One that can recommend a huge array of diverse authors from around the world, catered perfectly to your tastes. In reality, with the type of data Goodreads has access too, the site should be able to create an incredible algorithm. Why spend money improving something when there’s no chance of competition? After all, we know that Amazon values profit far more than user, or worker, experiences. So why has it come to this? While we can’t know for sure, there’s at least a chance that it’s down to the sheer fact that Amazon holds a monopoly on book discussion. “It should be my favourite platform,” one user told me, “but it’s completely useless.” Many now use it purely to track their reading, rather than get recommendations or build a community. Books fail to appear when searched for, messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. The design is like a teenager’s 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. Sometimes even checking what they’ve already read will be next to impossible… After numerous frustrated attempts to find a major new release, to like, comment on, or reply to messages and reviews, to add what they’ve read to their “shelf” or to discover new titles, users know they’ll be forced to give up, confronted with the fact that any basic, expected functionality will evade them. On a typical day, a long-time user of Goodreads, the world’s largest community for reviewing and recommending books, will feel like they’re losing their mind. While many use it as their go-to for tracking reading, browsing book reviews and finding recommendations, it has also received a lot of criticism for the ethics of its parent company, an awkward interface, and a general lack of progress when it comes to the site’s design. Used by over 90 million people, Goodreads, which has a fairly quaint origin story as a website set up to help friends find and discuss books, has been owned by Amazon since 2013. Goodreads has been in trouble for a while.
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