We’re seeing a mass exodus from X (formerly known as Twitter) as a protest of owner Elon Musk. Former X users are mad that the billionaire buddied up to Donald Trump throughout his reelection campaign and spent roughly $120 million to help get him back into the White House. And there’s another corner of the internet that is experiencing something similar.
Folks are leaving Goodreads, which was purchased by Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon in 2013, for The StoryGraph, a Black woman-owned company. Founder and CEO Nadia Odunayo, who started the book-tracking app as a side project, launched the space in 2019.
Chatter about the app started online and on BookTok, the TikTok community of book lovers, years before the 2024 election. But since the election — when Bezos restricted The Washington Post, which he also owns, from endorsing a presidential candidate, and later congratulated Trump on his win — more and more people say they are protesting Amazon by switching to Odunayo’s app.
The StoryGraph currently has 3 million users, up from 2 million in December 2023. The app had 25,000 sign-ups on Nov. 11 ― 10 times the average daily number, according to The StoryGraph’s newsletter. (That said, it’s still a much smaller reading community than Goodreads, which has 150 million users.)
“Here’s the thing, I never set out to create a Goodreads alternative,” Odunayo told HuffPost.
“And I actually think that helped me, because if I had said ‘I’m going to build a Goodreads alternative,’ one, I might have been intimidated by this… but the other side of it is, it would have been limiting,” she said. “Because if I just tried to build a Goodreads, I just would have looked at Goodreads and been like, ‘OK, what can I do that’s better?’ — and that wouldn’t have been different enough.”
“But to build something independent of Goodreads and just listen to my customers, I feel like I have ended up building an alternative, but it wasn’t just based off of [Goodreads],” she explained. “It was based off of, ‘Where’s the gap in the market?’”
The StoryGraph does indeed address gaps in Goodreads’ product, while also being a necessary space for people interested in social change.
“I think especially after the results of the election, more and more people have just become more conscious about the things that they’re supporting and recognizing that, just as much as our dollars are votes, the apps and things we use are also little…
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