
Unsubscribing from Goodreads email notifications - wilsonfiifi
https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2017/04/11/please-send-help/
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r3bl
I don't get why is this on the homepage. They clearly have a button to
unsubscribe from all the emails. And it works. I found it in maybe two days
after registering for an account and realizing that they send an email about
everything. Never received an email from them since then.

Even so, that's a crappy reason to hate a company that could be solved in so
many simple ways.

~~~
Ensorceled
It's on the homepage because it is a somewhat humorous comment on the bad UX
of putting the unsubscribe all at the end of pages of unsubscribe checkboxes.

I'm surprised you're clever enough to have found the button but are unable to
figure out why this made it to HN's front page ...

~~~
r3bl
Isn't it obvious to check how much of the checkmarks there is _before_ you
start unchecking them?

In order to do so, you have to scroll to the bottom of the page. If you scroll
to the bottom of the page, you'll notice that there's a "save settings"
button, and without clicking on the bottom, you'll be unchecking them for
nothing. And if you notice that button, you're going to notice "unsubscribe
from all emails" link right below it.

I don't see that as being more crappy UX than the rest of the Goodreads
design.

~~~
tragic
If there are about 50 possible actions to take on the page, and one of them is
literally the last action, even after the 'save your settings' button, then
that action is about as non-obvious as it can get while still being present in
legible text. Flip it around - if you wanted an action to be obvious, would
_you_ put it there?

As a comparison, look at meetup.com, a similar endeavour in a lot of ways:
their email notification screen[0] has a 'turn off' button before any of the
individual checkboxes, which turns them all off (except password resets and
the like).

[0]
[https://www.meetup.com/account/comm/](https://www.meetup.com/account/comm/)

------
netzone
I'm an avid reader, and I can say that Kindle, Goodreads, Google Books all
fill the use case of finding new books to read, but is very lacking in the
tracking department. I've had some small plans of making an app/site that just
focuses on the tracking part, making and managing a list of books to
read/already read with local ratings. I also want the ability to subscribe to
an author or a book series and be notified of new releases.

I haven't been able to find a good service that does this in a good way. I
have a prototype working pretty good right now, the only problem is that the
book databases I use isn't that good sadly.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> I also want the ability to subscribe to an author or a book series and be
> notified of new releases.

I also want this and am kind of surprised it doesn't exist (or if it does, I
haven't seen it). "Following" certain authors on Kindle doesn't seem to have
done anything useful, either.

~~~
samdk
You can have Goodreads do something like this, in the newsletters and other
mail section you can check the 'send me the monthly new releases email', 'only
send this to me if it includes an author I've read', and click the customize
button and deselect all of the genres.

And then you end up with an email which has new releases by authors you've
read before.

I generally have no use for most of what Goodreads does, but this combined
with the ability to pull my Kindle purchases in automatically is pretty
useful.

------
lucideer
While this is a practice that infuriates me in most cases, this article is
quite hyperbolic if you take just a minute to look at the examples given.

Goodreads has a long list of checkboxes, ticked by default to send you an
email in the case of an event, so it looks at first glance like they'll be
bombarding you. But looking through the list of events, 90% of them are both
significant (involving a deliberate action of a friend of yours on one of your
account posts/reviews/&c.) and relatively infrequent (extremely infrequent in
the case of my own account, which I would guess actually has above average
activity in the context of all Goodreads users).

They should untick a few of them by default - e.g. the newsletters. However
most of them make sense (unless you're of the opinion that all services should
default to opt-out on all notification emails absolutely).

Also - anyone not reading the entire 100% of the article is going to miss
Goodreads' redeeming feature at the very end.

------
dhimes
I'm glad to see that the Goodreads comments aren't agreeing that Goodreads
sucks. I'm not that kind of reader, but my wife wrote her first novel about
Bulgokov's writing of Master and Margarita, and it's getting good reviews on
Goodreads (she was on NPR a couple of weeks back). Googling her book is
actually how I found Goodreads.

For the interested: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31243075-mikhail-and-
mar...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31243075-mikhail-and-margarita)

------
lithos
If there isn't an unsubscribe button in the email I just mark it as spam or
autodirect to a "I'm really bored" folder.

------
shash7
Even meetup.com has the same problem, abit to a lesser extend.

------
andoon
Myself, instead of unsubscribing, I filter all emails. I stop receiving them,
and they still have to pay for the email they send to me. It works every
single time and I don't have to play any games like the ones in this article.

~~~
r3bl
There are no games. You just scroll to the bottom of one URL[0] and click on
one label. This article is bullshit.

[0] [https://www.goodreads.com/user/edit](https://www.goodreads.com/user/edit)

~~~
Ensorceled
That's _actually_ the punchline of the article, which you missed. It's bad UX
to put the button at the bottom and causes people to go through the checkboxes
unnecessarily.

