Is Goodreads Popularity a Good Thing?

Goodreads started out just simply trying to build a page for every book everyone Out There has ever read and display every "review" or "question" everybody took the time to type.

Well...within reason. In the process of reclaiming my reviews, I scrolled past a "question" on a Newbery Award children's book that many students have been required to read: "Is this book [word this site does not use] or what?"

Well, I thought the author set himself a tough job but did it rather well. Obviously there's no use answering a "question" that's meant to attract attention to somebody who wants to be known for disagreeing with the Newbery Awards committee. On a nonprofit, grassroots, free-for-all book site people are supposed to be able to find their own friends. The guy who hated the Newbery Award book probably has his own community who agree with him that books about certain topics, or books that reflect certain themes, or books that students are required to read, or whatever, are [a word this site does not use]. Good luck to them and let them have it.

But Goodreads grew fast, and now they're trying to sort which reviews people see first. The most ethical way to do that is the standard option for blogs and social sites: newest posts on top. Goodreads wanted to get fancier. For this year they announced a Secret Formula that takes into account Popularity! And Other Factors!

Sort of like Yelp...which is admittedly corporate-censored rubbish that will raise your blood pressure.

Popularity is controllable. Early adopters of Internet technology have sooo been there and done that. "Like" other people's posts, "follow" their discussions and reviews, spend as much time reading as you do writing: those were the formulas by which older sites like Associated Content, Chatabout, and Bubblews used to pay some of our Internet service bills.

Except, hello? Goodreads isn't offering to pay anybody. Who's going to sink that kind of time into a site that's not paying even a penny a post?

Goodreads' appeal used to be that it was all about the books. No incentive to socialize. If you liked a book and wanted to thank the author for writing it, Goodreads was a place to do that. If you didn't like it but thought someone else would, Goodreads offered the option of posting whether or not you still owned a copy, on the chance that someone else would want to buy it. Obviously that's an option for readers, not full-time booksellers.

Like most of Goodreads' original set of users, I posted the kind of brutally honest reviews there that I've posted here, only shorter, and I appreciated that Goodreads provided the purchasing information complete with Amazon photo links. (I was willing to let Goodreads have the referral bonuses since, although the links Amazon provides me have been durable, Amazon's monthly updates indicate that youall have not been using them every month.) Sometimes I read other people's reviews in order to write about the aspects of a book that stood out for other people. Sometimes I liked someone's review, and clicked a button to tell them so, or disagreed with something they said, and typed a comment to that effect. Sometimes people liked or quibbled with my reviews. Either way, it was all strictly about the books. Nobody seemed to be sinking time in trying to build e-friendships at Goodreads.

At a non-paying site, that really helped. Nobody has the time to load a big picture-cluttered page of information about some random person who happens to be visiting the same non-paying site!

Well...during the past year, Goodreads grew, and writers noticed that it was a way to drive sales for their new books.

I know somebody who knows somebody who's written a few books. They are books about the local history of our little town. I'd had them on my Wish List before this mutual friend hosted a book party. I wasn't in town that day, but mentioned that I would have liked to have bought a book to blog about it. "Oh, if you're going to blog about it, take this copy!" said the mutual friend. So I did. And I was glad. They were very good reads. It was jolly high time somebody wrote a novel about Gate City that was like the stories older people tell--about Gate City, as distinct from Appalachia.

(Appalachia deserves its own book; it's always been a completely different place from Gate City.)

But what was going on? My reviews weren't showing! Rita Sims Quillen, known to Twitter as @hillbillypoet, had appealed to all her Tweeps to post reviews on Goodreads. Dozens if not hundreds had given her new novel, Wayland, four or five stars. Nothing suspicious about that if you've read it; allowing for an unusual narrative structure, it is an excellent novel. But Goodreads had chosen to balk all of our reviews, because apparently some authors have taken the time to burden Goodreads with loads of copy-and-paste, five-star, lame-brained reviews of lame-brained self-published books.

Well, hello, Goodreads... "Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"Meretricious."

"Meretricious who?"

"Meretricious and a happy New Year."

A New Year, that is, of watching the site we built up last year die, as we your faithful readers remind ourselves that life is too short to keep watching for our reviews to appear, or worry about trying to build "popularity" (and then have our reviews suppressed, anyway, if we happen to like too many independent or small-press publications?).

Goodreads was fast, easy, and convenient to use. Now it's not. Good luck finding your next jobs, Goodreads staff.

And so...yesterday's e-mail contained a notice that somebody liked one of the reviews I posted on Goodreads.

Last year I would have thought, "How nice." Last year, if I had happened to open Goodreads before I'd forgotten which review or who it was (I've forgotten that now), I might have checked to see what else she'd read, maybe posted an extra review if she'd read something I'd read, maybe "liked" her review of it too.

This year, I noticed myself thinking, "NO. DO NOT GO THERE." Life's too short to encourage people to play the "popularity" game at a web site that's not paying by the line.

So hello, fellow Goodreads user, whoever you are: It's nice if you liked what I said about a book. Maybe we have interests in common. Maybe we should become e-friends.

But not on Goodreads...because Goodreads doesn't pay, and Goodreads is not and never will be as big as Twitter, and so Goodreads is not a viable place to build e-friendships.

Book reviews will be moving back here this year, Gentle Readers. You're welcome to comment; if you're not logged into Google, use Twitter; if you don't like Twitter or Google, use LiveJournal. E-friends and e-conversation are welcome but I'm not going to sink the time in doing them on Goodreads.

I think Goodreads needs to watch its numbers drop until it publishes a policy statement that it's going to trust readers to recognize for ourselves which reviews reflect an intelligent reading of a book, avoid mechanically filtering comments for anything it can't clearly define in the Terms of Use, and quit monitoring "popularity" altogether. People who want to use Goodreads for its intended purpose do not have the time to build "popularity" there, and shouldn't bother.

Let me repeat this. Middle school is a long time behind me, Gentle Readers. My objections to Goodreads' tracking users' "popularity" has nothing to do with wanting to be "more popular" on that site. I do not want to be "popular" on Goodreads. Nor should you. If we want e-friends, we want them on our own sites or on the big social sites--not on product review sites. We want Goodreads, if it can be saved at all, to focus exclusively on the "popularity" it can build for deserving books. We want our Goodreads screen names to serve solely to help people cite specific comments in their reviews of books.

Web sites can be about users' social "popularity," or they can be about the numbers of people who do and don't like books (or other products) and the reasons they give. Not both. People who are concerned about building social "popularity" follow other people's recommendations and echo their opinions and thus generate misleading publicity for products at review sites.

In order for Goodreads to be useful, it needs  to eliminate all traces of social "popularity," perhaps even removing screen names from comments and tracking them by numbers instead. To help readers find books they will like, people need to post their own opinions with no regard for "popularity."