In praise of how shit Goodreads is

Goodreads is maybe the last place on the internet where time still seems to exist in the way it used to. In more ways than one: firstly, its timeline is strictly in chronological order. Secondly, most people’s profile’s aren’t updated properly; photos are always old, the people on Goodreads are reclusive Luddites. Lastly, it’s shit. It’s so much more shit than really any other website out there. In order to make a website as shit as how shit Goodreads is right now, you’d have to put in a serious active effort to resist against the way that drag-and-drop web builders will snap your elements instantly into place, coercing them into harmonious concert with eachother, eliciting an involuntary ‘Ooh!’.

Goodreads is one of the few places on a computer where you can scroll down and lose interest in direct proportion to the amount of time you’ve spent on it. Progress is steady, slow and boring, because it is indicated in real time by people slogging through books, often through many emotions: hopeful, irritated, offended, excited, resentful, satisfied. Most of the updates on the feed are nothing of real remark; this makes the notification of a friend finally finishing a book and offering a thoughtful review — or scathing complaint — genuinely satisfying.

Goodreads is an entity that unlike other platforms that make money, seems to have no agency. It is passive and stupid, making no recommendations nor offering any manufactured intimacy. The only way to really get anything out of it is through exhibiting freakish archaeological behaviour: digging this way and that, clicking sidebar links, navigating the actual structured web of connections.

One of the most bizarre features I’ve found on Goodreads: this weird feature that for some reason shows the photos of the friends of whoever it is you’re stalking?

You can’t even click into their profiles from here, you just view them, as if your friend has collected these photos of a random sampling of their friends individually for you to view.

In contrast to Instagram’s recent feature roll-out that allows you to stalk reels that your friends have liked, while this Goodreads ‘feature’ feels creepy, it also feels distinctly un-Machiavellian; like the difference between your charmingly manipulative friend, who you consciously keep at arm’s length yet also can’t get away from, compared to your incompetently manipulative friend who you just feel sort of sorry for but are also somehow endeared to?

I’ll caveat that there’s nothing really romantic to this: the reason Goodreads is frozen in time, I learned, is because Amazon bought it and then axed any further investment into it. This article claims that it was the ‘Future of the Reviews’ (I really don’t care about futurizing my reviews but OK) until Amazon ruined it.

Yet on further thought this reminds me of the old Chinese useless tree parable: the great oak tree whose branches were so twisted, so full of knots — so useless that no carpenter wanted to cut it down, that it grew and grew past the age of all of its chopped down peers:

The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down! The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it. Cherry, apple, pear, orange, lemon, pomelo, and other fruit trees. As soon as the fruit is ripe, the trees are stripped and abused. … Their life is bitter because of their usefulness. That is why they do not live out their natural lives but are cut off in their prime. They attract the attentions of the common world. This is so for all things.

That tree is useless. A boat made from it would sink, a coffin would soon rot, a tool would split, a door would ooze sap, and a beam would have termites. It's worthless timber and is of no use. That is why it has reached such a ripe old age.

Every man knows how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless.

This tree has been trying for a long time to be useless. It was almost destroyed several times. Finally it useless, and this is very useful.

In some sense, Goodreads is protected in the archives by its sheer unprofitability and uselessness. But furthermore, it is a corner of true respite on the internet; a place that offers shade and quiet, without expectation; where its lack of movement within time makes eternity somehow more within reach, more abundant and fertile; where no inchoate dread continually dawns, nipping at the heel of the psyche constantly on the run. (Another place like this: Bandcamp)

Goodreads, the unchanging recluse who knows nothing of the changing world, and so is a steadfast companion: knows no COVID, no Hawk Tuah, no pulling out of the Paris accord. There are suggestions, sure: Hillbilly Elegy pops up on my feed; Han Kang, for winning the Nobel Prize; a resurgence of historical accounts of war. But it is all implied and never oppressive; nothing more than a halo of theoretical context that surrounds the thing of real substance, the real thing that has solidity, the book.

What a beautiful world we live in.

The funny thing about the ‘future of reviews’ thing is that it would probably take away all of the things I find profusely entertaining and indeed radically free about Goodreads: the absurdity of random people who can barely spell giving a one-star to a canonical Dostoevsky (talk about high agency! Go you!) juxtaposed against the most thoughtful and oblique reviews you wouldn’t be able to find in institutional criticism. And then, the reviews like this:

What a privilege to witness at our fingertips the indomitable human spirit, its many faces, its endless and elaborate creativity. Every electron pushed through lattices of copper and gold or vibrated across the aether to deliver me such deep, unperturbable satisfaction. The calibre of vitriol that Goodreads offers me is a pleasure no one could steal; none but Amazon, if they so chose to actually innovate it.

I can only infer that what is meant by Goodreads once being ordained as the ‘future of reviews’ really means is that it would become a influencer platform for reviews (or specifically, influencer platform for book sales): the reviews more polished, the recommendations more personal, more seamlessly connected to a digital funnel. A more positive, a more promotional, a more happy place.

Goodreads’ recommendations are so brainless it doesn’t even seem to care that I gave Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow a one-star review and DNF’ed it with a scathing, wildly emotional review (everyone I’ve ever met seemed to love it so deeply; it was doomed to ever impress me from the start).

And I would miss the haters so much.

I wrote a stupid piece complaining about the death of Web 1.0, and how so many of the remnants of that time are gone now due to their hosts shutting them down — hosting costs too high, owners too busy, or too disillusioned maybe with what the internet had become and demanded of them. But still, Goodreads survives, fossilized in amber by the foiled plans of the most ambitious of capitalists.

Perhaps life truly is a survival of the shittest.

I give Goodreads three and a half stars.