Shout out to all the PB users doing the hard work of identifying and notifying people of AI books, book covers, posts, comments. We see you! I will shout out LaDonnaQ putting in the work this week 🫶 Feel free to drop your favorite PB user, booktuber, booktok account etc., who hasn't given up on getting the word out on grifters!

And honestly, I applaud AI users who at least own it--it's the audacity of trying to hide AI use that is causing the paranoia and false accusations. I'm sure there's an audience of people who don't care about reading produced content if it scratches an itch for them. And the rest of us can make an informed decision on whether or not we want to waste time reading something the writer could not even be bothered to take time writing.

Is there a way to tag (or block!!) authors/books who openly admit to using AI in their process?

Hi everyone, we're considering making quite a big change to Pagebound and want to get the community's opinion - please leave your feedback here!

We have debated for a long while the merits of upvotes/downvotes vs a pure "like" system. We deeply believe in community moderation and community curation, and felt that an upvote/downvote system would provide the tooling for such community moderation.

In practice, we've also seen a lot of downsides with this system. While there's no guidance for how to use downvotes, many people use it as a "disagree" button which can make people with unpopular opinions feel unwelcome to share their opinion (for example, if you share that you dislike a beloved character, you may receive downvotes).

Moving to a "likes" only system would hopefully foster an environment where opinions are discussed rather than silently judged, and people are less anxious to engage in the forums.

In the past there have been some very strong opinions both for and against downvotes - let us know what you think below

Hi all, I'm doing a bunch of quality of life improvements right now and wanted to let you know ahead of the next founder announcement that some feed changes just went live. In an effort to make your feed more interesting and include content you can actually interact with, the following changes were just added:

When you mute a book from your feed, it will also mute comments & posts created by people you follow for that book

You will not see spoiler book posts from people you follow if that book is not in your library

You will not see comments made on book posts from people you follow if that book is not in your library

Hopefully this makes your scrolling more relevant to you! You can always see every post and comment from someone you follow in their book journey (when you click on a book, tap on "Activity from people you follow" and click the map icon next to someone's username)

Lucy and I were going through the Roadmap today (for those that don't know, we have a public roadmap to show what we're working on - you can find it in the "more" menu on the app in the top left of the navbar, or linked in the footer on web) and realized we've had a few requests for quarter star ratings. We said we'd let the community weigh in and make a decision, but the feedback thus far has been split. So, we're opening up the convo now!

Should Pagebound have .25 star ratings?

Pros: You can get granular with your ratings, you decide if you want to use the quarter star system or not (if you don't like them, you can continue to use half stars), many folks have personal rating systems that involve quarter stars

Cons: Since we have sub-ratings on PB, there is additional cognitive load to rating things like plot and quality with quarter stars (we think only having quarter stars for overall rating would be confusing and look like a bug). It could potentially discourage people from adding sub ratings if they feel paralyzed by the granularity

Very curious to hear what you all think!

Hey all! Thank you to everyone reading Jester. I started writing Jester in 2022 while in Florence, Italy. My grandmother had passed away at the beginning of the summer and then my best friend on the day I was let go from a job. I started writing the next day and never stopped.

The seed idea for Jester was planted while I was in college minoring in theater at UC Berkeley. When we studied King Lear, I encountered the Fool and became fascinated by his role. As King Lear goes blind, all the royals vie for power, and the Fool becomes a loyal confidante. This idea that a non-royal could influence the most powerful person in the realm stuck in my mind. Then, for about a decade, it rattled around, asking me to tell its tale.

I felt that the role of the Fool had been reduced in our zeitgeist to a trope and an archetype. But who is the man behind the archetype? Because after all, behind every player, is a person. Then I packaged it in a more epic fantasy outfit, and of course, took some liberties.

And alas, 12 drafts, rounds of feedback, and 3.5 years later, we have Jester.

I hope you enjoy the read! As an indie author, I'm here for conversation and thoughts, and most of all, thank you for supporting creatives!!

First of all, I would like to say that even tho I’m a huge Taylor Swift fan I’m not a so called “stan” because I do have better things to do rather than fight people on the internet and let Swift know that I didn’t like her re-recording of 1989 (I did like it btw).

I find Stan culture completely stupid and ridiculous, a total waste of time, I also have noticed that this things mostly take place in the US rather than in other countries, I’m not saying that it’s no happening in Europe, what I’m saying is that US Americans are louder.

This leads me to my next point and something the author mentioned, the fact that people in the US like to demand artist and celebrities overall o speak on social and political matters. This is something that, as an outsider, I’ve always found extremely weird and with all due respect, dumb. What do you think it will happen is Beyoncé decides to speak on a political matter? What would you think that would do? Celebrities do not hold the kind of power to change the world and stop wars, but I’ve seen a lot of people, not only in the US that think they do?. This is my opinion as an outside who doesn’t give a flying fuck about celebrities opinions on politics, because as comedian Ricky Gervais once said “celebrities don’t anything about the real world”.

Hi everyone, we have some community updates to share. Pagebound has grown significantly since the app launched in October, and to support this larger group we're revamping our Quest creation and community recognition programs.

We have decided to sunset the Top Contributor program. We started the program in the early days of Pagebound to recognize active community members and help build the culture. TC's created Quests, welcomed new users, answered questions, and helped us behind the scenes with beta testing, user interviews, and feedback. We are so grateful to the 80+ TC's who were crucial in helping shape the platform & culture as we built the v1 of so many features.

To make Quest creation and community recognition more democratic and community-oriented, we will have two paths for Quest creation:

• We will continue the community-voted List initiative, where each quarter Royalty members nominate Lists to be turned into Quests, and the entire PB community votes on the nominated lists. We will have 3 winners per quarter for a total of 12 list-to-quests a year.
• We will start a new program, community-voted Member of the Month (exact language TBD). Each month starting in the Fall, the entire PB community can nominate a user they believe embodies PB values. The user with the most nominations will be awarded a badge and the ability to create a Quest.

We will have more details on this new program when voting nears :)

Editing to add: Former members of the Top Contributor program who had Quests in-progress will be able to release those Quests. We have not put a time limit on this since curating a Quest takes a ton of work, and many hours have already been invested in these Quests. You'll continue to see some final Quests created by former TCs be released over the next months.

App + Product Updates The Discover People section got an upgrade: at the top, you'll see a Featured My Taste book that rotates daily, similar to the Featured Emoji. We highlight active users with that book in their My Taste section

We also fixed some small edge-case bugs related to progress updates + tracking. Reminder: you need to track your progress to see daily pages/minutes updated in your stats! So if you start & finish a book in the same day, you'll need to track progress still to see that graph updated (this is because there are some folks who don't track daily, and if we auto-tracked, stats would look very incorrect).

Thank you everyone for keeping this community thriving, PB wouldn't be what it is today without everyone's support & engagement. We can't wait to recognize new community members with these new initiatives, and are so excited to see what Quests y'all cook up. And of course, a special thank you to our Top Contributors who invested so much of their free time, love, and energy into this community. A round of applause for the (retired) TCs 👏👏👏

Happy Reading, Jennifer + Lucy 💜💙

I want to say this respectfully because this isn’t coming from a place of hate or opposition to representation at all. This is coming from someone who is heterodemisexual (part of LGBTQIA+) and deeply values representation and inclusivity in reading spaces. (Adding on, I am neither white nor form any white dominant country)

That being said, sometimes I feel like inclusivity within the Pagebound community isn’t always extended equally to straight readers.

I’ve noticed that when straight readers ask specifically for heterosexual romance recommendations or say they mainly enjoy heterosexual stories, the responses can sometimes feel subtly judgmental, with comments about needing to “diversify” their taste. While encouraging diverse reading is great, I don’t think anyone should feel judged for the stories they connect with. Just like queer readers shouldn’t have to justify wanting queer stories, straight readers shouldn’t have to justify enjoying heterosexual romance either.

I also don’t think the recent sponsored quest deserved this much backlash. Yes, it may not have had much representation, but it was still just one sponsored quest in an app that already does a lot for diverse representation overall. A quest isn’t automatically bad just because someone can’t personally relate to it — if it doesn’t represent you, it may represent someone else.

So my question is: is this what equality and inclusivity are supposed to look like, or should it go both ways? I’d genuinely like to hear other perspectives because I want to understand how everyone thinks about this.