Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
201 comments
·March 2, 2025kqr
What are your plans for the longevity of this? How are you ensuring there are enough funds and time to go around for maintenance? What are your contingency plans for when you realise there is indeed not enough funds and time to maintain it? These are questions I'd like answered before I commit!
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.
magicalhippo
> 10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars)
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.
kqr
I think one of the most robust rating systems I've worked with is based on comparisons, i.e. "did you like this more or less than X". This is more computationally intensive, but it can be made to work even with intransitive and unreliable judgments.
kmfrk
Goodfilms (goodfil.ms), rest in peace, had a great two-rating system with Quality and Rewatchability, because the latter turned out to be a really useful metric.
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:
SamBam
How does one use an average Rewatchability score to determine whether one should watch a movie?
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.
hiAndrewQuinn
To present an opposite viewpoint, I try to only engage with media I suspect future me will be able to revisit and pull enjoyment out of at least once. I rarely actually do so, but I've found it to be a remarkably effective quality filter.
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.
baby
I feel like a movie can be a good time, but I wouldn't rewatch it.
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.
vasanthk1125
I'm curious—what would you like to do with the API?
kmfrk
Ironically, mainly to check for irregular voting patterns like brigading.
Not dissimilar to what Steam implemented, which is basically Bollinger bands for ratings.
nerdponx
No, and that's why Netflix switched to thumbs up/down instead of 5 stars.
jfengel
And they mostly ignore that. They have access to what you actually watch, rather than what you say you like. They know what you start, what you finish, and how quickly you jump on a new one.
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.
watwut
And result is stupid. It is pretty much impossible to discover something new on Netflix. It puts you into a quick box and no matter how much I try to find a comedy, I can't because it decided the same crime shows are my thing.
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.
stevage
Yeah and I hate this scheme. Facebook keeps showing me clips that I do not want to watch and yet fined myself drawn to watching like some compulsive behaviour. Urgh.
skeeter2020
It's debatable this was the motivation for Netflix. More stars ==> more nuanced ==> more qualitative reviews ==> much more effort and time to decide if you should consume. Netflix is long(er) form TicTok and wants to optimize for continued consumption without friction. I wouldn't be surprised if they drop ratings all together and only offer a personalized AI curator stream. They could do this just based on viewing time and engagement and avoid even the minor disruption of "up/down". Don't make the sheep think.
vasanthk1125
They switched because it took more effort from users to rate on a 5 vs just saying good or bad. Because Netflix is a streaming service, casual users don't want to put in that much effort when they're chilling. Tracking is fundamentally different, where you go in with the expectation of organizing your library.
lostmsu
Last time I saw a movie there there was "super thumbs up" in addition to normal one.
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.
latexr
Agreed in general that 10 and even 5 is too much, and that 4 is a good compromise. Though personally I prefer thumbs up and thumbs down, plus a separate starring option. The first two signify “would I recommend this to anyone else” while the latter means “this has something interesting I’d like to revisit at a later date”. Something losing its star rating is par for the course, but the recommendation status is less likely to change (though it can happen). And yes, it is possible to give something a thumbs down and favourite it, e.g. when you don’t think something is particularly good or competent but it still had something which you recognise as meaningful to yourself specifically.
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.
stevage
I informally often use a -1 to 2 scale. Bad, fine, good, great.
The difference between 1 and 2 on a 5 point scale is not useful.
d1sxeyes
This is a great scale to use when you’ve got a group of people because it’s easy to teach without needing to do calibration: -1 is bad, not meeting expectations, 0 is “not good, but meets expectations”, 1 is “good, better than expectations” and 2 is outstanding.
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)
vasanthk1125
It just feels satisfying to me—organizing my library neatly by rating, based on how much I like each book. A four-level system just doesn’t have the same impact. Personal preference, I guess.
oneeyedpigeon
Just ranking everything in order is the ideal rating system. And it's easy to convert to whatever poorly-chosen system someone else wants you to use. It does mean the scores for your first few ratings will fluctuate quite a bit, though!
ijustlovemath
If you added half stars and stuck to a 5-star system, there's less user surprise for functionally the same thing.
vasanthk1125
I did go back and forth on this. I just like 10 stars better. IMDB, MAL, Mangadex all have 10 stars. So it's not really uncommon. But yeah, if a lot of people feel 5 is enough, we'll just return it back to the 5 star system.
7bit
I would guess that with experience and age preferences change. What's the point of a 10 star rating system if you have a 10 star rated book that you wouldn't rate the same after being ten years older?
qznc
Rating books on an absolute scale makes little sense to me.
The actual questions is: Whom can you recommend this book? Even mediocre books can be very useful for the right people.
gniv
Having worked on a rating system, I think 10 levels are useful (or 5 levels with half-stars). You can create better averages/recs using 10 levels, since ratings of 0 or 10, which are often spammy, can be down-weighed.
magicalhippo
I can absolutely understand that it makes sense to have a much more fine-grained average, but personally I struggle to give meaningful ratings beyond the four I mentioned.
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.
magicalhippo
I was interrupted, so when I picked up my brain continued with movie recommendation mode, I watch more movies than read books, but the binary multi-dimensional rating could of course be applied to books as well.
jay_kyburz
I once had an interesting conversation with my mother in law who was telling us about how much thought and effort she puts into scoring shows on IMDB. She was shocked to learn that I want my opinion to have more impact, so If I like a show I give 10 and if I didn't it gets 1.
gniv
Yes, but sadly a 10 is often used by fans of a lead actor to pump the ratings, and a 0/1 is used by the moral police as a protest vote.
stock_toaster
I typically like 7 point scales (like this[1] post from jgc outlines), but your classification also seems pretty good.
sega_sai
I don't mind a goodreads alternative, but regarding the UI from 2005, I am not sure I care. It works and people are used to it. I am not a supporter of "let's try build a new interface using shiny new technology" for the sake of new.
Freak_NL
A dated UI is fine by me, but at no point did the current placement of the search field make any sense for the average user. It is de-emphasised, hidden almost below the fold, as if searching for reviews of a particular title wasn't the thing most visitors come there for.
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.
lkbm
I don't mind where the search is. I do mind that the drop-down results can't be opened in new tabs—they are links, so you can choose "open in new tab", but they're links to "#", so you end up opening the current page in a new tab.
It's just a bunch of basic usability problems like that that they've never bothered addressing.
jay_kyburz
The search bar is only weird on the home page, which I don't imagine is visited very much. I bet most people jump to a books page from a browser or phone search.
jordanb
Arguably 2005 was a high water mark for UIs. That was when people were still focused on "human interface design" and hadn't adopted the A/B "revealed preference" nonsense.
actinium226
I find the Goodreads UI clunky. To note down my start/end dates for a book I have to have some activity on it, and then I can edit those dates.
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.
mtndew4brkfst
I care most about perf/responsiveness as I navigate the site. GR was tolerable on this metric while I still used it, StoryGraph (for understandable reasons) is abysmally slow somehow.
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.
vasanthk1125
That's totally okay. If it works for you, keep using it by all means. The point of an alternative is to serve those who do have a problem and are frustrated with the status quo.
frankfrank13
Agreed I really don't mind the interface, if anything, I hate the new stuff they've aded
Xelbair
for me it is the opposite - i actually prefer older UI.
Less optimized for farming my attention and ads, more optimized for me discovering things, and not being shoehorned into choices.
ch4s3
I view it as a positive. It's easy to find things and obvious which parts are interactive.
Meleagris
I was looking into this space the other day, and the number of options has been growing. By my record there is:
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.
the_biot
This has long been considered one of Goodreads' big advantages: its massive publication database, ISBN and all. But recently Anna's Archive has been making quite a bit of noise about their considerable ISBN database:
https://annas-archive.org/blog/
This may well be a great opportunity to seed a Goodreads alternative.
vasanthk1125
I’ve always hoped that once we reach Goodreads scale, we’d be able to release database dumps like VNDB (https://vndb.org/d14) and Lichess (https://database.lichess.org/)
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.
ssz
My personal project, https://rate.house, is kinda like goodreads but for all types of media.
moritzruth
In case you don't know, there is also BookBrainz: https://bookbrainz.org/
npunt
If you want the best UX for tracking and easiest/fastest Goodreads importer try https://margins.app (disclosure: I'm the designer)
noveltyaccount
Where are you sourcing book metadata?
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...
ForTheKidz
I just assume all reviews are lying unless I know the reviewer or have validated their past reviews. I don't know why these sites don't lean into the social angle and weight reviews by social-graph distance. This certainly doesn't mean you have to HIDE the public reviews by unknown people.... just give an incentive to give input at what sort of reviews you want.
Hrun0
> I don't know why these sites don't lean into the social angle and weight reviews by social-graph distance.
Goodreads does that though. Reviews from friends and people you follow are shown first
ForTheKidz
Ah, interesting, apologies for the accidental goodreads slander. I moved on to storygraph a while ago and haven't looked back.
Freak_NL
Doesn't that require the user to curate a friends list of people with comparable tastes? I've never met someone who has my exact (eclectic and multilingual) taste in books.
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.
ForTheKidz
Presumably you'd agree with a review and then follow someone.
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.
lukev
Yeah, reviews are inherently social. I’m waiting for someone to build a review platform on top of ATProto (bluesky).
vasanthk1125
We'll definitely implement automatic review bombing protection. I'm thinking something like Steam does.
chilipepperhott
How does this compare to https://www.thestorygraph.com/ ?
vasanthk1125
StoryGraph has made it pretty clear they don’t want to be more social—you have to go into your settings and explicitly turn on friends and followers.
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.
latexr
That was a pretty good endorsement of StoryGraph. I bet a number of people just read your description and thought “yes, that is exactly what I’m looking for”. Of course, it also means you did a good job of promoting your own service, since it’ll attract people who want the opposite.
crossroadsguy
I just had an account there. It might still be active. The way you have explained StoryGraph, it seems I must spend some more time checking it out. Seems really what I might be looking for.
sethherr
Came here to say this - the Story Graph is fantastic and highly recommended.
jfengel
They haven't yet made me any good recommendations. I'm still giving it data, if for no other reason than to track my reading. I know that book recommendation is hard. But I do think I got better suggestions from Goodreads.
AnonC
I’m certainly not the target for this. The following is going to sound harsh, but bear with me. Two things I really dislike about this, from what I look for generally from websites and services:
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.
jwe
I had to check if Help & Support is indeed linked to Discord and sadly it is. For me this is an instant turnoff. If there is no documentation but rather I am expeced to scout chat logs, I won't even start to use it. (I realize that this is a bit of a meme but it is true for me)
vasanthk1125
1. No, it just means completely free. And the website’s not going anywhere unless I die or something. I'll look into making this clearer.
2. Noted. We'll put up a proper email address. I just figured Discord would be faster.
crossroadsguy
My personal quick nitpick of a feedback would be
- 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.
vasanthk1125
Tech Stack
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 + CDNcyberpunk
What happened with cockroach? :)
_huayra_
They switched to a non-free license about 6 months ago [0]. This is not just the usual BSL terms of "do not compete with our hosted offering, but use it in your own product without issue", but they mandate telemetry from the free version.
Oxide 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...
osm3000
I am curious too
mmanfrin
Does Phoenix have auth? Any reason you chose supa over phoenix? And do you store user info (reviews+stuff) in phoenix and just reference it with the supa uuids or do you store user generated info on their own in supa?
vasanthk1125
Phoenix doesn’t have built-in auth, and setting it up with Guardian (the JWT library for Elixir) took too much time. Since we were already using Supabase for Postgres, we decided to go with its auth to move faster. Supabase provides a UUID after authentication, which we then use throughout the rest of the database.
saltcod
Why Elixir & Phoenix and Next.js?
BozeWolf
Why do you use supabase and not just postgres?
Do you use supabase’s api interface to do the queries? Or do you use supabase for other features?
vasanthk1125
When I first started working on the website nine months ago, I didn’t even know what Postgres was, so going with an easier option made sense. Right now, we also use Supabase for auth and emails.
For queries, we don’t use Supabase’s API interface—we interact with Postgres directly through our backend
BozeWolf
Thanks for your answer. Interesting take that you did not know about postgres, but chose an api for storage instead. I would have done the opposite.
SpaghettiCthulu
Well, they use Supabase for auth. Perhaps there's other integration there.
julienmarie
Why Next.js and not Liveview?
Little note: It seems the search is only by book title, not by author and not resilient to typos.
vasanthk1125
LiveView just has fewer libraries. For example, we use a rich-text editor called TipTap, and I’m not sure there’s anything similar for LV.
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
untangle
Nice. I would love to import the metadata from my Calibre Library. Calibre is great, but it is ancient and its evolution is glacial.
philistine
The landing page is mostly filled with sci-fi. I know it's what's popular on the site and what's reviewed recently but it's sending the wrong message that the site is exclusively for sci-fi. Most readers don't read sci-fi, and readers who read sci-fi tend to mostly read sci-fi, so the average reader would think the site is not for them.
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.
mattbaker
You might need to meet more women
rendleflag
“Women don’t read sci-fi”?
philistine
Sci-fi and Fantasy *together* account for 15% of the sales, and the majority of buyers are female.
amanaplanacanal
I think most people looking for an alternative to Goodreads are using Storygraph.
okucu
I found the UI of story graph unusable, like among the worst I had ever seen. I remember having to google how to see books I've already read. Using hardcover.app now, whose only issue is that the performance is really bad
phist_mcgee
Storygraph is brilliant, but it really needs some UX love for things like viewing your book piles (read, to-read, dnf) etc.
It's also quite slow, but I suspect that's just part of it being a smaller site.
albinn
Indeed what I've been using, since I learned that Goodreads was owned by Amazon
Since 2005, Goodreads has been the default book tracking site, connecting millions of readers. But let’s be real—it’s barely changed in 20 years. It’s the same site it was, just with more ads.
So I built Kaguya, a modern alternative, over the past 9 months.What’s live:
Would love feedback. What do you think?