Goodreads is a vintage social media
Goodreads feels like social media of the olden days: a simple timeline with few users and varying relevancy for you. For the most part, you see the one thing you signed up for: what your friends have read. The UI is rough around the edges, it has weird features like Quizzes that no one uses, but it still has its charm. It feels like it hasn’t changed since 2009.
Medium, Linkedin, Twitter, and other social media sites are sleeker and the content is often driving clicks and engagement. The goal seems to be to build a personal brand or to get signups for a newsletter. Goodreads' simplicity and lack of optimization for content or generating clicks feel refreshing. It’s drawing critique (an example here by Daley Wilhelm) but for me, the unpolished and often quite bad UI feels like a breath of fresh wind in the modern, sleek, sterile internet.
If vintage and nostalgia are a thing in music, fashion, design, and architecture, why wouldn’t they be in social media? I enjoy the feeling of being back in 2009 internet every time I open Goodreads.
A side note of nostalgia: did you know Poking still exists on Facebook? Go and Poke a friend!
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