Goodreads
Reddit take
AI summary of the Reddit excerpts below — not a quote
Goodreads is a polarizing but dominant book-tracking platform. While it remains the industry standard for its massive database and social connectivity, users are deeply divided over its aging interface and Amazon ownership. It is frequently used for managing "To Be Read" (TBR) lists and following niche reviewers, though many users express a desire to switch to modern alternatives like Storygraph.
Pros
- Massive user base and social features make it easy to follow friends and niche readers.
- Effective for tracking reading progress and maintaining a centralized 'Want to Read' list.
- User reviews and tags are helpful for identifying specific content like 'spice' levels or genre tropes.
- Extensive, user-curated lists can help discover obscure titles that algorithms might miss.
Cons
- Outdated and frequently described as an 'unusable' or 'trash' user interface.
- Owned by Amazon, which is a significant deterrent for users seeking independent platforms.
- Reports of a toxic community environment, including review bombing and verbal abuse.
- Technical limitations such as difficulty organizing books across multiple shelves and poor messaging systems.
- Increasing presence of bot reviews and AI-generated book listings.
Caveats
- The recommendation engine is highly controversial; some users find it helpful while others consider it completely ineffective.
- Many users feel 'trapped' by the social sunk cost, staying only because their friends or historical data are already on the platform.
Best for
- Readers who prioritize social interaction and seeing what their friends are reading.
- Maintaining a large, long-term digital catalog of books read and to-be-read.
- Finding niche genre recommendations through community-created lists.
Avoid if
- You want a modern, clean, and technically polished app experience.
- You prefer to avoid Amazon-owned services.
- You are looking for a platform with a strictly positive or highly moderated community.
This summary uses balanced time weighting with about a 6-month half-life. The evidence is older (median age ~392 days), which may not reflect the most recent app updates, though the core user sentiment regarding the interface and ownership has remained stable.
Sentiment
25 positive (49%) · 7 mixed (14%) · 19 negative (37%)
Trust + time weighted score: +14% · raw score 12%
What redditors said (10 of 51)
hardcover is just the name of the app that the bot is based on, its a platform like storygraph and goodreads where you can track the books you’re reading
I’d use the platform to applaud my peers when I loved their work, and I’d let other people give poor ratings to books I didn’t love. Seems like the right thing to do when you’re in the industry.
Goodreads is a good place to share reviews.
The most obvious home for any kind of regular review writer is Goodreads. Anything goes there in terms of style as long as you stay under 3,000-ish words.
I personally hate Goodreads because it’s just so social media focused. And it’s so review focused. I don’t really like looking at reviews before reading a book because that does influence me.
Goodreads: -Searching/browsing sucks. If you're looking for something and you don't know the title or author, you're never going to find it. -They may have changed it, but it used to be that all booklists were publicly editable. So, I couldn't make a list of my favorite YA books without everyone on earth adding THEIR favorite YA books, rendering the list useless to me. -Only one cover appears for each book. If someone is looking for a book with a certain cover, and you suspect it might be this or that book, you can't use Goodreads to check.
I’m sick to the back teeth of KU and now Goodreads pushing books to me that sounds very good and come very highly rated… only for them to be utter ai slop
If I check goodreads and the first page of reviews all have gifs in it, I am much more likely to not read the book.
I put them on my Goodreads “want to read” list.
I check the books that caught my attention on Goodreads. Each book has many reviews there.