Solidifying my dislike of Goodreads, I got my “year in books” email from them today and the first thing that loaded, at the top of the email, is an ad. For pillow cases.
Once you're #1 on Google searches for half of the published corpus of humanity you stop caring about little things like that... Surprised storygraph even has that many users when they're nowhere on Google when I search books.
I mean I'd bet 90% of goodreads users are just googling quotes but yeah this girl got her timing right, Amazon bought goodreads and then just sat on it for like a decade... Storygraph would never ever be able to compete with goodreads on search, so they sorta had to pivot to winning on social and stickiness.
It’s cyclical. Once the StoryGraphs and Hardcovers of today are big enough to be not bothered about some users with refined UX taste they’d do the same. This repeats.
I don't think it is Amazon so much as sheer number of users.
When you have 20K (like Hardcover), it is much easier to be focused on each of them (or at least small groups of them) than when you have 20 million - much less a few multiples of that number.
As we grow, even Hardcover will have to evolve. This noted, I know this team (including myself, to be clear). Adam is truly focused on innovation and dev excellence. Ste, our lead designer, always has his eye on UI/ UX improvements and listening to what our users want/ how our users are using the site. As for myself, I'm the data/ social media guy - always looking to make our data as solid as possible and looking to use social media as effectively as possible. :)