Jessica Mae Stover > Status Update

Jessica Mae Stover
Jessica Mae Stover added a status update
I’m sorry WHAT!? — did GOODREADS JUST TAKE AWAY DIRECT MESSAGING WITH NO WARNING between me and all my penpals?

I mean it’s Amazon-bought and they redesigned things to basically make book pages second Amazon pages and to downplay the community aspects so perhaps not surprising, but as a step this is def. getting worse. They also took away some other things such as basic linking, which is commercially controlling af.
Dec 05, 2025 12:37AM

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message 1: by Cecile (new)

Cecile Has anyone you communicated with started moving to Story Graph? I haven’t made a habit of it yet and I don’t want to upgrade to paid.


message 2: by Jessica Mae (new)

Jessica Mae Stover Hi! I have a page there but I haven’t migrated because I’m not a stat-driven reader (pretty much the opposite!) and there really isn’t community built in there. They’re also just as likely to sell to Amazon or the like in the medium or long term: they don’t have any corporate structure preventing it or even a weak governance statement saying otherwise, so.

Frankly with storygraph I also don’t think the pros (librarians, book sellers, journalists, authors, English majors) who build all of the value outside the authors themselves with their books should be paying for subscriptions while creating all the top inputs/reviews that make the site anything worth looking at to begin with. The same people/labor built goodreads with their expertise and reviews and community curating before I got here and look how that went. GR sold them right out with no equity. I’m also of the thought that if I’m paying for something book related I’m going to put that to authors/books directly: not tech startups about authors/books.

I’m on a decent sized, private book/reader discord and I have my author server which is my backup for now but what I really need is a separate timeline wherein GR isn’t acquired! ;-)


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