As an addition to the current system of deriving recommendations from my own past reading, I would like to see explicit recommendations by people (including authors) I follow. I envision a future StoryGraph where recommendation tools allow me to toggle which kind of recommendations I want to see at the moment.
This could be developed in a few different ways:
- Easy way 1 - just use the ratings. Blah.
- Easy way 2 - a simple checkbox to "recommend this book".
- Cooler but more complex way: a dialog to recommend a book that includes tagging, so I could recommend a book with [tag1], [tag2]... When I follow someone, I would see these recommendations with the tags and the person's name - "Recommended by Joe Johnson for [tag1], [tag2]".
I think people would love to be able to recommend certain books, beyond just rating them. I may rate many books highly but would probably have a shorter curated list of books I think other people should read and would want to tag them to show why.
I love The StoryGraph, but I have to admit that I was turned off at first glance by the idea of categorizing and books by 'mood', and by deriving recommendations from books I've already read. I'm sure you've heard objections to this before (filter bubbles, etc.). For my part, I value the chance to discover random things in a library (or a record store) just by walking past them and taking interest, and to find out what people I find interesting think others should read.
Hello! Thank you for this suggestion! A few points:
The recommendations are mainly based on your responses to your reading preferences survey, not your past reading. We specifically did it this way to allow the user more granularity of control and to make it easier to update your preferences on a whim to find your next perfect read. The best recommendations are received when you fill out the topics/themes/tropes free-text box. It's not the easiest interface and we've got ideas to make getting high quality recommendations easier, but for now it's the way and we've got a link to some guidelines on the form page to help you in filling it out.
We will definitely have a way for users (which will include author accounts) to recommend books to one another in-app. We're not sure of the exact mechanisms via which we'll do that, but it's definitely something we'll offer!
We'll also have a way for people to share their curated lists (custom tags) on their profile coming soon!