Good Riddance Goodreads

There comes a time when staying in an online community just isn't worth it.

When eBay first started changing from a place that welcomed small businesses to a place that gave free rides to huge corporations at the expense of the small businesses who helped build the company, I stuck it out. I had built a business there over 7 long years. But rule after rule made making money, and having fun, more and more difficult. At a certain point, sometime back in 2011, I decided I had had enough. I quit.

Well, it's not going to take me 7 years to quit Goodreads. I'm done.

I joined Goodreads back in 2009 at almost the same time I began blogging. It was a fun place to hang out with other book lovers. Other readers. It had a nifty way to catalog my books as I read. To comment, to take notes, to make observations I could share. And then the drama came.

You can trace it back to when Goodreads started aggressively marketing itself to authors as a marketing tool. At the same time, self publishing was booming, with lots of new authors completely overwhelmed with all that comes of being your own marketing department. Friction was inevitable.


Instead of protecting the providers of free content (the reviewers and GR librarians), Goodreads decided to sanitize book pages and reviews by hiding anything objectionable. Last week, it went even further, by deleting shelves and reviews without notice and without properly posting the policy changes IN ADVANCE or anywhere on the main page.

Any company not willing to let its community know about changes of this magnitude does not need my participation and does not deserve my respect.

As a result, I've deleted my shelves, books, and reviews and have moved them in their entirety over to Booklikes.com.  I will not supply Goodreads with content. I will not patronize their site. I will not look at their ads, providing them with revenue. I will not recommend their site to others. In fact, I will advise anyone currently using the site to go elsewhere and those looking for a book site to stay far, far away from Goodreads. I'm keeping my account alive to keep my user name from being used by others, but otherwise...you won't find me there.

You'll find me here.

Goodreads Steps in It

Much of the drama of the last year between authors and reviewers has centered around the Goodreads site. It has been likened to the Wild West or a walk through the bad part of town. There are rules, of a sort, but they are rarely enforced. To date, Goodreads has taken a hands-off approach to both authors commenting, harassing or spamming readers and to reviewers writing snarky reviews, putting misbehaving authors on do-not-buy shelves or otherwise not being nice.

That hands-off approach ended today when Goodreads admitted to hiding reviews and announced "new guidelines" for why they would be hidden.

In the thread started by Ridley titled, Why Has My Review Been Hidden, Community Manager Patrick explains in detail about new changes to a (supposedly) existing policy.

"Our philosophy is that your review is yours to write as you see fit and we're happy to have you express whatever opinions you like in those reviews. They'll always be shown on your profile and be on your shelves, but the book page is ours to curate, and that's something we've been doing since the start of Goodreads. We want to make sure that we're showing the most relevant and most useful reviews on that page. "

I don't know of other reviews being hidden before. It's possible. But call me skeptical given Goodreads' previous hands-off approach.

He also states

"We'll be posting our review guidelines, which clearly spell out what is likely to get a review hidden, in a couple of days."

Nice that they've been working on these guidelines but are enforcing them before making them public.

My favorite one is perhaps this one:

'One of the points in our guidelines will be "review the book and not the author."'

This one gets my goat probably more than anything else in his response. And the reason is because this is the "be professional" mantra of the poor authors complaining about bad reviews. It's straight out of their playbook and gives me a clear indication of where these new rules are headed. And it's not in the direction of open, sincere communication among readers.

If Goodreads wants to sanitize their book pages in order to monetize them, that's their business, obviously. But it seriously undermines my trust in the site. I want to see ALL of the comments about a book on the book page. Not those that Goodreads deems "relevant and useful." Without that openness, the site loses much of its value for me. 

I admit to being disappointed. Goodreads has started a practice that will only grow more cumbersome, more fraught with drama, more irritating as time goes on.