Goodreads has been around for ~15 years now and it's still lacking the basic search functions. E.g. I'd would like to see a list of books published in 1965 in Science Fiction genre with at least 1000 votes, sorted by the number of votes. Hell, even just seeing a list of books, published in X year would be nice. IMDB can do this, progarchives can do this, a lot of similar sites can do this. But not Goodreads. And without the proper search function the "discoverability" tends to zero, which, in my opinion, should be the main focus of any site, devoted to books and book reviews.
On top of this, the UI is horrendous. Just as one example, compare Goodreads author page, say https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3706.George_Orwell where the only useful things you could see is the short bio and the most voted books of the author with a similar russian site https://fantlab.ru/autor238 Fantlab displays all the works, categorized into novels/novellas/short stories/essays sorted in chronological order (and you can sort by other criteria as well) that gives you a clear overview of the author's works. The book pages are hardly any better.
The only advantage Goodreads have over other sites is it's huge user base, and because of this, I'm afraid, we are stuck with it for a very long time and it's not going anywhere.
On top of this, the UI is horrendous. Just as one example, compare Goodreads author page, say https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3706.George_Orwell where the only useful things you could see is the short bio and the most voted books of the author with a similar russian site https://fantlab.ru/autor238 Fantlab displays all the works, categorized into novels/novellas/short stories/essays sorted in chronological order (and you can sort by other criteria as well) that gives you a clear overview of the author's works. The book pages are hardly any better.
The only advantage Goodreads have over other sites is it's huge user base, and because of this, I'm afraid, we are stuck with it for a very long time and it's not going anywhere.