Goodreads blows. Let me count the ways.
- Amazon owns it, which means it exists primarily to point you to the Kindle store. Therefore, they don't have much incentive to improve the site for users, which explains the remainder of this list.
- The servers are slow as molassas. Casually browsing, searching for books, and waiting for your shelves to load so you can mark a book as finished all take an extra chunk of time not often seen on the modern internet.
- Did you know you can blog on Goodreads? You can blog and you can follow other people's blogs—on desktop only. You won't be able to read these blogs on mobile, which is likely where you use Goodreads. You could use RSS to follow the blogs and therefore view them on mobile in an RSS reader, but while that's appealing to me, it's appealing not to the casual user.
- Notifications are broken. If somebody comments on your review, you'll get a notification. If you respond to them, they won't be notified of your response. You get one notification before radio silence.
- Goodreads didn't used to suck, so if you've been using it for more than a decade like I have, a switch to a different site like StoryGraph is a bit of a nightmare. I tried to manage both while I weaned myself off Goodreads, but juggling two apps was too much. This is textbook enshittification.
- Goodreads requires HTML! This might seem like a plus for me, considering I'm using the site you're currently visiting as a means to learn some HTML; however, if you're writing a review on mobile, you're not going to pull up a reference guide. Even being foreced to do so on desktop is absurd in 2026. Again, Goodreads exists for the casual user. Casual users are not going to use HTML, no matter how basic the tag.
Despite all this, I'll continue using Goodreads, so go ahead and friend me. Let's be miserable together.
