Hi anon! Goodreads is an online community for the discussion of, reviewing, and sharing reading lists of published books. Users can create profiles for authors and then pages for their books, creating a page where other users can interact with discussion and rating the book on a scale of one to five. It’s a pretty neat resource, and a fun way to find other people who are interesting in reading the same kind of things, and also to find more books to read based on what you like.

So… pretty cool..for books…

[a summary and links and resources]

The issue for fanfiction being on there for me is

• GR is a resource for published works
• If an author wanted to have a profile there, they would make one
• Works are being posted there and profiles are being created without the knowledge/consent of the author, often with personal information, bios and links to other social media (and in some cases non-fandom profiles, which is dangerous for people who want to keep their fandom and non-fandom lives separate)
• Fanart/manips/graphics that are sometimes created for the fic (and sometimes out of context things) are uploaded right alongside, also without knowledge/consent of the artist
• The review system creates pressure for authors who feel like their fic (which may or may not be a long term project, gone through rigorous rounds of editing like published books do, and might just exist because the author wanted to write a crackfic for their friend or something) to be judged alongside published works, taking the context outside of fandom [more in ingberry’s post] 
• Fic writers often rely on a reader’s basic understanding of the canon work and those characterizations to supplement their writing, i.e. if I mention “Derek Hale” and “fire” in the same sentence, a TW fan would automatically go “ah yes its angst time” but a casual reader would just “???”
• AO3 and OTW have created a safe space where works are legally protected, linking those works out of context could potentially put authors in danger of litigation, copyright infringement, etc etc, especially those who write RPF

This issue blew up recently because a lot of people just found out about their profiles/works being up there, and reactions have varied from “eh, whatever” to feeling grossly violated (which I understand if personal photos of you or your family/pets were put on your profile without you knowing.)

• Stoney’s post about fanworks taken out of context, and resources on how to remove your profile/works 
• Hatteress’ succinct barebones summary and also resources 
• Stoney on answering questions like ‘oh it’s just like Pinterest or a reclist’
• Hatteress on answering questions on how this is not the same as legitimizing fanfic as literature