Amazon owns Goodreads. It's not independent. It's also not mentioned on the site afaik. (They also own IMDb and a bunch of other internet companies that aren't Amazon-branded). If you want something independent, try storygraph or librarything.

Yeah I knew about IMDB. I know a guy at Amazon that said IMDB used to actually be in Perl, they rewrote it in Java over a few years.

Goodreads is tolerable, but mainly as a data source. The product itself has been in maintenance mode for... a decade?... or basically since the Amazon acquisition.

They rolled out a completely new design semi-recently for... half of the pages... and left the other half on the 10+ year old styles.

It just feels like Amazon is happy to take advantage of its dominant position with Goodreads having a more complete catalog than any of the other more open offerings. And yet, they seem to invest no effort in modernizing or improving the site, making it more performant, etc. The moderation tools kinda suck too — doing super common things like merging (incorrect) duplicate listings is a PITA.

Also the app exhibits blatant conflicts of interest like prioritizing buying new books from Amazon over, e.g., digital library loans, with no option for users to configure that.

Nothing I'm saying here is new though - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads#Criticism.