There is 1 good social media service, and it's owned by Amazon
Written over a year ago; my views may have moved.
Contents
Scrolling social media sucks. You should stare at a wall instead 95% of the time. But Goodreads, my good reader, is different.
If your screen time is above 30 minutes a day, odds are you are checking your phone when you don’t strictly need to. Which is fine and dandy, but do you like the time you spend on it when you don’t strictly need to? What if you could?
Amazon hasn’t paid me to shill Goodreads (unfortunately) (yet?). But it is the only social media service – if you’d even call it that – that may nourish your starved soul. It can be the compulsive habit you cherish. The dopamine hit perfectly correlated with post-facto satisfaction with your actions. I shill not in vain but out of love.
Whether the love is for reading, for feeling like a person who reads, or for looking like a person who reads, is for you to discover and for Adam Smith and other dead pals to judge. This is an attempt to get you to sign up or log in and actively participate. There are countless communities waiting to be formed, book clubs ready to spring into existence, as soon as you meet your fellow readers.
Reviews can be better than the books
Users can take book reviews very seriously.
One of my favorite reviewers on Goodreads got one-shotted by Infinite Jest so thoroughly that every review of theirs uses its style. Yep, that means obscure vocabulary, long sentences, peak absurdism. The reviews are hilarious and are always among the most popular for any book they grace with their comic devotion.
Others have one special interest – antiquity, say – and almost exclusively review books on ancient history and philosophy. Some are history buffs that you will feel have read every history book ever written, but that’s just because you’re still a novice and haven’t found the good stuff with 3 ratings and one review in Arabic.1 A few you will think have read every other book, and you will in fact be correct, amazingly. While you sleep, a Goodreads user is critiquing Voltaire.
Reading a review by these savants is a warm intellectual hug. You develop a headcanon for the source of their obsessions, their opinions, and their day job. The camaraderie and parasociality you may develop improve the quality of familiar reviews. You become surprised by someone extending their reach and trying a new genre, or topic, or review style.
Absent any social component, you’re still in good hands. If you like the great works of literature, you’re in for the deepest gold mine and the fattest feasts. Thinking of picking up a Steinbeck, an Asimov, a Tolstoy? Odds favor top reviews that are almost as amusing as the works themselves. You could see it as just sample sizes doing their magic: the bigger the book, the better the top reviews. But there’s a sense of responsibility and proportionality. “You don’t judge a classic as much as it judges you,” to paraphrase Michael Nielsen, the quantum-computing-deep-learning-scientific-history polymath who is, self-recommendingly, on Goodreads.2
If you’re into pop fiction like YA novels and whatnot, I’m… pretty sure there are decent reviewers for that too. But you’ll have to find them yourself. You can just see the people with the most votes in a given week3 – someone there will read what you’re into.
A single space for storage
Tired of having multiple book lists, spreadsheets, wishlists, book club lists, Notion pages, notebooks, leather tomes, and papyri with all your book-related information? On Goodreads you can just create shelves on top of the 4 default ones: Want to Read, Read, Did Not Finish (DNF), and Currently Reading. Better yet, as Amazon owns the entirety of the bookselling business,4 you get to make use of those sweet monopolistic synergies across formats: now Audible lets you access your Goodreads Want to Read shelf from your Lists section.
This is surprisingly useful. Don’t know what to read? Check your lists; there’s probably something there you saved for later and might just be in the mood for right now. Want to learn more about your own taste profile? Look at the books you’ve finished, the ones you didn’t, and the ones you’ve kept on your Currently Reading for 3 years because you will eventually get to them, you promise.
Your lists are empty, or otherwise looking dull? Well, good news!
Feed purity
What if your social media feeds just displayed updates from friends by default? No random short videos pouncing on your attention and breaking its neck in 0.1s of captioned expressive faces spitting hot takes about what you’ve been DOING WRONG ALL ALONG.
The lack of an elaborate algorithm to steal your attention means the Goodreads feed is a very temperate scrolling experience. You impulsively tap the app and check the top updates. If you’re lucky, a few people have rated or updated their reading status for a dozen-ish books. If not, there are no updates. You can easily and safely leave the app without your dopamine being further denied. Compare that to the experience of accidentally opening the Facebook feed and realizing you have been looking at geography memes for 15 minutes.
It’s trivial to only see the updates from friends and following on your feed in Goodreads. They only recently started showing book ads, and those can be turned off. Your recommendation problem is now solved: if you follow people with remotely similar literary tastes, their activity should give you material to consider reading. Better yet, if you follow skilled reviewers as mentioned above, they will help you be excited about a book. Good reviews aren’t always about good books – matter of fact, 1-star reviews are frequently the most entertaining – but thoughtful reviews can transform your perception of a title from “meh” to “goddamn, must-read.” And you’ll realize star ratings are poor projections of the reading experience anyway.
You might stop judging books by their covers and 3.5 star averages
Reading and writing book reviews gives you tacit knowledge of what makes (a) a good book and (b) a good review. If you’re regularly on Goodreads, you will consume significantly more book reviews than in the counterfactual.
You may learn that a book is processed differently each time someone reads it – each time you read it. The update depends on the model you already have. The same book can update you in different directions on different readings, which Einstein famously called insanity.5
Bad books can be useful merely by forcing you to think about their subject. Thinking is a useful habit,6 but differs when done in consumption mode or generative mode. Reading reviews may anchor your opinion of a work before its time, but if you are independent enough it won’t matter after you read the words yourself. Writing reviews, though, is extremely helpful if you care about what you read: why specifically did this book all your friends seem to like suck ass? Did it read as if the authors had no outline for over half of it and winged a debatable premise for 100+ pages? Was it terminally unspecific in its case studies? Did the narrative voice fall flat for the theme? Alternatively, if you really liked a mid book, what was it about the content that resonated?
You will both form a more specific vision of what enjoyable literature is for you, and remember what you read better. A short review is a simple act of recall that takes <10 minutes to write and can be referenced any time. And you’ll convey your experience to your friends.
Light-touch peer pressure
Those friends, followers, and followed will have (1) provided you with book recommendations, (2) entertained you with their reviews, and (3) rewarded your reading habit beyond the joy of reading itself.
This last item is vital. It’s easy to want to want to do something and not actually do it because the reward isn’t there. Your metacognition isn’t always pushing you in the direction of the person you’d like to be.
So hack that metacognition. If you have friends frequently updating their reading status, you get the signal that reading is the in-group standard. Of course, you don’t want internet pedants to be your entire milieu, but you can shape part of your social graph so it shapes you in the direction you desire.
Goodreads notifies you of people who want to friend you, who started following your reviews, or who have liked your reviews. There are no artificial updates to keep you hooked. This means the more active you are, the more of that dopamine you get. Alignment, for once: read more interesting books, write more interesting reviews, and the people you want to find are more likely to find you.
And if you don’t want to engage this deeply, that’s perfectly fine. As is usual when it comes to writing on the internet, this is an asymmetric payoff: the worst case scenario is that no one reads your reviews or cares about a book you read, and then nothing happens. The best case scenario is you get very cool people to appreciate the bit of effort you put into thinking through a reading experience, follow you, perhaps comment on your reviews.
Convinced yet?
Goodreads is – laughs maniacally – not perfect. By any stretch. You can’t really search for specific reviews. It’s hard to get data you want: if you yearn for someone’s most popular reviews, it’s far from obvious how and whether you could find them.7 Linking to specific reviews is only doable on the browser version of the app, and is a crummy experience.
Goodreads is nonetheless the only social media service I’d ever pay to keep.8 “General” social media websites like Facebook and Instagram can do so many jobs that they aren’t used for any specific one. They’re not built for sharing one category of content. A strength for user numbers and their addictive quality, but a liability for people looking for a tailored social experience. Meta’s products overwhelm and distract with the plenty of their content. To quote Francis Spufford’s brilliant Red Plenty:
[…] Plenty is an intrinsically vulgar idea. It is, in itself, a stupid response to human needs. ‘Oh look, there’s someone unhappy. Let’s overwhelm him!’ Real human needs are always specific. No one ever feels a generic hunger or a generic loneliness, and no one ever requires a generic solution to those things. Your plenty is like a bucket of plaster of Paris you want to pour over people’s heads. It’s a way of not paying human attention to them.
If you have specific needs, don’t get overwhelmed by accident. Read more, or don’t. Look for people you vibe with, or wait until they appear. If you’d like to be a bookish person and spend time on that darn small screen you carry in your pocket, you could do worse than tending a Goodreads account.
Notes
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No, of course there’s no auto-translation or translation button. What’s the fun in that? ↩
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The paraphrased quote is from one of his reviews. Semantic search isn’t a very developed concept on the app, for good or ill, so I’m not linking the review because it would take too long to find it. The app puts friction on your rabbit-holey impulses! ↩
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You might have to use the desktop site to access this page through the app or otherwise use the URL for mobile. ↩
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It doesn’t, but meeeh who cares. Over 50% of unit share in book sales, 76% of e-book sales, and 69% of print books is a pretty large share. ↩
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Of course, that’s likely the Matthew effect. ↩
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Optimal feature design for frustrating nerds: fitting enough to be assumed and searched for, and marginal enough not to be implemented. ↩
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Okay, I’d pay for Substack as well. It might be the spiritual successor to Goodreads, but it’s a wildly different experience. ↩