I’m curious to hear about why you may or may not block a user? Do you use this feature? I’ve never been on a platform like this where it shows you comment unavailable to indicate that you are blocked.

I was recently chatting with another reader about the vibes of a book and they didn’t agree, but instead of engaging in further discussion (to which I would have loved to have heard what vibes they thought the book had) they blocked me. I’m kinda bummed and have never had that happen before.

I wanted to open the floor up to maybe understand better. I don’t think I would block a reader in that fashion. Maybe I would use the feature if someone was sharing triggering content related, but not to end a conversation. I’m just surprised and a bit hurt.

Edit: WOW. Thank you all for sharing your experiences, opinions, perspectives, thoughts. This has really helped me see this feature in a different light and was very helpful for me to read. I appreciate you all. 🫶🏻

What's with litfic including the r word now, why is this becoming a thing. Third book this year and completely unnecessary

Hi everyone, we have some community updates to share. Pagebound has grown significantly since the app launched in October, and to support this larger group we're revamping our Quest creation and community recognition programs.

We have decided to sunset the Top Contributor program. We started the program in the early days of Pagebound to recognize active community members and help build the culture. TC's created Quests, welcomed new users, answered questions, and helped us behind the scenes with beta testing, user interviews, and feedback. We are so grateful to the 80+ TC's who were crucial in helping shape the platform & culture as we built the v1 of so many features.

To make Quest creation and community recognition more democratic and community-oriented, we will have two paths for Quest creation:

• We will continue the community-voted List initiative, where each quarter Royalty members nominate Lists to be turned into Quests, and the entire PB community votes on the nominated lists. We will have 3 winners per quarter for a total of 12 list-to-quests a year.
• We will start a new program, community-voted Member of the Month (exact language TBD). Each month starting in the Fall, the entire PB community can nominate a user they believe embodies PB values. The user with the most nominations will be awarded a badge and the ability to create a Quest.

We will have more details on this new program when voting nears :)

Editing to add: Former members of the Top Contributor program who had Quests in-progress will be able to release those Quests. We have not put a time limit on this since curating a Quest takes a ton of work, and many hours have already been invested in these Quests. You'll continue to see some final Quests created by former TCs be released over the next months.

App + Product Updates The Discover People section got an upgrade: at the top, you'll see a Featured My Taste book that rotates daily, similar to the Featured Emoji. We highlight active users with that book in their My Taste section

We also fixed some small edge-case bugs related to progress updates + tracking. Reminder: you need to track your progress to see daily pages/minutes updated in your stats! So if you start & finish a book in the same day, you'll need to track progress still to see that graph updated (this is because there are some folks who don't track daily, and if we auto-tracked, stats would look very incorrect).

Thank you everyone for keeping this community thriving, PB wouldn't be what it is today without everyone's support & engagement. We can't wait to recognize new community members with these new initiatives, and are so excited to see what Quests y'all cook up. And of course, a special thank you to our Top Contributors who invested so much of their free time, love, and energy into this community. A round of applause for the (retired) TCs 👏👏👏

Happy Reading, Jennifer + Lucy 💜💙

Although I generally think it is best when an author can explicitly state that a character is neurodivergent, I understand that we have only had terminology that allows this for a few decades — and even that terminology is ever-changing as we understand what neurodivergence more. After reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, whose main character resonates with many neurodivergent readers, I started to wonder about other books with neurodivergent “coded” characters, especially those which were written in times when we did not have terms like autism, ADHD, and OCD.

I’m thinking maybe I’d like to make a list of such books, and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for said list?