Unsubscribing from Goodreads email notifications | Hacker News Reader

Unsubscribing from Goodreads email notifications

thenextweb.com

62 pointswilsonfiifi28 comments

I don't get why is this on the homepage. They clearly have a button to unsubscribe from all the emails. And it works. I found it in maybe two days after registering for an account and realizing that they send an email about everything. Never received an email from them since then.

Even so, that's a crappy reason to hate a company that could be solved in so many simple ways.

The author implies that it's sort of hidden at the end.

It's on the homepage because it is a somewhat humorous comment on the bad UX of putting the unsubscribe all at the end of pages of unsubscribe checkboxes.

I'm surprised you're clever enough to have found the button but are unable to figure out why this made it to HN's front page ...

Isn't it obvious to check how much of the checkmarks there is before you start unchecking them?

In order to do so, you have to scroll to the bottom of the page. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you'll notice that there's a "save settings" button, and without clicking on the bottom, you'll be unchecking them for nothing. And if you notice that button, you're going to notice "unsubscribe from all emails" link right below it.

I don't see that as being more crappy UX than the rest of the Goodreads design.

Clearly, it wasn't obvious the author of the article and, probably, to the people that are upvoting it.

Pointing out one part of a UI has bad UX doesn't imply that the author thinks the rest is better.

If there are about 50 possible actions to take on the page, and one of them is literally the last action, even after the 'save your settings' button, then that action is about as non-obvious as it can get while still being present in legible text. Flip it around - if you wanted an action to be obvious, would you put it there?

As a comparison, look at meetup.com, a similar endeavour in a lot of ways: their email notification screen[0] has a 'turn off' button before any of the individual checkboxes, which turns them all off (except password resets and the like).

[0] https://www.meetup.com/account/comm/

"I don't see that as being more crappy UX than the rest of the Goodreads design."

I've seen this mentioned a lot of times on various forums. GoodReads by design doesn't look as good as any other social service we use now. But I am curious, whether that can be something an incumbent service can work on.

Providing great design and with GoodReads functionality, would that work for the new service?

> Isn't it obvious to check [___ ____ __ ___ __________ etc...]

If you're asking this, in the context of a discussion about UI, the answer is almost always "no".

The article is a satire-piece.

I'm an avid reader, and I can say that Kindle, Goodreads, Google Books all fill the use case of finding new books to read, but is very lacking in the tracking department. I've had some small plans of making an app/site that just focuses on the tracking part, making and managing a list of books to read/already read with local ratings. I also want the ability to subscribe to an author or a book series and be notified of new releases.

I haven't been able to find a good service that does this in a good way. I have a prototype working pretty good right now, the only problem is that the book databases I use isn't that good sadly.

What book database do you use? I've been looking into this as well... but its' problematic getting book summaries from somewhere that isn't wikipedia.

I'm using the google books api, then indexing my results in a database for referencing etc. It's working pretty well so far.

You mean you want to make a clone of fictfact

Actually, I had no idea this site even existed, but yeah I guess I do. It seems to do what I want it to, and I'll probably use it actually.

I still think I could improve on the interface and make it more to my taste though, so I'll continue on with my project.

As for why you were downvoted, your post comes off as moderately hostile/negative and would probably have been received better had you put it differently.

You are correct about the downvoting should have just mentioned fictfact meets most of your requirements . Btw fictfact is limited to series only so if you like a particular author unless they release another book as part of series you won't be notified about it. I think the biggest problem is that series information is not part of the standard metadata for books so you can not get information from isbndb etc. And have to manually curate it. Amazon has added series metadata to its listings but they usually don't have short stories and where they belong in the series. So I would recommend giving the ability to add books to a series to users etc to your app or website. With fictfact as the number of books and series has increased the people maintaining it need crowdsourced help in adding new books and series.

> I also want the ability to subscribe to an author or a book series and be notified of new releases.

I also want this and am kind of surprised it doesn't exist (or if it does, I haven't seen it). "Following" certain authors on Kindle doesn't seem to have done anything useful, either.

You can have Goodreads do something like this, in the newsletters and other mail section you can check the 'send me the monthly new releases email', 'only send this to me if it includes an author I've read', and click the customize button and deselect all of the genres.

And then you end up with an email which has new releases by authors you've read before.

I generally have no use for most of what Goodreads does, but this combined with the ability to pull my Kindle purchases in automatically is pretty useful.

Have you come across LibraryThing before? From what you're looking for in terms of tracking, list management etc it should meet your needs. The only bit i'm not sure about is the ability to subscribe to new releases by an author author or in a series.

Just tried it out for a while right now. It seems to work reasonably well actually, but adding multiple books seems like a chore. Fictfact, as stated below seems to be better in this regard, and it appears you can also subsribe to authors/series there!

Have you looked at LibraryThing? https://www.librarything.com

While this is a practice that infuriates me in most cases, this article is quite hyperbolic if you take just a minute to look at the examples given.

Goodreads has a long list of checkboxes, ticked by default to send you an email in the case of an event, so it looks at first glance like they'll be bombarding you. But looking through the list of events, 90% of them are both significant (involving a deliberate action of a friend of yours on one of your account posts/reviews/&c.) and relatively infrequent (extremely infrequent in the case of my own account, which I would guess actually has above average activity in the context of all Goodreads users).

They should untick a few of them by default - e.g. the newsletters. However most of them make sense (unless you're of the opinion that all services should default to opt-out on all notification emails absolutely).

Also - anyone not reading the entire 100% of the article is going to miss Goodreads' redeeming feature at the very end.

I'm glad to see that the Goodreads comments aren't agreeing that Goodreads sucks. I'm not that kind of reader, but my wife wrote her first novel about Bulgokov's writing of Master and Margarita, and it's getting good reviews on Goodreads (she was on NPR a couple of weeks back). Googling her book is actually how I found Goodreads.

For the interested: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31243075-mikhail-and-mar...

If there isn't an unsubscribe button in the email I just mark it as spam or autodirect to a "I'm really bored" folder.

Even meetup.com has the same problem, abit to a lesser extend.

Myself, instead of unsubscribing, I filter all emails. I stop receiving them, and they still have to pay for the email they send to me. It works every single time and I don't have to play any games like the ones in this article.

There are no games. You just scroll to the bottom of one URL[0] and click on one label. This article is bullshit.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/user/edit

It's bad UX though; the button could have been at the top.

That's actually the punchline of the article, which you missed. It's bad UX to put the button at the bottom and causes people to go through the checkboxes unnecessarily.

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