Hi everyone, I've been working on this extension for more than the one weekend I promised myself, and hope there are some people that find it useful :)
I've personally been using this in my browser while I've been building it and have definitely enjoyed having it around.
One of my favorite things about HN are the book recommendations you can find from other users, especially in those long "Ask HN: What are you reading" threads. I've found some of my favorite books by going through those kinds of threads. At the same time, while I am a Goodreads user, I almost never look at the user reviews at the bottom of Goodreads because I find they do such a bad job at selling me on why I should read a certain book. Often, they're just beat by beat summaries of what occurs in a book and don't say anything about why you might want to read it. Whereas, I think the opposite is true on HN. When people recommend books here it's, in my experience, brief and much more meaningful, and seeing a single person on HN saying: "this is my favorite book ever" + child comments that say the same thing, makes me much more interested in reading a book than almost anything else could. So, I wanted to bring that experience to Goodreads and that is why I decided to build this.
It's far from perfect, and will display comments that aren't relevant just as soon as it will not display enough comments. However, after quite a bit of tweaking, I think the extension is at the point where it's pretty useful - even with these issues.
I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have.
Thanks!
3 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] threadI've personally been using this in my browser while I've been building it and have definitely enjoyed having it around.
One of my favorite things about HN are the book recommendations you can find from other users, especially in those long "Ask HN: What are you reading" threads. I've found some of my favorite books by going through those kinds of threads. At the same time, while I am a Goodreads user, I almost never look at the user reviews at the bottom of Goodreads because I find they do such a bad job at selling me on why I should read a certain book. Often, they're just beat by beat summaries of what occurs in a book and don't say anything about why you might want to read it. Whereas, I think the opposite is true on HN. When people recommend books here it's, in my experience, brief and much more meaningful, and seeing a single person on HN saying: "this is my favorite book ever" + child comments that say the same thing, makes me much more interested in reading a book than almost anything else could. So, I wanted to bring that experience to Goodreads and that is why I decided to build this.
It's far from perfect, and will display comments that aren't relevant just as soon as it will not display enough comments. However, after quite a bit of tweaking, I think the extension is at the point where it's pretty useful - even with these issues.
I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have. Thanks!
Maybe hn.algolia would break on too many queries, though...