A harassment campaign on Goodreads

There are plenty of communities that mitigate this problem through earned privileges. Real users who are participating in the community are able to do more than someone that just signed up with a throwaway address. Stackoverflow seems like an okay model... recent moderator issues aside.

Also, the ability to whitelist an author or book for extra moderation seems like a no-brainer. After there is evidence of harassment then all user content needs to be approved before it is made public. Enable trusted moderators from the community to help with this if paid moderators cannot keep up.

This seems like it could get so so much worse than it currently is. The target of harassment seems to be taking it well but what happens on a platform like this to someone that isn't as prepared to deal with it?

Goodreads has been on life support for years. The community itself has complained about a lack of innovation and updates, and this is just another consequence of a neglected operation.

The real problem here is that Amazon doesn't want to put any money into it.

Your solution makes a lot of sense, but would require effort, and I doubt anyone involved in running GR cares enough to do it.