By Anna Hill
The credits of a film just rolled. The last episode of a television season just played. There are no more pages to turn in a book. Don’t have anyone to talk about it with? With the recent boom in media-tracking apps, this is almost no longer a problem. Anyone can log onto these websites or apps, read what others have to say about a piece of art and even post their own thoughts about it. Apps like Letterboxd, Goodreads, Serializd and The StoryGraph can connect users to each other, allowing their friends and communities to give them recommendations over more addicting and algorithmic social media like Instagram or Tiktok.
Letterboxd, an app for logging and reviewing films, has seen an exponential increase in users since 2020. A similar app used for logging television, Serializd, launched in Letterboxd’s wake. Both apps have a similar user-interface (UI) and “gamify” the experience of watching movies or TV by including functions like lists and favorites. The more time someone spends on the app, the more likely they are to watch something new they would not have otherwise watched. Chemistry major Brooke Robinson said about Letterboxd, “I like seeing what others have to say about the films I’m watching. Especially my friends!”
However, Letterboxd is not the only media-tracking app to gamify the user experience. Goodreads, another popular app for media-tracking, allows users to log the books they read, see what their friends are reading and check out reviews for books they want to read. Many interviewees that are Goodreads users, however, have noticed the “archaic” UI.
According to Wayne State Marketing and Management student Lalitha Akella, Goodreads’s features, such as listing books by genres and providing recommendations for books, are “basic, but good.” There is clear interest in Goodreads as a community-builder for readers and a promotional platform for authors. Why not make it easier to use? The answer: A 2013 deal with Amazon that underestimated the technological upkeep Goodreads would require. Because Goodreads was “painfully slow” in creating the change that Amazon wanted to see in book sales, the economic advantage to maintaining an app like this grew smaller and smaller to the point where these functionality complaints are now ignored almost completely.
In addition to functionality issues, Goodreads has also suffered from “review-bombing,” which occurs when an influx of negative reviews, mainly from bots, plague a book’s rating, sometimes before the book has even been released. Review-bombing has a tendency to hurt marginalized authors. As an anonymous interviewee pointed out, “looking for information about any book always brings up Goodreads as the second or third result,” and if a book is review-bombed, the first result will be negative. The fun Goodreads provides is, for many, not worth putting up with these issues brought on by a large corporation like Amazon, who evidently cares more about profit than the community an app like Goodreads could serve. There is a growing lack of trust between the users and the app.
In the wake of these Goodreads controversies, software engineer Nadia Odunayo developed an app called The StoryGraph, which removes some abused features of Goodreads, such as a comments section on reviews and direct messaging. Odunayo, who had no corporate investors in The StoryGraph to bend to the will of, also had no interest as of February 2025 in being bought out by Amazon, even if Amazon wanted to buy out its main Goodreads competitor.
When asked which one she prefers, English Education major Katie Youmans said that “[The] StoryGraph is less of a large corporation than Goodreads. It has statistics and tracking features that Goodreads doesn’t have [like] rating books with quarter and half-star ratings,” something another interviewee also identified as a functionality issue with Goodreads. First year Philosophy graduate student Scott Peyton also said, “The UI [of The StoryGraph] is better.”
While creating a companion app to Goodreads, The StoryGraph focuses on “the solitary reader” rather than the social aspect to a reading community. Not only does this solve some of the review-bombing problems of Goodreads, it focuses more on the user and the content they consume, further gamifying the reading experience as Letterboxd and Serializd do for film and television. The users are what keep apps running, so tailoring the app’s features to their interests in a non-invasive way seems to be what’s keeping apps like Letterboxd, The StoryGraph and Serializd alive.
Although everyone has different reasons for keeping track of the media they consume, Film Studies major Jonathan Urbin said, “I think [media-tracking apps] add a new layer of interactivity to media that I already love to consume. Also it’s a fun way for me to personally catalogue and recall what I experience.” For large companies getting involved in these media-tracking apps, it is important to remember what makes them special to their users because without users, who will happily go somewhere else to do their tracking, there would be no app.
Anna Hill is a senior at MSU majoring in English – creative writing. She has done editorial work for The Current and the Red Cedar Review. In her free time, she likes to listen to music and watch movies.