Goodreads is terrible for books – why can’t we all quit it?
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
The two big social media apps I use are HN and Youtube. (Reddit used to be up there but a lot less now because I don't get recommended anything good. They really upped their reliance on the "algorithm" so after I clicked a "drama" link once my recommendations got destroyed with trash.)
HN is mostly high value content but still it's not the most effective use of my time. Youtube is either very high value content or very low value content. No in between. Sometimes I find myself getting recommended garbage and I click into it and get mind trapped for a few minutes but catch myself and get myself out of it. I don't want to have to navigate these "dopamine traps" every time I want to watch an interesting lecture or video on a topic I actually care about.
edit: I even click in on my name to check if I've gotten any upvotes or responses. I understand it's all worthless but I still click in a semi autonomous way.
And one wrong click and you're inundated with garbage. Same for all social media really. At least hn doesn't have a per user "feed" (yet).
One thing I've noticed about goodreads is there are two distinct types of users. One type gives thoughtful reviews that are all text. The other type give shallow vapid reviews replete with emojis and memes and usually end with "didn't finish the book".
But it turns out that for more general search terms youtube will simply not show lots of high view count videos, and which ones specifically can change with each search. (It does always does show a large amount of music videos, Indian media, disturbingly repetitive gaming/meme stuff, children's videos, etc...)
So even a ranked list of which video has the most views apparently is algorithmic to some extent.
That would seem like a way to deliberately cream off the most algorithmically pushed videos!
I wonder what might be a good anti-algorithm indicator - maybe a mismatch between two metrics that normally correlate with highly pushed content. View count over time might be interesting. Big spikes might be bad sign indicating external push. Playlist inclusion might be good to pick up on some human curation. Some measurement of link sharing on other social sites might be helpful... like what google used to do. Sigh.
Ideally there would be such a facility to allow for the removal of at least one layer of algorithmic suggestions.
PageRank for videos is a neat idea though, maybe call it VideoRank?
youtube is for long-shot the best discovery(maybe tiktok) is not uncommon now that you get high quality videos for channel whith sigle video and dont show trash content from known creators,the new problem is maybe that the high quality content require high quality teams means more money and more pressure to monetize but youtube video quality is leagues ahead from what it was 10 years ago, now you have science, philosophy, history content than produce consistent research by various people content, such as Asianometry.
use instagram reel or twitter and most content is trash, the latter rquiring you to follow the correct people, thats virality. discovery is hard that why you use more netlfix than hbomax, tiktok than instagram
As well as with their parent Google. Did you know the minus sign is meaningless in the search now? Man, Google search is so useless now I'd actually pay a monthly fee (up to $10) for them to give me a bloody regex based search.
(Not affiliated with them except as a very happy customer.)
I am reminded of Pandora stations that eventually loop and play the same 15 songs over and over again. Same problem today in other systems, though.
Learn to recognize signals for slop. Slick well-produced video channels with multiple people working for them will tend to become slop even if they don't start that way; having a cameraman/producer/editor on payroll pressures a channel to perform well to pay for those people, so such channels will tend to pump out shallow content to keep revenue steady if not growing. As soon as a one-man channel hires a cameraman, that's usually a good time to tap out. Particularly if the host is chummy friends with the cameraman; the pressure to perform by compromising quality will be greater when the channel creator is paying his friends to help. This is why I had to stop watching NileBlue; as soon as he got a chummy cameraman his video quality took a steep nose dive with sensational gimmicks taking precedence over substance.
Right. I really wish there was some “average joe” filter. The noise/signal ratio would surely still be high, but a hell of a lot more manageable than the inauthentic and affiliate nonsense that gets gamed for the algorithm.
Obviously anecdotal but my favorite review videos all r ones by someone recording off their laptop, all with a noticeable noise floor. It’s unfortunate that the very well produced vids seem to be negatively correlated with quality of substance, so I’ll keep sticking with my annoying noise floor videos
When you go in "fresh", the world is your oyster for approximately three videos, maybe four, then the algorithm has completely made it useless. So, I either go through a link to a creator and see what they've been up to lately or I go to a fresh YT homepage and search for what I'm looking for. The first search is probably still heavily curated, but it seems to give me more interesting options. When I find a video I like, I go to the creators page and add the link to my home page.
I don't log in mainly for privacy reasons, but it also causes me to only be able to search my particular bubble, pretty much. Going in from the outside gives me much better results, at least before I've watched too many videos in a chain. I'm a patron on patreon for a few my favorite creators, which I generally swap around every now and then for those who have Patreon accounts. I don't think I've ever bought anything from a creator's sponsor. It weirds me out that randos on the internet are now expected to be commercial shills and personal brand curators as well as video creators.
So many times I remember to have seen a video about something and I just can't find it even with the right keywords. If I'm lucky I find it on...bing search filtered by videos.
I also find that keeping up with the news on the regular basis is a waste of time and it's mostly regurgitations of the same, but when I tried cutting it completely, I find that in a couple of months I am completely out of the loop and it takes quite some time to catch up.
This is not a useful example, but it's a funny one. I was out of the country and away from tech for 3 months and when I opened my door on returning to the US, the delivery guy was a teenager, and says "Man, you have so many good Pokemon in your yard!". I had NO idea what he was talking about and said "Oh, cool". Found out Pokemon Go was a thing a few weeks later.
A lot of the main subs you see on the homepage are not explicitly political subs, but they end up having almost nothing but political content (/r/whitepeopletwitter, /r/facepalm, /r/therewasanattempt) and Reddit seems to ignore me when I block subreddits. So, even though I WAS a reddit addict for 10 years, they changed the formula and now I'm just not hooked anymore. Thanks Reddit!
Half of the posts are "My friend said I should murder this guy but I said no, AITA?"
Reddit is so much nicer with all of the toxic crap filtered out.
Say, if I want to read grimdark fantasy novels, and I've already read all of Joe Abercrombie and Mark Larwence books and didn't like Glenn Cook, good luck getting anything else out of the algorithms. There's no discovery, just regurgitation of whatever has been blessed by the masses.
And that's when things aren't manipulated. Take any popular category and it's all gamified. Someone is manipulating the most recent book to the top of the "best of all times" list, even recent self published crap gets into the top recommendations for popular categories. It's all manipulated garbage and Amazon doesn't seem to have any interest in changing it since it gets them sells or Kindle Unlimited subscriptions for that self publisher.
I've fallen back on critics and awards to curate my read lists. It's not as specific, but looking back on what I've enjoyed reading most recently, almost all of them have been awarded a hugo award. So now I just go through the award winner lists and pick something that looks interesting. I recently discovered the Imperial Radch series this way and really enjoyed it.
Wonder how we could make it more effective. I’d love a keyword filter. Or an algorithm I can train myself to teach it what I like and don’t like. ChatGPT summaries of the comments to filter the wheat from the chaff would be helpful too.
Personally I'd love to put in the names of some American cult of personality figures - Musk, Trump, the Kardashians etc.
Ideally it would filter out all posts and comment trees on HN or reddit that are about these people and a handful of other topics. Even if it only worked on those two sites it would be a huge improvement to the internet for me.
I think you are conflating externally driven, top down algorithms, with users expressing their own preferences over what they see.
Further, no personal preferences means the site isn't expected to be tailored to you specifically, this promotes a certain sense of deference where people are exposed to lots of ideas, concepts, industries, experiences and viewpoints -- nobody is an "expert" here and on any particular day, there may be multiple things for you to weigh in on, or none, and that's ok. Along with fair, objective moderation, the discussions here are mostly well-behaved, non-partisan and civil, which all the sites you can personally customize fail to achieve.
I don't much care for the upvotes (nor the occasional down) but the responses are not always worthless. In fact a count of responses (in total or since last visit) would be more useful to me in the top right of the page where the vote count currently sits.
Someone might be correcting or refining what I've said in a way the I'll find useful, or someone could be asking for clarity on what I've said which, assuming I have time to respond back, might be useful to others too, or might highlight that I'm not as sure as I thought I was originally which again may help my understanding.
This isn't true elsewhere of course, HN is one of the few places online, other than private groups, where responses have a reasonable chance of being useful.
Is it though? Don't you think maybe the billion of social media users around the world are getting some value out of it? It's a pretty shallow take.
Does HN meet the definition of "social media"? Yes it does, but is it the same kind of social media as these others? I don't think so. I don't see many negatives of sites like HN. Even Reddit could be a nice experience if certain things were tweaked there (atrocious user interface, showing up/down votes next to posts, showing account age, probably a better algorithm etc)
I don't either -- HN is the same category as Reddit which is much worse to me.
>Over there most people use their real identities and it seems they take everything very personal as a result. Here people are just nicknames in a comment section
There are plenty of people taking things personally here, all the time, and if you stick around you'll notice that a good number of them either use their real names as a handle or have it in their profile. And there are "celebrities" here just like there are on Reddit, except here it's usually tied to some high-ranking position at a company. For instance, the CEO of Matrix has many comments under the username Arathorn in almost every single post about Matrix.
>I don't see many negatives of sites like HN
Tree-style nearly-endless commentary combined with an algorithmic ranking of "top" stories that may have a big payoff if I just press refresh one more time turns out to be way, way more addictive than "traditional" social media, at least for me. Twitter never hooked me, and I kicked Facebook a decade ago, but even after forcing myself to use a privacy frontend for Reddit and never, ever logging in, I'm still addicted. I spend hours a day scrolling, and resolve to quit, and then go back.
I do the same thing here. It's so bad that I consider HN and Reddit to be as addictive as video poker.
I feel if we include things like HN as social media then we need to include Newsgroups/BBS, Forums of the late 90s, etc. and literally every site online where a person can post a comment.
Perhaps technically they are all social media but to me when someone says 'social media' I think of the never ending feed of content that is manipulated to keep you coming back like a drug along with notifications about every "like" or comment or retweet (or whatever we call them now), etc.
- User-submitted content
- Individualized experience based on algorithmic curation, follows/subscriptions, or both
- Ability to directly interact with other users, whether publishing to some kind of profile or "wall" of theirs or sending direct messages
- Users have some kind of durable persona (at minimum a human-readable, memorable account name, but usually a multimedia profile of some sort)
Hacker News mostly has none of these things. A very small proportion of top-level content is user-created and there is algorithmic curation, but not individualized. This is really more of a newspaper without writers or editors. The stories come from other platforms instead and every reader's letter gets published automatically.
Reddit isn't social media, either. It's a discussion board. There has to be something that made MySpace and Facebook different from phpBB and Usenet or why'd we come up with a new word at all? People seem to be using "social media" as a general derogatory name for any potentially addictive, high-noise, low-signal time sink that encourages mindless consumption of undifferentiated "content" and creates bad incentives to creators of such content to abandon truth and artistic integrity in favor of flashy gimmicks and trend surfing.
But that describes virtually all of pop culture.
I don't understand what is missing? Old-school UI? Come on, this is not Twitter, you are not supposed to be hooked to it 24/7. I spend 10-15 minutes on this website once a month, I can live with old-school. Ratings not realistic? This is a joke compared to Amazon. There are authors on the website? All the better, I can connect with the author (actually sounds amazing to me!). Lack of content moderation, although I didn't encounter any serious issues myself, is a problem I agree with if this is the case.
Anyway, maybe the fact that there is no popular alternative speaks for itself. I know there are some alternatives but nothing as known as Goodreads as far as I can tell.
I don't want or need it to do more.
Their UI is fine. Their ratings are as good as any other ratings.
I would hate a “modern” Goodreads and am glad Amazon bought it and abandoned it rather than Meta who tried to make book readers live stream their reading or whatever stupid stuff they’d try.
I have found that I learn a lot about the books I've read from other reader's reviews, which I tend to read after I've read a book and not before.
The UI is adequate. Who cares?
The site tracks multiple literary awards: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/books.asp
The site tracks books by nominations and awards: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_top_noms.asp
The site tracks top book recommendations by literary critics: https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists.asp
And finally, most read books. https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_top_reads.asp (I hate that most sites don't allow me to sort not by rating, but by votes cast, or by review count)
Always frustrating to purchase a book, read the first page, and immediately realize that it really isn't my style.
The only downside is that it is a bit dated in its UI.
Here's my profile, if anyone wants to be book-nerd friends: https://www.librarything.com/profile/awesame
Why do people care about any social functions on it?
The data is terrible and badly governed. There was a recent thread here, I believe, about an author who couldn't get AI-written books out of her name because they simply won't correct their data.
Worse, those books were being sold on Amazon!
https://janefriedman.com/i-would-rather-see-my-books-pirated...
'Sealioning' is a form of trolling meant to exhaust the other debate participant with no intention of real discourse. [0]
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/sealioning-internet...
And the UI was always bloated and clunky.
IMO this is an insurmountable moat for any service that would try to challenge it.
https://booksliced.com/books/the-exact-ebook-market-shares-o...
The Goodreads integration into Kindle cannot be overstated.
But, you just have to approach it from different angles. Don't attempt to compete with Goodreads, but rather build something better that works in a new way around people's desires around books.
Goodreads is just a review database, easy to innovate around that barrier.
I don't use GoodReads' social aspect at all, but I do use it as a book database, and will continue to do so until they remove the ability to exfiltrate my data.
I read a lot, and used to use goodreads for this, and now I don't use anything for this. I have a messy little notebook where I write down books I want to read so I don't forget they exist.
I inconsistently cross them off as I read them, and all together it's enough to usually remember what I read and often remember how I felt about it. It turns out my reading life isn't improved by any more than this.
I like keeping a journal as I read and find that valuable. But goodreads isn't well suited for that and I never look back through it anyway. Writing it is useful, indexing it isn't.
IDK my reading isn't your reading but you might be surprised how little of the goodreads feature set is actually valuable if you stop using it.
Not much, all things considered. But I have a pretty bad memory, and it can be hard to remember which books by an author I've read, and which ones I haven't.
I guess I could just store all this in a spreadsheet, or email myself reviews, but this is convenient enough that I don't do that.
1. Keeping track of where I am in a series. Goodreads has a handy feature where you can see the list of books in a given series. I maintain a reading list with (way too many) different series and it has my next book in each one.
2. Remembering which books I've read. (Kind of related to #1.) More than once I've gotten more than a few pages into a book and realized, "hey I'm pretty sure I read this before".
Either of these would work in a notebook or spreadsheet but that would require changing my workflow (and "importing" a long list of books).
- I read a lot and so friends not-infrequently come do me for recommendations. Having rated a big chunk of the things I've read, I can sort by rating and scroll for things they'd like. Often I go "holy shit I forgot all about that one, but it's perfect for Bob."
- I'm always looking for the next thing to read, and it's really nice to be able to quickly scroll through my (long) 'want to read' list for something that piques my interest for the mood I'm in.
It would be awesome if it were federated with other libraries somehow, since I also use the NYPL.
After, oh, ten years, I'm likely to forget whether I even read a book or not. And unlikely to have a physical copy unless I really liked it. So "bookshelf" is a pretty flip and un-useful answer.
I recently came across it in a youtube video but haven't used it myself.
Edit: video I came across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PFFJlyiv28
Whenever a book references another book I may want to read later, or there is a HN comment recommending a book which sounds interesting, I'll add it to my "to-read" list. Then when I finish my current book, I can sort this list by average rating to decide where to go next.
The reviews are poor enough to just be a waste of time I regret looking at. I mostly read non-fiction history, science, health, politics and something I have only noticed recently is that so many Amazon and GR reviews are just political takes - using the review section to advance or attack some position instead of actually discussing the book. Pretty tiresome.
edit: I don't have a goodreads acct and don't fully remember what it is, but I think the value there is finding people who like books you like, especially less famous ones, and then finding what else is on their list.
I dive deep into a number of long-running series. Cosmere/Sanderverse, Star Wars, Dresden Files as examples. Once you step away from a series/topic for a bit, it's hard to walk back and see "What did I read? What's next?" - especially when you're doing it via (multiple) libraries.
GoodReads is the best I've found for tracking so far. I also have a private-notebook for some series - but goodreads is just easier. If you feel negative value in a feature (following authors/communities seems like line noise?) - just don't use That feature. I have ~300 books on my 'Read' shelf - That's valuable information moving forward I use when deciding What's Next.
It’s easier than keeping my own cloud doc and looking up titles and authors.
That’s it. I like a list of all books I’ve read and if I liked them. And I like a list of books I want to read.
I’m happy that I can see what my friends read, but that’s not a determining factor of using the site. And way less since no one I know uses facebook any more.
It speaks to the value of fediverse that so many services are becoming fedi-ized. Not just Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, blogs, 4chan, reddit, but even GoodReads.
Thank you for sharing this link!
I hear there are some issues with its licensing. They seem to use some sort of 'anti-capitalist' license which is non-OSI. But I think that its ok, we need to start experimenting again, and clearly the OSI model isn't working.
to be honest, I have not tried hard to use any of the social features. But hopefully soon I will try them and have more to say. But for now, all I need is the list of books I want to read, a way to track my progress, and also some light organization. This works great, and it's guilt-free compared to Goodreads!
I am especially excited that they have an import feature.
The site is built on outdated technological infrastructure, which made the cost of overhauling and updating it a challenge that was ultimately not worth it for the e-commerce giant, according to former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Meanwhile, limited manual content moderation and a lack of protective features allow users to engage in targeted harassment known as “review bombing” — behavior that has resulted in the cancellation of books and their authors.
... Former employees said Amazon seemed happy to mine Goodreads for its user-generated data and otherwise let it limp along with limited resources. In Amazon’s more than 20-year history, the company has made dozens of acquisitions, and it is not unusual for it to try to cheaply acquire properties in markets that it wants to dominate, only to let them languish. ...
Goodreads “hasn’t been all that well maintained, or updated, or kept up with what you would expect from social communities or apps in 2023,” said Jane Friedman, a publishing industry consultant. “It does feel like Amazon bought it and then abandoned it.”
I was only using it to keep track of what I was reading so it made sense for me to just use this app instead.
They are very reliable for these core functions, and quite unreliable for any other. when someone figures out how to disrupt them, Microsoft/Amazon will crush them or buy them.
This is why we have regulations against monopolies, but there are far bigger fish to fry these days.
So I just use it to track and the yearly reading challenge. I like seeing that achievement :)
There’s ZERO other activity from me on GoodReads. By no means it’s a social network for me.
Occasionally it's interesting to see what my friends are reading.
That's it.
I certainly have complaints about the site but I think the author's hyperbole here is a bit much.
And as for the ratings and reviews which the author seems hyper focused on - I've generally observed the opposite, ratings on pretty much everything are suspiciously high. I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the books on the platform have a rating above 3 / 5.
Of course, I like plenty of books with a lower average rating, but that does give me my first impression.
(It reminds me of when I was requesting a house on Airbnb and the owner writes "what's with the 4.9/5 rating you have? There's got to be a story about that." It turned out anything below a 5 set off his red flags.)
Where else was I supposed to go?
Same thing with Google. I really want to quit it, but when you plug the keywords into DDG and it doesn't seem to have a fucking clue what you're searching for, what's your next move?
Edit: I just checked, and Librarything has a scavenger hunt going on right now to celebrate their anniversary. The founders wrote the clues themselves. Each clue refers to a specific page on the site, and if you go to that page you get a point. They do this a few times a year. How adorable is that? The Goodreads equivalent would probably be an ad for a Kindle.
The interface is good, the plots provided are useful, I like their transparency on upcoming features, and the fact that the premium version is not needed and mostly a way to support them financially.
On the minus side, their search engine and recommendation system could be improved and it does not seem to be able to sort the books I want to read by most recommended.
I never look at whatever Goodreads recommends. The people I follow usually come across interesting books I would have never heard of. If they review a book, and it sounds interesting, I add it to the top of my list of things to read. This is a giant semi-sorted text file. If I feel the urge to read some book, and it's already in my list, I will put it to the top of the text file. A bit like a splay tree. I don't care that my stuff is not perfectly categorised and systematised because reading habits are not like that.
I pay no attention to the actual star rating of books on Goodreads. There are a lot of bad reviews on Goodreads. You usually know within 2 seconds whether a review will be worth reading. Sometimes I will filter books by lowest star. I often found the people I follow because I saw them write an intelligent, detailed, dissenting review of a book.
Many people love reading and cataloging their books and connecting with a few friends online, all earnestly.
I can't stand when websites pop up those near full-screen things like that asking me to subscribe or put my email in or something. I haven't even finished the article! I couldn't because you blocked it. I could click the X and finish reading, but lately I won't, I just hit Ctrl+W.
Has anybody seen the data behind those? Do they actually work? Given how often I see them used and how nearly every marketing site on the planet includes them (and generally marketing is a very data-driven field), I would think they must be effective, but it's just so counter-intuitive to me that interrupting somebody's flow would make them more likely to subscribe to you.
EDIT, but looks like LibraryThing, also mentioned here, does![2]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=ringworld&qid=DjSO9UZu2o
[1] https://www.worldswithoutend.com/searchwwe.asp?st=ringworld
I run a similar platform and google has basically broken the internet over the past five years with SEO. Wordpress garbage is everywhere. Oh well, the correction is coming but who knows when.
BTW, if you're into kpop check out kpopping.com for your kpop needs (Of course, there's a shitty wordpress that outranks us on every single* page -- here's a funny thread from some SEO guy about it https://twitter.com/paulk139/status/1550532282288508929 )
Finding a way to search Goodreads for top 100 sci-fi novels with certain tags shouldn't be an abject navigational nightmare or, in some cases, completely impossible.
There are plenty of examples: craiglist for classified ads, plentyoffish for dating (or at least used to), gandi for domain registration, github (as opposed to sourceforge which was filled with dark patterns)...
Why did I get excited about Goodreads?
I want to know what people are reading and what they love and why.
I love hearing that from my friends, and I want that on a wider level from humans. I love knowing what someone else loved to read and why, it helps me explore books and ideas and this weird world.
(its why I started shepherd.com)
Like… lots of OK books that plenty of people enjoy are a 3, even judged only against their peers. That’s fine. I want the actual 5s, though. I’ve got too much to read as it is, if I’m going to add something to the list I don’t want to factor in the ratings from someone who rated the worst Harry Potter book a 4 or 5.
- manage my "read" and "to-read" books,
- glance through a couple of top reviews for the book that I'm intending to read
Goodreads is super useful for these features. I don't know how many times I saw a mention of a book, added it to my to-read list only to finally read it years later.
What I don't do on Goodread:
- look at the average score (it's meaningless),
- engage too much with social features.
In other words, it sucked, so I quit it. I do not believe I am the only person who was able to do this.
I see the author doesn't use Amazon very much. The instant checkout flow is a mathematically frictionless surface; literally every other interface is somewhere between a bannister full of splinters or landing in a copse of pines without a parachute.
What's the solution to this?
There are books mentioned inside books and movies that you like. Try those.
Search for a book in particular topic, append reddit. Go to reddit thread, and try books that appear in many comments are the most upvoted.
Search "books" on HN. You will get ~10 years worth of reading in about ~30 mins browsing.
You must have people that you look up to- professionally, among relatives, etc. There must be some people that are bookish? Take recommendations from them.
You must have a niche area of interest? Follow forums/groups of that group. What books come up more often? Read those.
There are a lot of such advice that I can continue with. Probably a whole blog post. But, that's for another time.
All advices above are practised by me. None are theoretical.
1) check if any FB friends/acquaintances have read the same books that I have 2) use the ratings to rank-order the books of a particular author. E.g., if I know I want to read another Balzac or Mishima novel, I check the ratings to see which one I might try next
RSS.
Instead of bespoke walled gardens that require some centralized control and teams, why not a standard to aggregate content and just put it in place on an html site.
Why can't you quit it? Because you lack self-control to act on your convictions and desires. Worry less about why other people "can't quit" it, because other people may not even want to quit it in the first place. Worry more about why you lack the self-control to act on your stated desire to quit it.
I don't use Goodreads, I use LibraryThing. What you are experiencing is a 'you problem', not a 'we problem'. I guess you are trying to frame it as a 'we problem' to make yourself feel better about your lack of self control. Stop doing this, this is a mental crutch to shield your ego from acknowledging the you problem. Framing it as a 'we problem' prevents you from fixing the problem you have with yourself.
It's perfect for that.
I think if you're trying to use it for getting recommendations you're going to be disappointed.
1. Asking me to sign up for the Walrus newsletter. Does anyone actually do this? 2. Asking me to donate - despite being conspicuously ad-supported.
Unimpressed with the walrus.ca.
Mention you wrote a book, and you get flooded with offers to review it.
Goodreads really IS pretty worthless. I want to like it, but I just can't.
On the one hand, she complains that Goodreads is not just a space for readers, it's also a space for authors. On the other hand, she takes the perspective of authors (and is one herself), and complains that Goodreads hasn't done enough to stop review bombing. It's somehow both a problem that authors and readers can interact on the site (as pointed up by the fact that she received a thank you from an author for her early positive review), and that the site doesn't focus enough on the author experience. Even if the problem is supposed to be that the site is unfocused, not really prioritizing any one's needs in particular, that's not likely to cause a typical user to want to leave unless the problems become much more concrete than that. And it's really not clear that a typical user would be upset about interacting with an author on the platform, or attending a Q/A session, etc.
While I readily admit that Goodreads has a bunch of issues (amateur reviewers taking themselves much too seriously, interface problems), I'm not sure my complaints are even salient for this author. To me, in fact, statements like the following suggests that her problems with the site might be more personal:
> My to-read list ballooned alarmingly, not from titles I felt drawn to out of genuine desire but ones the algorithm pushed on me. The thrill of discovery, too, felt compromised: every time my feed told me a friend had added a book that I’d found first, I felt a frisson of annoyance. Have some imagination.
> I use it to get a rough and ready sense of how a book might be selling based on the number of ratings and the speed at which they accrue. I use it to drop five stars on upcoming books by friends, giving their work a tiny boost in a landscape where a book can live or die based on hype.
As a Goodreads user, I find it perfectly passable at what it does - allow users to catalogue books they have read and books they want to read, find potential new books to read, and view a feed of books read by their friends. Unlike the author, I'm glad Amazon has more or less abandoned it. It's not a perfect site, or even a great one (their recent UI update made it so that adding a "read date" to a book you've just finished now takes 10 steps instead of 2), but the flaws are minor enough that I'm not strongly compelled to look for an alternative. I suspect this experience is generalizable enough that this is why "we" can't quit it.