Today’s question: Members who have your books. Do you ever look at this feature? Do you use it to make LT friends, or compare notes? There are three tabs- weighted, raw, and recent. “Weighted,” which means “weighted by book obscurity and library size” is probably the least self-explanatory of the three, whereas “raw” and “recent” are more so. Do you get any kind of use out of this feature?
I never look at the raw or recent; raw is full of extremely large libraries and recent is full of small ones that just joined. The weighted one is most likely to show me a library that I think is also similar, but still the focus of sharing tends to be so much on my fiction that I never find someone and think, “Wow, you like all the same weird stuff as me.” But many of the libraries on the list have been the same for a while, so I’ve browsed and “know” them, and tend to find lesser-known classics there that I have missed in my travels. I never use the feature to make LT friends, because my only LT friends are people I really know, and I still think of members with your books as the real social aspect of LT—it’s about connections between books, rather than between people.
I have the same problem with raw- the other libraries are just so big, that of course we’ll have stuff in common- but it’s just not that useful.
I agree that LT is all about “connections between books, rather than between people.” I’ve always thought of LT as a handy way to keep track of my library – don’t really use it for “social networking.” But browsing all the different libraries is certainly lots of fun.
I like the weighted tab too- it shows other people with my idiosyncracies :-)
I also prefer the weighted, it’s especially interesting when your library resembles another persons that is about the same size.