Slashdot Mirror
IMDb Hits 25
An anonymous reader writes: The year 2015 heralded a number of notable Internet milestones — the humble .com domain name reached 30 years of age, while both eBay and Amazon reached the grand old age of 20. That the Internet Movie Database, a gargantuan film and TV show encyclopedia better known as IMDb, began 25 years ago as a pre-Web hobby project and is now one of the top 50 most visited websites on the Internet is a notable achievement. "IMDb is the only pure Internet company that can celebrate its 25th anniversary," said Col Needham, founder and CEO of IMDb, in an interview with VentureBeat.
My own take on IMDB is that it's the internet poster-child for "commercial exploitation of user generated content". It's an identical model to Slashdot, though I bet Amazon makes a shit load more money from IMDB than Dice do from here.
I think the main problem is the sense of scale (volume of visitors) is lost on most people. That, and determining how much money a website makes is pretty difficult for experts, and impossible for a regular web user to do.
The reason the deceit is so strong, is that it's a similar experience to giving money to a homeless person on the street. Most people "feel good" about this, yet if they discovered later that the guy actually lived in a nice house and simply went out on the street to make money, they would be upset and pissed off.
Same with IMDB and other websites based on user driven content. When people go there and contribute, they think they're doing something good and helping other visitors like them. They think they're being "nice" and to some extent they are, so many would claim that it's a win-win for contributors. Yet if they later discover that the website generated $X millions for it's owners, then I think (and rightly so) most contributors would be pissed. Why do we tolerate these parasites?
It's exploitation and its dishonest, which is why community sites really need to be owned and run by their contributors. Compared to 20 years ago a successful website (millions of visitors a day) can be now run on easily accessible hardware. Hosting costs simply aren't that high any more. I am mentioning this because a common phrase thrown around online is "hosting isn't free" and "we need them [the owners] to run the site". This "woe is us" mentality in support of the site owners is just a corporate pity smokescreen to play down the value of the revenue generated by the site. Community hosting does not need to be expensive, and does not need the guaranteed up-time of the commerical interests.
In closing, I'm simply advising you to think carefully about where and how you contribute online. Your efforts (my own post here included) will not be rewarded, while at the same time the website owner is making actual cold hard cash. All other "rewards" such as "reputation", "karma", and so on, are just ego stroking distractions and ultimately pointless. As for most experiences in life, to ignore the ego is to be truly free.
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Not APK