Goodreads sucks. it’s as simple as that.

Once upon a time, Goodreads was supposed to be a haven for readers—a digital bookshelf where book lovers could discover hidden gems, share what they were reading, and celebrate storytelling. Now? It’s a cautionary tale. A broken platform plagued by trolling, dishonest reviews, ideological bias, and a complete lack of moderation. Goodreads no longer serves readers. It serves agendas, outrage mobs, and the loudest voices in the room.

a haven for trolls

Goodreads has become the digital equivalent of a playground without adult supervision. Trolls swarm the site daily, leaving reviews for books they haven’t read—often boasting about it. Want to ruin an author’s release day? Just round up a few friends, post one-star reviews filled with sarcasm, memes, or baseless claims, and watch the rating plummet before the book even hits shelves.

The platform makes it incredibly easy to do this. No verification process. No requirement to prove you’ve actually read the book. No meaningful penalty for abuse. The report button exists, sure, but it’s a placebo. In practice, Goodreads rarely removes malicious content, even when it blatantly violates their own guidelines. The result is a system that actively punishes creators while rewarding mob behaviour.

And let’s be clear: the trolls aren’t edgy teenagers or chaotic neutrals. Many are deeply invested in Goodreads as a platform for performance, wielding reviews like social currency. For them, reading is secondary. Visibility and influence are the real goals.

false reviews and review bombing

The line between legitimate critique and targeted harassment has all but disappeared. Often on Goodreads the ‘Readers’ are not reviewing books they’re reviewing the authors. And more often than not, they’re doing so based on online drama, political views, or internet gossip.

If an author tweets something unpopular, it’s open season. If they make a controversial character choice or explore a difficult theme, they’re “problematic” and “need to be held accountable.” The review section transforms into a warzone of outrage, with long-winded rants that mention everything except the content of the book.

There are also coordinated review bombs, where one-star reviews roll in like waves the moment a book is announced. It’s common for books to be flooded with hate before a single ARC has gone out. The community knows it happens. Goodreads knows it happens. Yet nothing changes.

badly behaving authors don’t help

It’s not just the reviewers being scummy but some authors are just as guilty. Rather than rising above the noise, a handful of writers have chosen to wade into the mud, responding to bad reviews with personal attacks, arguing in the comments, or even creating fake accounts to praise their own work and bash others.

But it doesn’t stop there. In more calculated moves, some authors (even a few well known ones) have been caught mobilising their fanbases to attack the competition. Under the guise of “protecting the community,” or just outright pettiness and vindictiveness they subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) encourage their followers to leave negative reviews on rival authors’ pages. And this often happens before a book is even released. It’s a form of review bombing and it’s pathetic.

This behaviour is toxic, and Goodreads does nothing to stop it. In fact, its broken system actively allows these campaigns to flourish. All it takes is a few bad-faith reviews from loud followers, and an author’s star rating can tank overnight. And because Goodreads doesn’t verify whether a book was read or even accessed there’s no friction stopping someone from hitting one star and moving on. Hell, the victim’s can’t even complain or get a blatant false review removed even if they tried.

In a space that should champion creativity and fair critique, some authors have turned the platform into a strategic weapon. And in doing so, they contribute just as much to the site’s toxicity as the trolls they claim to detest.

clunky, outdated, and going nowhere

Let’s not forget one of the most glaring issues with Goodreads: it’s ancient. Not just in internet years in every sense. The interface looks and feels like something from the early days of the web, and it hasn’t meaningfully changed since Amazon bought the platform over a decade ago. It’s clunky, awkward to navigate, and absolutely maddening to use if you’re trying to do anything more complex than rate a book and leave a comment.

Want to organise your shelves? Good luck. Want to find decent recommendations? Get a book cover updated? Be prepared to scroll through a mess of recycled titles and irrelevant suggestions. Want to engage in meaningful conversation? The discussion boards are buried, glitchy, and overrun with spam or stale threads. Even adding a new book or fixing a typo in a listing is like pulling teeth.

There’s no dark mode. No easy way to filter reviews by quality or relevance. The mobile app is barely functional. You can’t even reliably sort your reading list without jumping through multiple hoops. And yet, despite years of feedback, nothing changes. Goodreads sits there, dusty and unimproved, with Amazon apparently content to let it limp along indefinitely so long as it doesn’t make too much noise.

The most frustrating part? The platform has so much potential. If anyone bothered to modernise it and to clean up the interface, overhaul moderation, and prioritise genuine book discovery it could thrive. But that would require investment, vision, and actual care for the reader and author experience. Oh, and needs to be depoliticised as a primary goal. So far, none of that’s been on display.

Until then, we’re stuck with the same tired, broken system: old, irritating, and falling further behind every year.

an ideological echo chamber

Arguably the most corrosive shift on Goodreads is how ideological it has become. The site is infested with a vocal faction of left-wing activists—self-described “woke” reviewers—who treat books not as art to be discussed, but as battlegrounds for cultural war.

If a book dares to challenge certain orthodoxies, features characters they deem “problematic,” or is written by someone with the wrong political stance (real or perceived), it becomes a target. These reviewers write manifestos disguised as critiques, often hundreds of words long, that accuse authors of every conceivable social transgression. Misgendered a character ten years ago? You're cancelled. Wrote a villain with a certain trait? You're accused of bigotry. Used the wrong word? You're complicit in oppression.

This group has weaponised Goodreads. They swarm books with low ratings not based on quality or craft, but because they disapprove of the author’s opinions, affiliations, or imagined offences. It’s censorship masquerading as criticism—and Goodreads enables it.

What’s worse, the site’s culture now actively discourages dissent. Challenge these reviewers, and you’ll likely be labelled a sympathiser, blocked, or brigaded. Nuance isn’t welcome. If you're not marching in ideological lockstep, you're a problem.

The truth is plain: Goodreads sucks. And until the platform is gutted, rebuilt, and properly moderated, it will remain one of the worst places online for anyone who actually cares about reading. No wonder so many authors hate it.