Confused: What's the best way to find people who both have similar books to me and have given similar ratings as me?

Hi. I'm a bit confused right now. I imported my Goodreads library here, so right now, all my read and to-read books are in.

I'm an odd reader who gave 1-2 star ratings to a lot of popular books that don't click with me. e.g. A popular recommendation for those who liked "Children of Time" is "A Fire Upon the Deep." But for me, CoT was a 5-star read while aFUtD was a 1-star read that I couldn't finish.

I want to search up people with similar taste: those who have both read the books I have AND given them similar ratings to me. That way, I can check what else they like and dislike and so, hopefully find books tailored to my preference.

Is there a way for me to do what I want? The closest feature to it that I see is "Find similar libraries" function but I think that ignores the ratings I give, right?

Sorry for the question; I'm new to the site and while it looks exciting, I'm a bit overwhelmed!

Yep, LibraryThing ignores ratings - it assumes that if you have the book, you have a connection to it.

One way to make the system work better for you is to make specific collections - one for the books you want to be used for recommendations and one for all the books you really do not want to (make sure ALL your other collections are marked not to be used for recommendations).

However - keep in mind that no matter what you do, Vinge will come up - because most people have both books in their libraries...

Ah, too bad there isn't a way to connect over similar ratings too :(

But thank you, I hadn't realized I could mark collections to not be used for recommendations; that should definitely help!

It's too bad Tim doesn't let you scrape "librarything.com/work/*/members", or you could use that data to track down like-minded raters on your own.

You've already done the best step - importing all of your library. I believe the recommendation algorithms have allowances for popularity so by including books that fewer people own, you're more likely to receive recommendations that match your tastes.

Sadly as above Tim (site owner/developer) doesn't think recommendations will work at the level of granularity we'd like. the pool of people with high CoT/low FuthD is very small, so hard to generate useful statistics. Few books are rated in any manner, and in some degree he's right, owning a book says more about what other sorts of books you may like than whether or not you liked that specific book.

But I think he's heavily biased from a non-fiction mindset, and that genre fiction readers are more likely to rate books, and that small differences in sub-genre/plot/writing style could appear and would be very interesting and useful. Sadly I don't get to influence developer time.

You could try bribing them. I bet they're highly bribable.