I apologize for the reblogs, but this has to be one of the greatest posts on types of reviews that I’ve ever read. Big difference between rating for review and rating for recommendation.
After reading quite a bit about GoodReads, both from the site itself and that which has been written about it, I have come to the conclusion that the current problems which have come to light are an outgrowth of a fatal flaw in the structure of the site itself, and unless that flaw is addressed, things are just going to get worse.
Much has been said about the behavior of both reviewers and authors, and there is certainly much to criticize regarding how the users of the site have chosen to escalate their conflicts. I, however, am more interested in the genesis of those conflicts.
I believe that the essential problem that GoodReads faces lies in the confusion between rating for review and rating for recommendation, and that the structure of the site encourages such confusion.
To take a counter-example, let’s look at Netflix–one of my favorite…
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Legends of Windemere 
He makes a fantastic point. Goodreads was supposed to be a method of pulling out of the masses books you like based on your reading history, just like Netflix. That’s how Goodreads started out for me.
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I was never sure what it was because I learned of it only this year. It looked like an on-line library to me, but with review capabilities.
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A simple way to fix the problem is to offer profiles, one public, one private. Use the private one as a way to find books you would like to read. Use the public one to review books as one does currently on Amazon.
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That would help, but I think the public ones will still cause people to create these hate bookshelves and try to destroy authors. They were called hater packs on a few websites. I think Goodreads should have a filter, so bookshelves are tagged if they use certain terms and deleted if it is indeed a hate bookshelf.
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Ah. People have hate bookshelves? I did not realize.
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One blogger listed a name of one entitled ‘authors who should be raped in prison’. It’s that bad.
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The beauty of internet anonymity.
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It’s what keeps the bullies safe.
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