complaints related to the feed is the limited filtering optons. I don’t like to see everybody’s “Likes” on my feed. Sometimes they show some interesting liked reviews that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, but they also show a lot of liked reviews that I’m not remotely interested in. It's especially a problem if you have friends who have a ton of friends themselves and just go down and rapidly click “like” on everything on their feed whether they read it or not. It just floods my own feed too much. People can “like” things however they want, but I don’t want to see it on my feed. The problem is that the only setting to remove likes from the feed also removes non-book-related updates. I learned that after I had already made that setting change and was too happy with the reduced clutter to revert back for the sake of a few general updates. I don’t even know if any of my friends ever post those types of updates, and I would really like to see them if they do, but not at the cost of having to see all those “likes” again.

The filter controls on the feed have a lot of room for enhancement. In addition to wanting more precise control over what I see, I’d love to be able to establish those settings by friend. That would probably seem like overkill to many people, but it would be my “if I ruled the world” dream. I prefer things on my feed with text and tend to skip past textless things quickly, so for all but a few friends who have similar tastes I would probably turn off the notifications about books being shelved, and possibly even star ratings without reviews. Right now you also have to lose book status updates if you want to turn those things off. If I could do it, I would also probably turn off status updates without text across the board, where it just shows what page or % somebody has read to. I have mixed feelings about status updates with text. Most of the time they either a) make no sense because the person is making a vague reference to something you either don’t remember or have never read or b) they’re spoilerish because they do explain what they’re talking about. But I do like reading status updates for books I’ve read before, and I find it pretty easy to just skip over the rest. Asking for a way to filter out “status updates with text for books that aren’t on my Read shelf” is probably a asking a BIT too much, so I’m willing to compromise on that one. ;) If I could control it by friend, I might even turn back on "Likes" from certain friends who have similar reading tastes and a smaller # of friends.

If any of y'all with the good ideas ever need a recommendation for a programming job at Amazon, you can count on me. You've all made excellent points.

YouKneeK, the ability to filter better is one of my dreams, too! Very rarely am I interested in seeing what folks are saying in other groups, for example.

LOL Allison :)

Oh yes, I forgot all about the group posts showing up on the feed. Since my like-avoidance filter settings also filter out those, I never see them, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t ever want to. I imagine they would especially be a problem if a friend is posting in an unmarked spoiler thread. You might get an eye full of spoilers for a book you're currently reading.

Goodreads success created its own downfall. A less successful site would have been left as it was.