For Bethany Baptiste, Molly X Chang, KM Enright, Thea Guanzon, Danielle L Jensen, Akure Phénix, RM Virtues and Frances White, it must have been brutal reading.

Last summer the author Elizabeth Gilbert postponed a historical novel set in Siberia after hundreds of users criticised the book, which had yet to be published, as insensitive amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The author Sarah Stusek appeared to take offence when a Goodreads user, Karleigh Kebartas, gave her debut novel Three Rivers four stars instead of five and commented that the “ending was kind of predictable, but other than that it was incredible”.

Publications such as the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post hold journalists and reviewers to professional standards, Patrick argues, whereas Goodreads lacks such oversight.

The site was launched in 2007 by Otis Chandler, a computer programmer, and Elizabeth Khuri, assistant style editor for the Los Angeles Times’s Sunday magazine (the couple married in 2008).

Shelly Romero, a freelance editor and writer based in New York, points out that most of the debut authors whose books that Corrain disparaged on Goodreads were people of colour, who already have an uphill struggle to get their work published.

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