What is going on with Goodreads?!!

12.03.07

It's funny.
Goodreads has such a potential for building literary/art appreciation communities, yet over the past couple of months, it has, indubitably, begun to go the way of myspace, which is itself, inevitably, going the way of the bison, or Eddie Murphy's career.

I say this, because every few days, when I log on to my account, I now have 5-10 "friend requests" from people all over the freakin' place, whereas when this site was in its infancy, I would only occasionally receive such requests, and the people were either those I knew personally, or who took the time to type a message which displayed their interest with my readings/writings in particular. However, when I select any (or, usually all) of these newer friend requests, my internet browser navigates to a Goodreads profile that shows some random person I've never ever seen in my life (and who certainly did not include a personalized message with their friend request), and who has, apparently 983 friends on Goodreads.

"Oh!!Oh!!! I can't belIEVe it! They actually want to be my friend!!!! This is amAZing!!!!!! LOLZJKOMGROFLMAO!!!!!!11"

Bullshit. You don't have that many friends. You just send out mindless friend requests to every page you come across, for the sake of drawing attention to your book, or your book reviews. Further, in many cases, one can observe profiles listed under pretentious, obviously-fabricated names, like, let's say - Etienne ... Nothing wrong with that name, but Etienne, who lives in Greensboro, NC? BULLSHIT. Anyway, you see these pages, and to the right, their column of 4,927 "friends", and, HUGE surprise: they are every one of them female. Kind of reminds me of that particular brand of power tools that you find on myspace, who have Tila Tequila, Christina Dolce, and six-to-twelve more random girls baring their plastiq asses in thongs on their "top friends" space . . . only, instead of being concerned with covering up their penile insecurities with aspirations of tribal tattoos, spinning rims, 50 Cent, and porn, the "come-on-girls-be-my-friend" guys on this site read books. "Look at me, I'm sensitive, and I LOVE Nicholas Sparks' writing!!! AND Kenny G!"
Right.
Don't encourage these users, please. They are not charming. They may very well be good people. But, they are, in fact, well-groomed poséurs.

Friend Request *DELETED*

Wow, didn't mean to side-track like that!
All I wanted to express, really, is that this site is being mis-used for purposes which it was created as a contra for; that is, where myspace (and other social-networking sites) have become nothing more than excuses for marketing products you probably don't want, creating friends lists that are larger-than-yours, and leaving tacky, flashing HTML scripts (that do little more than cause computers to run incredibly slow) as comments on friends' pages, lieu of actual communication, Goodreads was built with the potential to foster learning, quality digital networking, and building learning communities for discussion and the enrichment of culture.
What a novel idea: We have this - the Internet - the greatest source of information ever available in history - and, it can actually be used for something other than sharing porn and pirated music!! I have an idea:

Let's talk about books. Let's suggest literature for each other. Even, let's write our thoughts about the literature we read.

Let's cultivate culture and art appreciation, which will further induce the creation of more art in the future.

Let's not try to use this as an e-popularity tool to boost our fragile little egos and appear to be more desirable than we actually perceive ourselves to be.
Let's not use this as an excuse to push products, or the sales of books.
(I'm absolutely all for supporting underground literary voices; I'm a writer myself - but don't try to spread your stuff all over the place, regardless of who is actually interested. That's called SPAM, and it tastes like SHIT.)

Come on, folks - you see why we can't have nice things?


This site was created different; I, for one, would like it to stay that way.
So, if you agree with me, help out, by boycotting Goodreads users who do little to prove that they aren't actually robots designed for pushing products on social networking websites.

That's all.
I hope someone gets a laugh, at least, out of this - it isn't meant to be pretentious or holier-than-whatever.