I've yet to find an algorithm for any other medium that suggested something I like from lucky hits or blatantly obvious the next in a series rather than consistently predict things I even find tolerable. I don't it's my weird taste as much as when it's relying on user ratings, how people rate will be wildly inconsistent - ex. I can say my 5 stars are much harder to earn than some of my friends who say I really liked it I'm going straight to that, vs. it having to be a favorite book of the year for them.

Same here – also, this rating behaviour differs across media. E.g. rating my music is usually pretty fine grained whereas store ratings receive 5 stars or nothing at all.

P.S.: Here's some info on itch.io's rating system. It's pretty transparent and directly changes suggestions by similar raters.

P.P.S.: Congrats to your first comment.

I play some jigsaw puzzle game on Facebook. After each one, they ask for a 1-5 star rating, and I always give 3 stars unless I'm really pissed off, which is rare. 3 because I have no goddamned sense of what to rate a puzzle.

Pretty sure I'm not all that regulated when judging other things, too.

Another of the problems with building an alternative for a dominant but poor-value website/company is that if you start getting traction, the dominant company will buy you out or change their product so as to suffocate yours.

If StoryGraph starts making serious gains, Amazon will probably buy them out. Which is fine for the founders, but doesn't solve the problem for the general public.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. So many of the promises of the Internet have come false.

I use Goodreads to help keep me on track reading comics I'm planning on binding, and so I have a record of what I've read and a general sense of how I liked it. It's very satisfying to see a visual list of what I've read over the course of a year, and "gamifying" my reading (via a yearly reading tally/goal) has helped inspire me to read more. That's everything I use it for, and it's extremely helpful for those things. I sometimes get notified that someone else has liked my reviews of something, which baffles me occasionally, because they're very much written to just remind myself of how I felt about a book, usually with very little detail.