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GoodReads Sucks

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Melody Bot, Sep 14, 2020.

  1. Melody Bot Sep 14, 2020
    Melody Bot

    Your friendly little forum bot. Staff Member

    This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply.

    Sarah Manavis, writing at New Statesman:

    With the vast amount of books and user data that Goodreads holds, it has the potential to create an algorithm so exact that it would be unstoppable, and it is hard to imagine anyone objecting to their data being used for such a purpose. Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books – Goodreads is almost 40 times the size of the next biggest community, LibraryThing, which is also 40 per cent owned by Amazon – and it appears to be doing very little with it.

    GoodReads is a really bad website and an even worse app. It could be awesome. It should be awesome. The difference between using it, and say Letterboxd for movies, is night and day. It just makes me sad.

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    BoldType likes this.
  2. Olyphantastic Sep 14, 2020
    Olyphantastic

    "See you in the car! Best wishes" -Milhouse Supporter

    My reading slowed right down to essentially nothing during the pandemic, but finally read a new book while on holiday this past week. Of course I went to log and review on Goodreads and in doing so referenced how long it had been since I read sci-fi. It occurred to me that if Goodreads was a halfway decent site I could have quickly looked up exactly what the last sci-fi book I read and when I read it. But the thought of navigating the site to get that info made it a total non-starter.
     
    Orla likes this.
  3. Jacob Tender Sep 14, 2020
    Jacob Tender

    Web Guy Supporter

    I'm not a GoodReads user and don't know much about its full feature-set, but I will recommend BookTrack for iOS/MacOS Catalina+ users. If you aren't looking for a social experience, but some tracking and stats (as well as personal library cataloging), this is a great little app.
     
    Orla likes this.
  4. contra11mundum Sep 14, 2020
    contra11mundum

    I hate spoilers. Supporter

    I only use it to keep track of what I’ve been reading. I would use it for more but yeah it sucks.
     
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  6. travisred Sep 14, 2020
    travisred

    Trusted Supporter

    The sad part is they've actually made the app UI slightly better this year, but it's been bad for years now.
     
  7. Jacob Tender Sep 14, 2020
    Jacob Tender

    Web Guy Supporter

    The Overdrive Libby app is painfully terrible. So many UI blunders it makes me angry to use the app. I don't think the book space is all that competitive for good developers, unfortunately.
     
  8. skogsraet Sep 14, 2020
    skogsraet

    Trusted Supporter

    I'd rather use a spreadsheet to track my reading than Goodreads.