The article doesn't mention my biggest pet peeve about Goodreads: it makes you type reviews in HTML. It's 2019, how hard is a WYSIWYG editor? Or at least accept Markdown!
One more complex feature I'd love from an ideal-world Goodreads is ephemeral book clubs. Find people who want to read this specific book, read it together with them, and then disband.
I mean yeah you can do it on GR with a group as well, but I'm talking about a built-in book club feature with a timetable, chat, status updates, etc. Say I'm looking to read War and Peace this winter. I find a bunch of other like-minded people, and we set a timetable, read it together, then disband.
A timetable? On reddit the thread starter mentions when the next discussion is going to take place. The timetable reduces friction, but it doesn’t provide that much additional value.
Fair point. But I looked on Reddit and couldn't find the kind of thing I'm talking about (r/bookclub chooses one book a month by vote, and r/ReadingGroup seems like an overwhelming sea of random posts). I think also the fact that it contains clubs for many different media is a bit of a handicap, since the book content gets swamped, and there's a searchability problem. (Reddit's UI isn't great at the best of times, anyway.) GR has a built-in audience of a wide range of readers, so they're better positioned to do this kind of thing.
One more complex feature I'd love from an ideal-world Goodreads is ephemeral book clubs. Find people who want to read this specific book, read it together with them, and then disband.