There is a reason that most discussions of Goodreads here and on GR itself tend to bring up complaints. It’s not so much that Amazon hasn’t upgraded the site to a "modern" web design – plenty of people like the old-school aesthetic and we don’t want endless scrolling and an attempt to maximize the time the user spends on the site (because we’re supposed to be reading books most of the time, after all).

Rather, the problem is the long-standing bugs that Amazon has never bothered to fix, because it can’t see any financial incentive to develop Goodreads further. The book database is a mess and even those of us empowered as "Goodreads librarians" are unable to help much. For example, today many authors might have the same name, a problem only made worse with all the self-publishing going on. Yet the Goodreads librarian UI has no straightforward way to assign a new book to this or that author of the same name. Instead, you have to use a hack where for author X you have to type two spaces between the first name and surname, for author Y you have to type three spaces, etc. It is totally amateur, and when you have 20 authors all of the same name you have no reference for which author has how many spaces typed between the first name and surname.