I believe a method of also solving the possible feed congestion is by giving the user the option of publishing their progress update. Maybe not everyone wants their progress added to the feed, but also let people viewing their profile see what percentage/ page they're on.

We could allow people looking on a user's profile page to see what page or percentage they're at on their books. So, what if a user wrote a note in their progress update and wish it to be made public? Just give them a publish button on their progress update and it'll be pushed to the feed, and friends, followers etc can read their note (and allowing the option of marking words and sentences as spoilers, like with reviews.

I think it'd be awesome to see a friend reading a book in a series I finished and reading their notes in their updates and seeing their thoughts, feelings, predictions and theories. It might also be a good way of users determining if the book might be something they'd wish to read or avoid.

the way a (wildly unrelated) app I use manages this type of thing is when you 'follow' someone, you can choose what types of content from them you want to follow. maybe options could include reviews, finishing a book, changing up next, or journal entries? additionally, it might be nice to allow users to choose whether their journal entries are public, friends only, etc, since they might choose to put private notes in their journal entries. i'd really love to see an addition like this to the community page though!

Or maybe let us mark those friends who's journal updates we want to see on the community page? That way it's not cluttered and we still can stay connected to good friends.

Or or maybe on the community page there can be an option to mute journal updates or something?

@Abbie - completely understand! that's why I said add it as an option. Maybe make "mute" an option as well? One reason I'm having a hard time convincing friends to jump from goodreads is that they really like the community/discussion aspect. Some of whom have built a presence and community around their own reviews. Maybe there's a good compromise?

Hello! We could think about this, but a lot of the feedback we had in initial research showed that people thought other book apps' newsfeed were much too busy as you could see every single update people made on a book! People also like the fact they can write whatever they want, especially spoilers, when making progress updates.

But of course we'll keep this option in mind. :-)