Goodreads is desperately in need of a strong competitor.
replies(4):
Sadly, any Goodreads competitor will need to miraculously gain the network effect; everyone you know is on Goodreads, so it'll just be you and whoever you can convince to move to a new platform.
As for the downsides for Goodreads, this blatant lack of moderation is troublesome. I also dislike that Kindle / Amazon are the only visible links to purchase books by default. Amazon already dominates the ebook/audiobook market, so I also simply dislike Goodreads due to their acquisition by Amazon.
Not needing to start from scratch would make building a competing service a lot easier. Sites like Stackoverflow have reasonably open licenses on user data, so you could theoretically use that data and build an alternative if the site fell apart. I'm guessing that's not the case for Goodreads though, at least for things like reviews.
But even pulling in basic category information would be easier than starting from scratch.
You could argue that is necessary to get engagement from reviewers, but in trying to be both, goodreads doesn't do either very well. Throw in the fact that they haven't improved much since Amazon acquired them, and they've become a sort of static site targeted at acquisitions for ebooks.
Besides the dark growth patterns, overall Goodreads feels like a clunky product suffering from feature bloat and poor usability. Unfortunately, because of the network effects and the Kindle integration, it's very hard for a competitor to get off the ground.
[1] screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xh4rr6mvey1lbfh/Screenshot%202020-... (it's been like this for at least a year)
(Facebook's API has been locked down in the meantime and Goodreads now only has access to your FB friends that also linked Goodreads...which they use to send a friend requests to each one)
For example: https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/1836622-dandelion-cap...
It's a book that my brother and I recently re-read, and the recommendations are...four other books that I and my brother read recently. Granted, the majority are the same genre, but two aren't. They're just...books we both recently gave 4 stars.
These days though, the FB API has been locked down and basically can't be used for growing your userbase anymore. Any new startups in this space won't have the social graph advantage that Goodreads did. Sad.
My family was recently shocked to discover that adding a book as read and rating it doesn't automatically set the read date. I don't think it needs to do so, but these people are computer-literate and have entered > 1,000 books a piece. And they didn't know how it works. That suggests poor UX.
As someone who DID know this and and always manually add Date Read...here's how to do it on desktop: hover over the shelf dropdown until a little popup appears above, move up to that popup without it vanishing, and click "Write a review", which secretly means "write a review or enter date read."
2. It's slow.
Loading just the html of the front page is > 3 seconds. Loading My Books is > 5 seconds. Again, this is JUST the html, excluding no js, css, and images.
3. Nav is bad
This combines poorly with the site speed. One thing I do most frequently is to look at my most recently read books:
- Go to goodreads.com (3+ seconds)
- Click "My Books" (5+ seconds)
- Click "Read" (It defaults to books read and on your to-read list all mixed together.)
- Sort the list by Date Finished (5+ seconds)
- Re-sort the list by Date Finished because it did ascending the first time. (5+ seconds)
(Obviously, I could just bookmark that page with the desired params, but if I'm bookmarking to avoid having to use your site navigation, that's a UX issue.)
4. The recommendation engine is bad.
Various people have mentioned this. I will grant that recommendations are hard. But basically, don't use the recommendations. Use the lists manually built by users. (But note that on most lists the top spots will be pointless recommendations that you read Harry Potter. Gee, never heard of THAT book before, thanks!)
5. Lists aren't super-accessible
As I mentioned, the lists are much more useful than the recommendation engine. They're under Browse->Lists.
There's a search at the top of every single page. It searches books and authors. Not lists.
If you're in the lists section, it...still won't search lists. There's a tiny search box on the lists page for this.
6. Search Breaks Middle-Click
When I search a book, it populates the results without me having to click through to the results page. If I want to open those results in a new tab, though...nope! It'll just re-open the current page in a new tab.
7. Their export tool doesn't work right.
This is a minor quibble--it's VERY nice that they let you export your data at all--but I recently discovered that a lot (most?) of rows in the export are missing the Date Read field even if you entered them. Not all though. I don't know what the pattern is, but it's annoying.
Basically, I think Goodreads has approximately one engineer, whose job is to do some tweaks for the marketing team as needed (they renamed Giveaways recently-ish). There's clearly no designer, as UX has been essentially touched in the 12 years since I joined.
It doesn't need a sweeping redesign, but there are obvious UX tweaks they could have made at any point in the past decade and instead didn't. And some performance work, please!
Once upon a time I bought something online for about $10 from what was a legitimate business with an address in San Francisco. About 14 months later they claimed I subscribed to some service and started making huge charges to my card ($150/week). Getting them to stop and getting my money back was an enormously stressful and difficult process.
That's why I have a knee-jerk reaction - not a cold, logical reaction - to online purchases from companies I haven't used before, and I'm not the only person like that.
I've had incorrect subscription charges on one of my cards, and while it was minorly annoying (a search on the card website, fill out a form, repeat one more time the second month it happened) I can't imagine a scenario where it would be "enormously stressful and difficult".
Your card issuer is required to respond when you report fraudulent charges, and if they don't you need a new bank.
I've had no negative fallout from purchasing a subscription, and they have very good privacy controls for those who don't want the social aspect (so you can basically turn off other user interactions in many ways). It's there when I need it, doesn't seem to spam me and I probably paid with Paypal (I use Paypal as a way to not give 3rd parties my CC info, a proxy if you will) like most things.
It may look old school and appear at a glance like it's not maintained, but it's updated and run actively, there are a bajillion people using LibraryThing. Logging in to look at my account, there's a link on the right for the latest news posted today about "The January ER Batch is up! We've got 2,960 copies of 89 titles this month." (early reviewer books) https://www.librarything.com/er/list
A competing site that is focused on surfacing books that the reader likes, with links to more than just a single purchase point would likely gain enough traction to be useful.
I imagine that scraping a user's GoodReads profile every now and again with authorization would also allow the user to update status in their Kindle / eReader while still populating another site, which would be interesting.
They thing is, on another level: they're done. They offer excellent cataloguing and the ability to share your reviews and so on and so forth. What more do they need to add? A visual refresh every few years? At this point I'd rather they spend the money their customers pay them on keeping things running, not adding crap no-one cares about, surveillance capitalism anti-features, or whatever.
Dislikes over likes does sound interesting though.
