This, I've given up so many times wanting to watch a soccer game and found no way to do it. It is incredibly frustrating. I don't understand how the current system works as it is impossible to figure out how to watch games.
We use AI internally as a tool, and I am working on some things around "book twins" to help people find books they will love for sure. I am going to look at possibility of a prompt type search, right now we do filters.
That math books are mostly not a real math books. When I want to have a math book I go to torrents and download hundreds of them. They do not have so rich annotation as books on your website, but too rich annotations means you have only 10 or less books per page. The biggest flaw of your math book collection is that it was collected by not a mathematician. When I am looking a math book I typically looking for a book with some tasks after each topic.
Same about philosophy - those are not a philosophy books. All attemts to mark some math or philosophy books as "best" do not work here, because I do not interested about what most people appreciated. I am interested in all books per field. For example, I am interested in Stoicism, but you have only "stoicism from a psychiatrist and philosopher" (what was the stupid reason to prohibit me from selecting and copying this line) - but I hate psychiatrists as scientific freaks.
Another rebuke is that your webpage takes too much memory, I would like to see not so rich and colorful interface which should take less than 50MB per page.
Yep, we are probably not made for you. I get it. Our UX is designed for a different group of readers :). I hope you can find a great place to find books other than us.
Will authors be pleased if I stop reading their books? How about dead ones?
The most upsetting part of your website for me is focusing on new (recently published) books, while I use to appreciate older books more.
We don’t focus on newly published books, why did you think that?
We focus on the most loved books published in any year with everything we built. We have filters for the readers who do want to see specific years in some sections, but that is it. Books are fairly timeless.
I think authors really appreciate it when you pay them for said book. The value is immense compared to the small cost, and otherwise there will not be more authors. Libraries are great too! I know if you are outside an English speaking country, books in English can be expensive, especially technical books, so i do understand. But hopefully one day you can pay that back.
I miss StumbleUpon :). Did you see that Digg is also about to make a comeback? I joined their group and it's been fun to see how they are thinking through it -> https://reboot.digg.com/
Well said, I also hope this is a good thing that wipes a lot of AI slop off the web. But I also see friends destroyed by it and many websites shut down.
Any "out there" ideas on where discovery shifts?
i.e., I built something cool, I do a Show HN, but how do other people find it in the future?
Ya, I'm in a similar boat (https://shepherd.com). Despite sky-high engagement stats, we lost 70% of our traffic from Google. Luckily, we have a strong brand, a growing community, and get decent traffic directly (and from other search engines).
We are surviving, but we've changed our entire focus as the web we know is a dead man walking. AI bots are the new frontend for the web, and I am curious about what the web will look like in 2 to 10 years. I hope the AI companies start paying to access the data as they answer queries or construct dynamic frontends (but I doubt it).
I have many friends who ran great indie websites, and it has been sad to see that 90% of them are now frozen or closed.
I expect to lose a lot of information websites, especially when the outcome of a long research is a few bullet points (such as product/place recommendations). Once tech companies feel the need to monetise LLMs, all bets are off.
I am curious what it looks like when you need a good product review in two or three years. Is YouTube the only trustworthy source by real people? For most products, the web is just going to be Astroturfed Reddit posts and Forbes AI-written junk that didn't even have the product to test.
I'm hoping paid MCP data sets might get there, then I could make my data available there, and hopefully make a $1 to $4 per thousand requests to the data set. If that replaced the loss of Google traffic, that would be amazing.
I'd love for 25% of my AI subscription to go toward that each month, i.e., I can pull "a list of all science fiction books the NYT recommended in the 1950s" and it gives NYT a few cents to go through their data...
