The problem with Goodreads is more than just an old-fashioned website. The community there, the whole "social" angle of the site, has been taken over by the same phenomena as on Amazon.com: publishers send free copies of their books to certain reviewers, who often don’t even actually read the book before writing their review, and then those reviewers exploit this attention to build up their own reputations as "influencers" and eventually monetize those reputations. Because their reviews have bright colours and image memes, and cliques support each other with mutual likes, those reviews show up at the top of any book listing.

If you are one of those reviewers who honestly reads and reviews books, then you can feel like your signal is lost in the noise of the shill reviewers. Also, for those who were initially interested in what their real-life friends were reading, the majority of those IRL friends will have dropped off the site over the years, either because of a natural attrition or because they have come to prefer snackable web content over books.

This is actually what I was trying to get at: GoodReads could be so much better, but that would require the maintainers to care. And they don’t, because they’ve got the market lock and have moved into other things. Like Microsoft did with IE6.

Agree completely the broken community is much more important than the aged look of the website.

It’s the IE6 when it comes to rendering quality too. Zero support for any sort of standards, bugs everywhere you look, and it’s users complain bitterly if you don’t go out of your way to support their entrenched ways of working.

I use goodreads as well and find the UI/UX very old fashioned. The lag is astonishing as well. What are some issues you have with it?

The mobile app is horrible. It's a webview or something, and works like total crap on old devices. If you open a notification for a group discussion post, it tells you what the title of the discussion is--but not what group it's for.

As much as possible, I find myself interacting with Goodreads through calibre plugins; I've got a library with zero actual book files that contains an entry for every book in my library, and I mainly use that to browse my collection. Since syncing that list takes so long, my actual calibre libraries are also synced to Goodreads, as that's where I actually make my changes.

With Library thing's recent removal of library limits, I'm thinking more and more about abandoning Goodreads--except I don't know if there's a calibre plugin for PT, and I've spent so much time adding and updating book records for items in my goodreads library, which would have to be redone for LT.

FYI the mobile opera browser uses the webview and is superfast, but the Kindle app is all native code.

Kindle and Goodreads I think are both crap for the same reason: the goal is to kill the competition not make great products.

Amazon should never have been allowed to buy Goodreads.

The barrier to entry for an alternative to Goodreads isn’t exactly high. But does anyone care enough to do so?

The barrier is actually quite high. Sure, its easy to make a CRUD app that would aggregate ratings. The difficult part is to get people to use it instead of the leader. These are called network effects, and they are very hard to break.

This is why big social media sites have such high valuations. Any small group could develop an alternative to Facebook. However, the chances of that usurping them is almost zero. The same goes for Goodreads.

The barrier was not high. Now that it’s baked into Kindle (automatic sync, instant review, etc), Goodreads has a significant moat.