Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it

There's a little bit of discussion from when I posted this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36550687

No well done review site will remain good once it reaches a critical mass. Private, small scale networks of friends are the future of trusted reviews and recommendations.

Goodreads wasn't "the future of book reviews", it was a good review site that might have innovated great new things or might not have at all.

But regardless, Amazon should never have been allowed to acquire it -- it was incredibly anti-competitive.

Amazon never wanted to do anything with Goodreads at all -- as demonstrated by the fact that it hasn't done anything. It was a purely defensive move to prevent anyone else from acquiring or partnering with Goodreads, because their database of books and reviews could be used to instantly start competing with Amazon's book business. Amazon snuffed out that threat of competition in an instant.

This article starts off pretending to be a criticism of Amazon, and this is highlighted in the headline. After a few vague critical gestures towards Amazon in the first four paragraphs, it gets to its real point: Goodreads, a social network, has woefully inadequate censorship, which can lead to financial losses to authors and publishers.

According the the WaPo, Amazon's crime with Goodreads seems to be that it hasn't kept the site up with changes in censorship standards and technology, and just lets whoever say whatever about books.

I wish news organizations would not give direct quotes when pure marketing nonsense was written. Just say something like "Amazon did not give us any substantive comment on the matter."