📑 Almost Everything About Goodreads Is Broken
What Goodreads is good for is keeping your own list of books you want to read or have read this year. It’s a list-making app. And while that’s useful, it doesn’t live up to the company’s full promise of being a haven for readers. Readers and authors deserve a better online community. And while Amazon has at least some nominal interest in improving many of its other products — Alexa, for example, becomes more advanced with each passing year — Goodreads lingers in the dustbin of the early aughts, doomed to the hideous beige design and uninspiring organization of a strip mall doctor’s office.
Angela Lashbrook analyses Goodreads and highlights a raft of limitations associated with the site. I wonder if a future possibility would be to create a federated site to support book clubs etc, in the same way that Pixelfed and Mastadon offer alternatives to Instagram and Twitter. This could be supported by micropub clients like indiebookclub which allows users to provide updates on what they are reading.