GoodReads

Community here tends to provide book reviews of variable quality and reliability, I recommend searching for reviews of a book on Amazon.com. There you can compare the percentage of a book's rating that received 5 star ratings or higher with other titles, recommended reading by the NY times, bestseller lists curated by Amazon's editors, etc. Look a title up at ALA.org or read a review in publications like School Library Journal. Bottom line - pass on this one unless given no other alternatives. Not recommended.

There are major bugs with importing books and with simply logging in. If you click "Log in with Amazon" and enter your password, you are taken to a blank screen. If you try to log in using Facebook, it doesn't recognize your Facebook password. Also, the general layout and usability sucks in comparison to Shelfari. I was very disappointed that I had to give up Shelfari after years of use.

But the most frustrating part is the book import. When they dumped Shelfari, they told you to download your books and info into Excel and then upload into GoodReads (even though they are the same company). Once I did that, I noticed none of the dates that I entered in Shelfari carried over correctly. According to Goodreads I'd read my entire list of books in January. I spent years putting my Shelfari shelf together and would never be able to remember all of the months and years I read the books.

I emailed GoodReads and they got back to me and explained they'd reformatted my sheet and I needed to re-upload. I did this, and it changed nothing. I went back and forth with GoodReads over the course of months, and they kept giving me the same advice. I finally realized the person I was corresponding with did not really understand English and my repeated "I obviously did not read all of my books in January" wasn't translating. When I tried to get around this person by posting a complaint through the site, I got back to the same person with the same exchange.

And now I can't even log in. Terrible site.

It's clearly best/biggest of type, hence i was highly motivated. That didn't last long. It's a very typical kind of website: looks slick but has a clunky interface and worse 'help'. I waded through its ratings process [rate 20 books or die!], when i didn't need GR recommendations.
I was there to meet people. I gathered the only way to do that is to join a "discussion group". But i couldn't even find any, much less join one. I'm tired of fighting interfaces [of apps too] so i gave up. I should've had more patience? Funny, that's what they all say.

Permits authors to network and swap reviews, falsely inflating the perceived value of their work. Scam all the way. The site is set up to encourage scams like this, and they ban anyone who protests. Keeping unscrupulous authors happy is Goodreads' bread-and-butter. I like keeping track of my books there and sharing my opinion, but I would never buy a book based on the reviews I read there, and I stay far, far away if something was self-published. Too bad the scammers ruin it for everyone else!

I've been a member for a while. They WILL send you unwanted and unsolicited emails. For example advertising events even after you unsubscribe 4x from ALL emails. I just got one that says

You are receiving this message because you've read a book by Anne Rice. We have some exciting news for you!

Um. Yeah and I rated that book I read 1 star. They don't care what your opinion of a writer is. They just push them on you.

My recommendations were broken for a year and a half. They fixed them the week before they sold the site to Amazon.

Facts on books are often wrong. Help is not helpful. It's a fairly bad site that Amazon bought when Goodreads was looking into selling books. Expect it to get swallowed at some point by Amazon who didn't want it for the community but was preventing competition..