Amazon has done little to improve Goodreads, which has basically remained a list-making app with design flaws and features that don't help avid readers
Despite Amazon's innovation elsewhere, Goodreads has stagnated for 12 years, and its problems are endless Tweets: @patchworkbunny , @css , @crapshoot101 , @basche42 , @mckinneykelsey , @mka_ultra , @mmmontycarlo , @kmhrt , @ashponders , @lemonsand , and @lemonsand See also Mediagazer Tweets: Ellie Warren / @patchworkbunny : Please don't integrate Goodreads with news outlets. I think part of its charm is that it's still a decade behind. Great for record keeping and some of the group's provide that community/recs functionality without algorithms getting in the way. https://onezero.medium.com/... CSS-Tricks / @css : Smells like an opportunity there eh? https://onezero.medium.com/... Aadik / @crapshoot101 : Massive pet peeve. The world is begging for a better alternative, and Amazon has the data / resources for a better alternative, but for some reason leaves it as is (seriously - its amazing how awful Amazon + Goodreads book recs are as compared to say, Spotify Discover Weekly). https://twitter.com/... Ben Basche / @basche42 : Thanks - too exhausted to ever do this. someone at @goodreads (does anyone work there ?) plz read this https://twitter.com/... Kelsey Mckinney / @mckinneykelsey : Glad to be on record as a goodreads hater https://twitter.com/... Allison / @mka_ultra : I talked some shit about Goodreads and Angela is such a good writer that even I, noted dumbass, sounded relatively coherent. https://twitter.com/... @mmmontycarlo : Great piece on how bad the UX is on Goodreads, not to mention its abysmal normcore tastes in the macro. You don't need to recommend Harry Potter. It doesn't need to be featured on every list/page https://twitter.com/... Kim / @kmhrt : remember when i linked my goodreads to my facebook to simply FIND friends who were on it with no intention of adding ALL of them but it did that for me anyway without my consent and i woke up to emails saying that men i slept with once accepted my goodreads invite............. https://twitter.com/... Ash Ponders / @ashponders : Goodreads is the worst thing I enjoy using. It should be Letterboxd but for books. Instead it's just awful. https://twitter.com/... Angela Lashbrook / @lemonsand : ICYMI, I wrote about why Goodreads makes me sad https://onezero.medium.com/... Angela Lashbrook / @lemonsand : I went long on... Goodreads https://onezero.medium.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece documents what readers had long suspected by late 2019: seven years into Amazon's ownership, Goodreads was still essentially the same list-making app, its design flaws untouched while Amazon innovated everywhere else. It fits a pattern already visible in coverage of Amazon's broader weakness at running consumer-facing websites.
The story aged into an arc rather than a one-off complaint. Former employees later detailed how Amazon kept the site resourced thin while mining its user-generated review data, and by 2020 challengers like The StoryGraph were explicitly attacking the gap between Goodreads' dominance and its usability.
First-order effects
- Avid readers are left doing their reading tracking and discovery on a decade-stale interface, relying on groups and manual lists because the recommendation features don't serve them.
Second-order effects
- Neglect creates the market opening that competitors exploit: [[a:957785|The StoryGraph and other challengers pitch themselves directly on fixing what Goodrefs won't]], competing on usability against an incumbent whose moat is its archive of reviews.
Third-order effects
- As [[a:841689|former employees described, Amazon treated Goodreads primarily as a source of user-generated data rather than a product to invest in]], pointing toward an industry pattern where acquired community platforms are valued for their data exhaust while the community itself stagnates.
The trend: Platform acquisitions increasingly treat user communities as data assets to extract from rather than products to maintain, letting challenger apps chip away at dominant-but-neglected services.