5 Reasons Goodreads is the Worst

Published on by Breanna

There’s been a lot of talk of migrating away from Goodreads lately, so I thought it would be the perfect time to finally finish this post I had been working on! I’ve been a member of Goodreads for 10 years and I love the site, but there are a lot of things that need to improved. And sadly, these are all issues that have been occurring for years and still nothing has been done about them. Here my top five gripes with Goodreads:

1. THE SEARCH FUNCTION IS HORRIBLE
If anyone uses Goodreads, I don’t think I even need to explain myself. For a website owned by Amazon you would think the search bar would be user friendly. Why is it when I start typing a title, the book shows up, but if I type one more letter it disappears again? And why is it that many books that I have shelved/read don’t even show up in the search? Those should be the first ones to populate, followed by popularity. And I HATE that when I hit enter, it automatically selects the first option instead searching of whatever phrase I had typed.

2. THE APP IS CONSTANTLY DOWN
The Goodreads app is one of the worst and with its popularity, it’s amazing the developers don’t care enough to fix it. It’s constantly down. I mean, constantly. And there never seems to be any rhyme or reason for when/why it crashes. If I’m reading reviews of a book, random reviews just won’t load. The app can work one minute and then go down the next. It’s so frustrating.

3. FORMATTING REVIEWS
In this day and age of the internet, why do I still need to type <i> or <b> throughout my review to make something italicized or bold? Do you have any idea how long and tiresome it is to format one single review on Goodreads? Come on Goodreads, get your shit together.

4. DISABLED URLS IN THE ABOUT ME SECTION
This was supposed to be a temporary problem, but now it looks like it’s been made permanent. I’m still baffled as to why URLs are no longer allowed in the about me section of the profile. This is really unfortunate for me, and many other users, as I can no longer link to my Twitter/Instagram or display my NetGalley badges.

5. EDITING A PREVIOUSLY POSTED REVIEW
It doesn’t matter how many times I painstakingly proofread a review before posting. I will eventually read it months later and still find a grammar or spelling error. On the website, I can uncheck the box to keep the review from showing on the my feed if I go back to edit it. But on the app, it will show on my profile/home feed that I just finished reading that book. STOP IT. I just want to be able to edit my reviews as many times as needed without it reposting numerous times.

Goodreads is the worst, but I still love that website and it’s convenience for keep tracking of my books and books I want to read. There’s a lot of talk of switching over to BookSloth or Storygraph but I don’t see myself ever leaving Goodreads, especially since those alternative sites don’t seem to have the same function or capabilities as far as sorting books and shelving.

Do you use Goodreads? What aspects do you think need to be changed or fixed? Let’s chat in the comments!

26 thoughts on “5 Reasons Goodreads is the Worst”

  1. I fully agree, but unfortunately, believe it or not, Goodreads is the best book collecting website out there now. Not that best actually means good.

    I tried Booksloth, it’s awful and has barely any books on it. I tried Booklikes, it’s dead, the owners left. I used to love Shelfari but I believe Amazon bought it then shut it down. There’s a couple of others but they all feel even more outdated than Goodreads. And now Goodreads is owned by Amazon, it’s very hard for anything else to compete.

    I’m going to sign up for Storygraph optimistically!

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    1. Ohh I hadn’t heard that about Booksloth, that’s good to know! I don’t anticipate leaving Goodreads due to the sheer number of books I have shelved on there and all my reviews, but I look forward to seeing how Storygraph is going to play out!

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  2. I’m so agree with the formatting and the search bar, it just doesn’t make sense and very outdated. I don’t know if I can explain this well, but the thing that annoys me the most is for example, I saw a book I already add to my to-be-read shelves on a listopia about specific topic, for example “awesome YA fantasy”. And while I already shelved that book on the tbr shelf, I haven’t add it to my specialized fantasy shelf so I want to add the book. I toggle and check the fantasy shelf mark. But lo and behold, instead of adding the same edition of the book on my tbr to the fantasy shelf, Goodreads add a different edition of the book so now I have two editions of the book: one shelved but totally unecessary, and the other one is still unshelved. It’s really frustrating, especially when I’m reorganizing and browsing for a certain themes 😒

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    1. OMG YES. I HATE that it adds different editions of books to shelves!! I’ve noticed that it does this when signing up for giveaways as well! It doesn’t recognize that I already have that book on my “to-read” shelf and adds it again 😑 I totally know what you mean. I’ll go through all my read books and find more than one of the same book, and then when I try to delete one edition it deletes them all 😒

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    1. I literally only use the app to update my reading progress lol. And I’m just boggled by how terrible the search function is for a website owned by A M A Z O N.

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  4. Agreed, GR can do so so much better. I hate the app a lot and stopped using it after a few weeks. And the search bar and recommendations section just utterly baffle me all the time. It’s so frustrating. The only good thing about it is the shelving and the ability to add reviews, but even that is a hassle. One thing I truly hate is the fact that I can’t add someone on GR as a recommender if they aren’t my friend…like why???
    Great post ✨ I really wish they would make it better.

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    1. The thing that baffles me is that these have all been the same problems on Goodreads for YEARS. They have an entire team of developers and are owned by one of the largest companies in the world. How difficult would it be to take the time to fix these problems?? Hopefully one day (very soon)!

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  6. I have the exact same problem with goodreads. It’s a love-hate relationship. 😂 The app is the worst. AGH. I just use it on my laptop because as you said the app is ALWAYS down and has some kind of problem. Then, the formatting is just bad and I still don’t know how to insert pictures into my reviews, haha. 😅

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    1. Yes! Inserting images is such a hassle!! And the images always get so weirdly squished and it takes forever to readjust their sizing to look decent, but by then they loose their clarity 😑 This is very fresh in my mind because I spent almost an hour trying to format images in one of my pre-reviews 😅

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  8. I really hate the search function with a burning passion. 😒 It will let me type in half of a title and give me the correct suggestion, but if I add one more letter, it’ll suggest something entirely different! I just don’t understand. If Goodreads had just listened to our frustrations, they could have improved so much, and we wouldn’t have to look for other places to track our books!

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    1. Right! How much effort/time would it really take for the developers to just fix the website when they’re owned by one of the largest companies in the world? It’s not like they’re oblivious to the problems, they’ve been the same problems for years!

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  11. You just voiced all the problems I’ve been having with Goodreads perfectly! Like you, I’ve been on Goodreads for roughly 10 years and I don’t see myself moving away and never using it. I just started with storygraph and it seems to have potential. Great post! 🙂

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