It could be kind of lame to poke fun at a site that I don’t use (anymore), but I find this funny enough to share: Goodreads has started changing and updating their site last year, but apparently they’ve broken a ton of things in the process, and now they’ve published an announcement with the list of 12 bugs they’re (supposedly) trying to deal with.
In short, literally the most essential functions aren’t working. In the iOS app some people can’t shelve books. On Android people can’t see all reviews. On desktop the search and sorting are completely random, the default editions that represent each book are also apparently random, though it seems the selection favours the editions in any language other than English, preferably also in a non-Latin script. The database is borderline impossible to navigate.
So if you search for Harry Potter, the first result is Random Harry Potter Facts You Probably Don’t Know: 154 Fun Facts and Secret Trivia. If you open the page of William Shakespeare, the first books that are presented to you are Romeo and Juliet in English, Hamlet in Italian, and Macbeth in Arabic. And after a while instead of showing his actual plays, the site just lists weird collected editions such as Romeo and Juliet; Hamlet; Othello; An Index (The Works of Shakespear, Vol. 8) by some scammy publisher that prints PDFs from Google Books.
I’ve spent enough time on GR to see how it’s held together by duct tape and inertia, and now it really seems to be crashing down. Still, kudos to the admins who are keeping up with the recent trends in technology, such as actively ruining your website, as also seen on reddit and Twitter. In fact I’d say GR has better chances of actually dying (i.e. having a massive user drain) than the other two sites.
Is there anyone here who’s still active on GR? Not trying to judge, but I really have to ask -what’s making you stay there? Are the alternatives too lacking in book data/users?
I don’t really understand how such a widely used site can break a core functionally (like search), and not know how to fix it? Crazy to me…
Caused me to check out StoryGraph, and it seems pretty nice, or at least the core functionally works well 😂. There are some strange UX choices with how Friends / Follow functions and they are also lacking an API for 3rd party integration. Solid alternative though, especially with the ability to import from GR.
It’s owned by Amazon and they just don’t give a shit about it anymore would be my guess. There is no way with all of their resources they should be having any issues with it.
Something updated and made a lot of plugins/addons/packages incompatible is my guess.
Like when Wordpress used to update and suddenly 20% of the internet would look funny because their themes were no longer compatible. Or when the guy who made left-pad got screwed and retaliated by deleting it, and so so many things stopped working.
Downside of modern programming using so many plugins, is eventually they will start becoming incompatible. So you need someone on staff who can identify and implement new solutions when that happens, and they seem to have fired whoever that would have been.
I guess to me, it isn’t strange that something like that could break (I see that all the time). It is that they broke something as essential as search, and didn’t immediately rollback whatever changes they pushed out. Unless it has been a gradual / over-time issue, that has gotten worse? I only remember it working properly one day, then being unusable the next though.