I Hate Goodreads

And I keep in using it anyway

Me and Joey vs the Goodreads book dragon. Yeah, it’s Grok.

This isn’t about toxic Goodreads culture. It’s about why I still use a platform I don’t fully trust.

It’s about why the platform is shitty and why we I keep using it.

I’m sure I’m not alone. We want to walk away from Goodreads…but just can’t.

I’m not sure there is an easy answer, but I’m hoping by writing this article, I can figure one out.

In the beginning

For decades, I’ve kept a simple, handwritten notebook, cataloguing the books and authors I’ve read each year. I still record my yearly reading in this book.

The notebook has a bright green cover, cost me about $2.50 and came from Woolies in Alice Springs.

Until 2010, it was the only record I kept of the books I’ve read.

If we dig into prehistory, before the bright green notebook, I didn’t keep a record of what I read. That’s the first 25 years of my reading life, unrecorded.

Most of the time that unrecorded prehistory doesn’t bother me. When it comes to that period of my life and books, I have a reasonably sharp mind and can remember what I read back in 1983.

There’s the occasional book I can’t recall, but the internet and my brain usually conspire to work those out after a few days.

Enter Goodreads

My Goodreads (GR) account tells me I joined the platform in 2010. That was the first and only year I’ve ever read 100 books, which I did as a FUCK YOU to finishing my PhD the year before.

I also joined LibraryThing, but never used it much. And, for a while, I didn’t use GR much at all.

Then, for some reason in 2013—I can’t recall why—I started using GR all the time.

There were a few things I that I instantly enjoyed:

• I could keep a digital to-be-read list that I could access anywhere

• There were themed groups where you could do read-a-longs and chat with other people.

• It was easy to discover new books.

• Booklists created by users. There are 1000s of them!

• I enjoy reading candid/funny/entertaining reviews.

I didn’t mind that Amazon owned it—and to be honest I really don’t care that they do.

Hate me for that, but someone’s gotta pay the bills and keep the servers going.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was trading something for that convenience—privacy.

Using Goodreads changed my reading

Before GR, I read about 40-50 books per year.

With the exception of the post-PhD, 100-book-year and a period of time when I was very ill and read only a handful of books for several consecutive years, this 40-50 number has been very stable.

However, post-2013 my reading consumption rocketed. It jumped to 60, then 70, spent several years hovering around 80, and two years where I read over 90 books.

This is—no doubt—a result of joining the annual GR challenge. The first thing I do every 1st of January is set my GR challenge for the upcoming year.

I don’t want this article to be like 100s of others that talk about how GR and social media have made reading into a competitive sport, but yes, let me tell you about the dopamine thrill of reading 70, 80, 90 books in a year.

This is real. This is addictive. I am a hopeless sucker for it.

Reading is a sport I excel at.

And it’s not just me. There are people on GR who read 200 or even 300+ books in a year. This person apparently read over 2000 books in 2025—yes, I have questions. In fact, all I can think of is—umm—Bonnie Blue.

There is a trade off.

For me, it’s that I can no longer recall all the books I’ve read over the past 13 years with the same razor-focus of my prehistoric, pre-Goodreads life.

In fact, there are books that I’ve loved, raved about, given 5 stars to and written detailed reviews about…only to have my mind completely erase their existence.

Books I have no memory of reading, despite the emotion they invoked.

And that, my friends, is fucking scary.

A Shitty Platform?

Other people have written ad-nauseam about what’s wrong with GR. Lincoln Michel’s Substack article for the Counter Craft newsletter sums up most of them nicely.

Goodreads Has No Incentive to be Good

Other common complaints are:

• The website is clunky (I don’t find it clunky at all)

• Its recommendation engine sucks (disagree—there are SO many recommendations, too many, in fact)

• That you can’t give half or quarter stars (FFS, who gives a quarter star?)

• The shelving system (I’ve never really understood why this is a problem when you can name your shelves whatever you like).

As you can tell from my comments, the most common user complaints are not the ones I have.

My main issue is privacy. I want to use the platform and not have books I read or want to read made public unless I want them to be public.

I’m sure someone is going to tell me that, yes, you can set your profile to private. However, even with that done, there’s still limitations:

• Reviews are Public - Reviews, ratings, and updates are always public, even on private profiles.

• Author Accounts - If you’re a GR author, you cannot make your reading private.

• Secret books - you can’t hide books you’ve read like “Ravished by the Roomba” or “Pumped by the Peppershaker” (I made these up) from your profile.

• Rereading is still clunky - if you reread a book, it’s still hit-and-miss as to whether it will show up in your current yearly reads or not.

• The US date system - the rest of the world does not want the US date system. We hate, loathe, despise its nonsensical, illogical exceptionalism. GR will not allow us to change it.

My janky solution to the privacy issues on GR is to have a pseudonymous username rather than my own, and to include no identifying information in my account profile.

I have written several books, including those under my Katt Powers pen name, but I keep that GR profile separate. Several years ago, I nuked the GR author account under my own name as I wanted to read judgement free.

However, I’m sure a truly dedicated stalker could track my GR account down.

Goodreads Alternatives

I’ve tried several of these.

For whatever reason, I never kept up with LibraryThing. However, I used StoryGraph for several years, again under a pseudonymous account. I also tried Fable twice. I’m aware of other book tracking apps or websites, but I haven’t bothered to try them. This blog post lists 31 GR alternatives. This more recent one weighs the pros and cons of 10 recent offerings.

StoryGraph is very clean and minimalist, but it lacks the catalogue that GR has, doesn’t have the user-generated lists, and doesn’t really have a community vibe (if that’s what you’re looking for). If you read a lot of Indie authors, unlike GR which adds every obscure book within days of it being published, on StoryGraph you have to manually add them. This isn’t hard to do, it’s just fiddly.

And, yes, if you are insane enough to need them, you can rate with quarter stars. I am not a fan of the content warning feature and just ignored it when I was using the app. I was even tempted to add a content warning that was actually ‘content warnings’, but never got around to it. I HATE, loathe and despise content/trigger warnings on books—yep it’s a Gen-X thing. Give me the hurt.

Finally, the privacy features on StoryGraph are almost identical to GR, so you’re stuck with a fake name if you want to unidentifiable.

Next up is Fable. The Corporate Memphis/Alegria artstyle on the homepage is a massive turn off. I’m not sure why you’d use the world’s most hated art style on your front page, but whatever floats your boat.

When I first used Fable, it was a CHORE, to get a new book listed. You had to email them with the book details. Sometimes, they would add the book, other times, they’d tell me they didn’t have the resources to do so. I’m not going to lie: this really turned me off the site.

Now, Fable has a Chrome extension which does adds new book—but they lost me long before this.

Then there’s the look and feel of the app/site. Fable is TOO busy. There’s too much to do there, too much gamification, I don’t care about tracking movies or TV series, I don’t want cutesy graphics. I just want to track my effing books. It’s like going to a 14 year old’s Tumblr on speed.

Privacy on Fable is pretty much the same as StoryGraph and GR. You can make your booklists private, but your profile, reviews and ratings are public.

I parted ways with Fable pretty quickly. Everything about it screamed made for a non-binary 14-year-old cat girl. Which is fine if that’s what you are.

And you’re into Corporate Memphis…hop in the nope cannon and light the fuse.

Arriving at the beginning

It’s clear to me that I’ve changed over the past decade and a half. Where once I wanted to share my reading with the world, now I want to hide it.

Seven years of being the target of an obsessive stalker-troll will do that to you. However, living through the cancel-culture heavy years of 2019-2025 has also done the same.

Photo by Maithilee Shetty on Unsplash

If I want to re-read Harry Potter because I enjoy it, I want to be able to do that without a bazillion book-o-sphere mean girlies calling up my boss and telling her that I’m symbolically murdering people. If I want to read an sci-fi book written by a Jewish author, or even someone who voted for the Bad Orange Man, I will—if those books float my boat. After all, most of the time, I have no idea what an author’s politics are and don’t care. I just want to read the damned book.

So I’m looking for privacy.

But I also value GR’s lists, recommendations and I do get a thrill out of the reading challenge.

The very messy middle

I’ve maintained my handwritten notebook but also added this spreadsheet reading tracker that keeps stats.

Several years back, I started keeping a reading journal where I write reviews of every book I read. I don’t share that online.

I’ve continued to use GR pseudonymously, but I suspect 2026 will be my last year. I can set goals in the spreadsheet and in my head.

Which leaves me using GR to find books I might be interested in reading via other people’s lists and the platform’s in-built recommendation features, and reading those funky one-star reviews. I write public reviews for most of the Indie authors I read—I’m happy to keep doing this.

Privacy is clearly the main issue for me, and the fact that I’m feeling the same vibe that we’re all feeling: unwelcome, jaded & exhausted by the online world.

An unsatisfying end

So I’m not really quitting Goodreads. Not yet. I’m just changing how I use it. Because at the end of the day, I don’t need Goodreads to see what I’m reading.

I just need it to help me find the next book.