I have decided to stop using Goodreads for the sole reason that it moves the emphasis of reading from quality to quantity. While it’s widely accepted nowadays that social media is harmful, for a while I thought a reading platform would be benign if not encourage healthy habits. However, I’ve noticed in my reading life that Goodreads has had a net-negative effect on both my understanding and enjoyment of books. This isn’t the fault of the platform itself, I believe; rather, it’s a symptom of trying to measure deep experiences with shallow metrics.
It takes effort to grasp the message of a good book. As Mortimer J. Adler put it, reading is like catching a ball. The author’s job is to give a good throw, but you still have to play an active role in receiving. Without taking the time to properly engage, you’re at best missing out on quite a lot and at worst completely wasting your time.
The issue with Goodreads is that it encourages reading as many books as possible rather than understanding each book deeply. The obvious culprit is the social feed. People see how many books their friends are reading, and that can stress them into reading more to “catch up,” perhaps guiding them to pick shorter, less engaging titles or to read faster with less depth. Others might be motivated to tackle classics or fancy books just to show off. But it’s not only the social features that discourage engagement.
Offline features such as setting yearly reading goals, monthly achievements, and the like, also contribute to surface-reading. All of these try to ‘gamify’ reading. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using gamification to encourage reading among people who struggle to pick up a book. But at least for me, gamifying something turns it into a min-max problem which in many cases detracts from the experience.
There is also nothing wrong with stopping a book whose content isn’t resonating with you or is just straight up bad. Yet there have been times where I’ve pushed through to finish a book for no reason other than I had spent enough time on it that it’s worth finishing to have one more on my profile.
Goodreads’ rating and recommendation systems don’t help much either. Reducing a book to a star rating feels insufficient, and I’d rather keep my written reviews on a platform I control, like my own blog. The recommendation feed is relatively harmless, but on a site owned by Amazon I’m skeptical that suggestions aren’t skewed toward what’s available on Kindle or simply most expensive. Besides, like most people, I have an ever‑growing backlog already long enough to keep me busy for years.
Perhaps this attitude is fine for the YA and trendy novels that dominate the platform, but for getting more out of reading than just entertainment, Goodreads is not the place to be.
This ties to a broader problem which I face, and is common among us who work in technical fields. That is putting too much attention on the countable metrics and too little to lived experiences. Trying to reduce life to numbers is unjust. Having a metric such as books-read, places-visited, projects-completed all shifts focus from depth to breadth. For me, the mere existence of these metrics create pressure to finish one thing and rush to the next so the counter keeps increasing. I suspect this flaw comes naturally to those of us who spend our time optimizing fancy numbers and comparing models, techniques, or data.
If there is nothing other than just me and the book, I can take my time, learn more, and be less stressed. It’s unfortunate that engagement is harder to measure than book count. Once you’ve caught this mindset it’s harmful to your health, learning, and work quality. Hard tasks become frustrating because progress appears stalled (although it isn’t) and you want to move on. The correct approach is to stop, consciously address the problem, and learn from it. Solving challenging problems without pressure matters even if it’s less measurable.
I’ve seen this problem pop up across several domains. At least for reading the cure is simple: stop tracking your reading. I’ll still keep around a list of books I’ve read and want to read— but its purpose is a memory aid, rather than a score. As for books I want to share my opinion on, I’ll post occasional reviews to my blog, as that still encourages understanding each book thoroughly. The only measure I care about now is whether each book gets the engagement it deserves.