A dated UI is fine by me, but at no point did the current placement of the search field make any sense for the average user. It is de-emphasised, hidden almost below the fold, as if searching for reviews of a particular title wasn't the thing most visitors come there for.

Of course there are plenty of monetisation and engagement reasons for that UI item to be awkwardly placed…

Kaguya seems a little better here, but it too starts with a huge 'MAKE AN ACCOUNT OR FUCK OFF' message in mid screen, with the search field in the navigation bar on top. If you want become the Goodreads alternative, start with realising that a lot of people just want to see if the reviews are any good before committing to creating an account and contributing in turn.

I don't mind where the search is. I do mind that the drop-down results can't be opened in new tabs—they are links, so you can choose "open in new tab", but they're links to "#", so you end up opening the current page in a new tab.

It's just a bunch of basic usability problems like that that they've never bothered addressing.

The search bar is only weird on the home page, which I don't imagine is visited very much. I bet most people jump to a books page from a browser or phone search.

I find the Goodreads UI clunky. To note down my start/end dates for a book I have to have some activity on it, and then I can edit those dates.

There are other corners of it that could be nicer. It's not so much about modern tooling as much as it is about using modern tooling to achieve better flow and more pleasant presentation.

Arguably 2005 was a high water mark for UIs. That was when people were still focused on "human interface design" and hadn't adopted the A/B "revealed preference" nonsense.

That's totally okay. If it works for you, keep using it by all means. The point of an alternative is to serve those who do have a problem and are frustrated with the status quo.

Agreed I really don't mind the interface, if anything, I hate the new stuff they've aded

for me it is the opposite - i actually prefer older UI.

Less optimized for farming my attention and ads, more optimized for me discovering things, and not being shoehorned into choices.

I view it as a positive. It's easy to find things and obvious which parts are interactive.

I care most about perf/responsiveness as I navigate the site. GR was tolerable on this metric while I still used it, StoryGraph (for understandable reasons) is abysmally slow somehow.

I have the same complaint about BoardGameGeek. If it was super snappy to go with the dated design, I wouldn't bat an eye, but it is also kind of a slog.

Both are things I use for discovery a little bit more than I use to record my thoughts about my previous experiences, so my browsing behavior is very breadth-first search and that makes the slow loads more of an acute problem for me.