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A harassment campaign on Goodreads

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270 points ilamont | 2 comments | 06 Jan 20 20:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.522s | source
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jasonpbecker ◴[06 Jan 20 21:19 UTC] No.21973446[source]▶
Goodreads is desperately in need of a strong competitor.
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bryanrasmussen ◴[06 Jan 20 21:21 UTC] No.21973472[source]▶
Aside from the spoofing issues what are the main drawbacks and benefits of GoodReads from your perspective - what's the worst of times, what's the best of times?
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1. bduerst ◴[06 Jan 20 22:02 UTC] No.21973915[source]▶
Goodreads is a social network framing itself as a book review website.

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.

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2. sailfast ◴[07 Jan 20 16:24 UTC] No.21981418[source]▶
I would argue it's an Amazon referral engine framing itself as a book review site. They have optimized for purchases and not for reader happiness / quality.

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.