Slashdot Mirror
IMDb Is Shutting Down Its Long-Running, Popular Message Boards After 16 Years (polygon.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: After 16 years, IMDb's message boards and the ability to privately message other users is shutting down, with many members of the community openly mourning the loss of the section. IMDb, which stands from the Internet Movie Database, is one of the world's biggest databases for film and television. According to the company, there is information on more than 4.1 million titles and 7.7 million personalities available on the site as of January 2017. The message board, which was introduced in 2001, reportedly remains one of the most used services on the website, but despite that, the company is getting ready to shut it down, citing a desire to foster a positive environment and serve its audience the best way it can. "After in-depth discussion and examination, we have concluded that IMDb's message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide," a statement on the site reads. "The decision to retire a long-standing feature was made only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic. Because IMDb's message boards continue to be utilized by a small but passionate community of IMDb users, we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they'd like to keep for personal use. During this two-week transition period, which concludes on February 19, 2017, IMDb message board users can exchange contact information with any other board users they would like to remain in communication with (since once we shut down the IMDb message boards, users will no longer be able to send personal messages to one another)."
Well, fuck you, that movie sucked anyway!
Sad day now that this message board is ending. I always enjoyed reading the comments about old movies, although I never posted.
there you go.
What all message boards need are ruthless moderators who re-write and/or delete posts that are stupid or trolling.
Obviously that cannot scale well... for now. One can easily imagine a "ToneAI" that fixes post to be less trollish or flamish. Then maybe we can all have nice things again.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The story's title isn't quite accurate, so I've gone ahead and corrected it.
"IMDb Is Shutting Down Its Long-Suffering, Vitriolic Message Boards After 16 Years "
The contents of comments sections and message boards are getting worse year-over-year, and IMDB's are no different. Through no direct fault of their own, mind you, it's just that as the number of users on the Internet continues to expand, those users are living up to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
That's half the usefulness of IMDB gone then, as the message boards were the perfect place to look for discussion of obscurities you noticed while watching something.
This has the taste of IMDB being deliberately crapified, due to the financial incentives of being an advertiser of movies and tv shows - a place where open criticism is not welcome (unless buried somewhere at the bottom of the reviews).
I have been reading the IMDB forums for about 15 years, and will greatly mourn their passing. I'd often head there after watching an older film, as users would have nearly always posted some interesting facts or retrospectives. The long-running thread about Blade Runner's impact on movies and culture at large was particularly fun.
If it's not improving or generating more revenue, it gets cut. Nobody wants to just keep providing the same service they provided yesterday anymore.
we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they'd like to keep for personal use. During this two-week transition period, which concludes on February 19, 2017, IMDb message board users can exchange contact information with any other board users they would like to remain in communication Ample time? Two weeks doesn't seem like much time to wrap up and move a community built over 16 years.
Amazon might allow people to comment on goods they sell from 3rd-party manufacturers, but now that they are producers of movies themselves, they will certainly not like to see negative reviews of them on their own web page.
IMDb's message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide,"
So what if only a minority find it useful? Turning off functionality that works, and took a fair amount of resources to create, is a waste and a shame.
You know how pedestrian crosswalk signals make a beeping sound for the benefit of the visually impaired? It's a very small minority that finds that useful. By IMDB's logic, that feature should be shut down.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The service might be popular, but if the hosting company is not making money from it somehow, they see no reason to keep it going. If they even tried to sell subscriptions or advertising, no one wanted to subscribe or not block the ads. Everything free eventually goes away.
There are exceptions. But the vast majority of the time when I clicked through to a message board, hoping to find some insightful discussions about the movie or TV show I just saw, the discussions were just kinda stupid.
I think online communities build standards, early on /. managed to set a standard where most comments are relatively thoughtful and that seems to have persisted as the site grew. I don't think IMDB ever managed the same and the message boards have just become a bit of an eyesore.
I stole this Sig
As a former sysadmin of a popular forum back in the late 90s, I can say that this form of social networking is definitely dying. Killed, as should be obvious, by the likes of Facebook. Basically the progression over time has been...
Usenet (for those select few with internet access back in the day)
Stand-alone BBS - the first real online social networking available to the public
Networked BBSs / online services (AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie, etc)
More general use of Usenet (around which time it became filled with spam and binaries, making it nearly unusable except for moderated groups)
The advent of the WWW brought the HTML based discussion forum, which ruled (and is still very much applicable) for the greater part of 20 years.
Hybrid, topic based discussion (Slashdot, reddit, etc)
Facebook and its various constructs (celeb pages, groups, and the totally unorganized comment discussion that originates based off of random posts created or shared by users).
The thing that concerns me in the Facebook era are the lack of organization, clear moderation (who is even in charge of which group?), searchability, etc, of anything on FB. Let me give you an example. If I want to work on my vehicle, I can search for the topic online, and find a discussion forum where owners of that vehicle discuss in great detail the problem I've encountered and how to repair it. That's not even possible with FB.
Anyway, after all that semi-offtopic rambling, I'll say this is not a good thing in my opinion that IMDB is shutting down their forums, because there is no adequate replacement.
Better known as 318230.
This sucks because I often made posts in there calling out issues with shows and also when shows were "done" that I could then reference later showing how awesome I was at predicting their demise.
The Joss Whedon guys must have actually read the forums because there have been a number of posts I made where they actually made changes to the show.
I liked the message boards a lot. They gave a bit of insight into the movies and characters you wouldn't get otherwise. Also, if you read a message board in a movie that came out a couple years ago you can see how the messages change from before the movie came out to afterwards.
Yes, there are griefers, but that's just the Internet. If you can't handle it, go elsewhere. Or, if you are IMDB, close up the communication forums.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
WooOO hOOoooo. that's all I needed to know. cya
I posted there rarely, but never trolled.
If you watched a film and didn't understand part of the plot, found something unrealistic, or particularly enjoyed something, you could head to the IMDB forums and almost always find a discussion about what you wanted to know.
Now that is gone. And it didn't have to happen. Pure corporate greed.
I must have spent too much time reading movie details, trivia, goofs, and background of various cast.
mfwright@batnet.com
The reviews and the message boards were the best part of imdb. That and the parental advisory section are the only reasons i really go there.
I wonder if they will keep the reviews part of it. If not, its a real shame. Many people put probably millions of collective hours into reviews and posts on there. To have it all simply deleted is a real waste of human effort, to future historians and to humanity at large.
One can only guess that this is due to financial constraints, which is sad. I loved being able to discuss small aspects of movies with equally passionate people on there. I had a period where i reviewed every movie that i watched, and can easily go back to see those still from 2003 and older.
Truly a sad day and a loss of original content from the birth of the internet age. One wonders if there shouldn't be laws stopping companies from doing this, similar to heritage housing laws that some cities have. This kind of info is priceless and will be more and more priceless as history moves on. Hopefully someone like the internet archive can archive it all before its too late.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I was literally just researching some films in the discussion boards. When you're looking up obscure films, the decade and a half of expertise that is buried in the comments and stories that people have — often by family members and friends of the cast and crew— are invaluable. Also useful are the tangential comments and links that take you from one title to another via the comments.
It was often just good reading.
Let's not be dramatic. This is not the burning of the library of Alexandria, but it's a unique resource and as someone said above, there's nothing close to a replacement in site. And if there was, there'd be no reason to go to it because it doesn't link from anything, or to anything.
They could at least zip up the archives and post them to the torrents for posterity. On the basis of killing off the comments, in my estimation, they've cut out a huge reason for me to visit their site.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
One of the best things about the message board was getting help with the name of a movie you had half forgotten. People were incredibly good at coming up with the correct title on the vaguest of clues provided.
To start an alternative to imdb, that isn't quite as commercialized as it has come in the past 15+ years.
Imdb was good back in the days where it was mostly a plucky upstart, providing forums to fans of assorted media work, and providing a detailed repository of information on each topic. But it has for a while been pushing towards a more carefully manicured appearance that is far more corporate than internet community.
IMDB: RIP!
Can't say most of the comments were useful.
In the old days before the USE*NET flame wars, we have film message boards where people posted useful reviews and film commentary, but ever since then, film criticism has become less and less useful.
I don't even bother reading the comments anymore, if it isn't one posted by professional reviewers, or by fellow Lifetime members of film societies.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
One has to add to this mix... the lawsuit brought against IMDB about their practice of publishing the real age of actors. Once you silence the masses you have completed the first step in information "management".
Peace out.
same as slashdot sounds like. Maybe they're considering the same.
"You just didn't understand it"
"Most boring movie ever made"
etc., etc....
However, in between, there were a lot of great postings about soundtracks, directors, subplots, scenes, that only true fans that had seen the film several times would have known or noticed. I'll miss these postings. Without them, I have no reason to use IMDB.
I'm sure what happened here is what seems to be happening on loads of other sites these days. Trolls and spam get worse every day, and at some point an exec or site owner does a cost/benefit analysis. What they inevitably see is that the vast majority of users on almost all sites never leave a comment, and the active commenters are generally a tiny fraction of the userbase. So the question inevitably comes up: "Why are we spending our time and money fighting trolls and spam just keep the forums going for 1% or whatever of our users?" Of course, generally these stats are exaggerated, and there's frequently less data or weight given to those who may just READ comments but rarely or never comment themselves. (I generally only comment on a handful of forums, but I frequently read comments on a dozen others at least occasionally.). But none of this seems to matter: all the site owners will see is "why are we paying people to delete troll posts again? Why do we even need these discussions?" What's unfortunate is that most established forums could easily adopt a moderation system that solves many of the problems just using volunteers... But for some reason site owners don't seem to want to do that most places.
I was literally just researching some films in the discussion boards. When you're looking up obscure films, the decade and a half of expertise that is buried in the comments and stories that people have — often by family members and friends of the cast and crew— are invaluable.
::
::
Let's not be dramatic. This is not the burning of the library of Alexandria, but it's a unique resource and as someone said above, there's nothing close to a replacement in site. And if there was, there'd be no reason to go to it because it doesn't link from anything, or to anything.
They could at least zip up the archives and post them to the torrents for posterity. On the basis of killing off the comments, in my estimation, they've cut out a huge reason for me to visit their site.
Absolutely agreed. I couldn't have put it better. This is terrible news. Yeah, sure there was quite a bit of crap there (with some films, a LOT of crap), but I've learnt some real gems from those forum threads. Funnily enough I've been meaning to finally sign up to them lately, as I've been watching a lot more films recently. Oh well...
I do worry just how much info will be lost though.
That's pretty fascist of you. In tune with the 'zeitgeist'.
Protecting a bunch of innocent people who just want to talk peacefully from the ravening mobs of trolls is not fascism. It's the opposite of fascist, it is the reasoned rule of law. It is being a police officer helping the innocent stay safe.
I'll bet you think the seatbelt in your car is fascist too. And the lock on your door.... and your door.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
rape is pretty much unrelated to the issue so fuck off with it
Your word of the day is...
Analogy (from Greek , analogia, "proportion"[1][2]) is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another (the target), or a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process. In a narrower sense, analogy is an inference or an argument from one particular to another particular, as opposed to deduction, induction, and abduction, where at least one of the premises or the conclusion is general. The word analogy can also refer to the relation between the source and the target themselves, which is often, though not necessarily, a similarity, as in the biological notion of analogy.
Analogy plays a significant role in problem solving, as well as decision making, perception, memory, creativity, emotion, explanation, and communication. It lies behind basic tasks such as the identification of places, objects and people, for example, in face perception and facial recognition systems. It has been argued that analogy is "the core of cognition".[3] Specific analogical language comprises exemplification, comparisons, metaphors, similes, allegories, and parables, but not metonymy. Phrases like and so on, and the like, as if, and the very word like also rely on an analogical understanding by the receiver of a message including them. Analogy is important not only in ordinary language and common sense (where proverbs and idioms give many examples of its application) but also in science, philosophy, and the humanities. The concepts of association, comparison, correspondence, mathematical and morphological homology, homomorphism, iconicity, isomorphism, metaphor, resemblance, and similarity are closely related to analogy. In cognitive linguistics, the notion of conceptual metaphor may be equivalent to that of analogy.
Analogy has been studied and discussed since classical antiquity by philosophers, scientists, and lawyers. The last few decades have shown a renewed interest in analogy, most notably in cognitive science.
Protecting a bunch of innocent people who just want to talk peacefully from the ravening mobs of trolls is not fascism. It's the opposite of fascist, it is the reasoned rule of law. It is being a police officer helping the innocent stay safe.
One big problem is, ruthlessness affects innocent people too. It creates more tensions, it creates more fears, thus general oppression, often leading innocent people to cause problems too in the longer term. Plus it generally provokes increasingly negative reactions, to complete chaos. It's quite natural to react strongly, even when you're at fault: in a stressful situation, it's even more difficult to reflect on yourself, and you simply react to the immediate counterattacks by more attacks, even though you are the one causing the counterattacks to being with, and if you would stop, they would often quickly stop too (although there sure can be some lasting consequences, but they most often will be less important than continuing to attack). You can't expect people to reflect on themselves, through more violence. It's a very counter-productive illusion that humans thrive in stressful and dangerous situations. We make do. "Trolls" generally make do by more "trolling", here or elsewhere.
An associated big problem is, you are trying to brute-force the end of consequences, without researching and thus generally without touching the causes at all. It's particularly problematic, as brute-force, direct or indirect, is often already one of the main causes why people act destructively. Thus you only further the problem.
As always, the problem requires to be addressed more deeply. It is of course far more difficult though, as it implies large philosophical, economical and educational changes. But it's the only way. Sure we can continue failing for some time, but it will not solve anything at all, and it will only be more painful. In a way, it is actually far more easier to change the entire human society, rather than continue to suffer so much.
If you can't handle it, go elsewhere. Or, if you are IMDB, close up the communication forums.
That IS IMDB going elsewhere. You are literally complaining about them doing what you are saying they ought to do. You are also mixing up "can't" handle it with "don't want" to handle it. Everyone who doesn't feel that putting up with an avalanche of shit on a daily basis is a worthwhile way to spend time goes elsewhere. All that leaves you is the avalanche of shit. What's the point in having one of those?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Between 1999 and 2005 I observed on my 3 favorite 'hobby' sites:
favorite website one: it was sold to a new owner, a jerk. The owner put fire on political flames that had little to do with the subject. [I'm not revealing what these sites are to prevent publicity and further damage, and libel lawsuits against me!] I think he thought it was fun, and he had a political view to push. I also think he thought it might push up the numbers of posts--gee, a few years later we discovered he bought the site, pumped it up, and put it up for sale. Unknown to the community. Instead, the forums on the site became moribund in about 2 years. I mean, if you posted about the difference of a Barbie Doll with the Mattel logo on the buttocks versus on the bottom of the left foot you were attacked for being in league with Al Qaida or the KKKi---well, I gave up on that site. BTW, the Barbie doll concept is based on reality, but the site was some other hobby, not Barbie Dolls.
Site two: A Yahoo group. It had dozens, hundreds of post a day, and in those days a lot of people had every post emailed to them. The mods on this site quickly deleted any post that was not strictly on-topic, very narrow focus. In those days and that site a lot of people hated off-topic posts that clogged their emails. It survived Forum Wars pretty good, and is still around. (But Yahoo Groups are all dying off).
Site three: another Yahoo Group, focused on a Brand Name of some technology. Boorish behavior drove off a lot of people. Boorish behavior and personal attacks drove off at least one woman, and I believe many other women left without notice. Meanwhile a civil war erupted between two factions promoting upgrades and repairs of the equipment, with more vile posting. I had the leader of one faction upgrade and repair one of my units. I posted about it and got savaged by the other faction. I faded away after that--I was in it for fun. It wasn't fun anymore. The owner/moderator was mostly an absentee, too busy at work. One of the factions 'won,' mostly by persistence. It still exists, but is fading.
Site 4. Same technology as site one. It adopted the approach that it was a family site, and all posting should be appropriate for people 14 years or older. Tellingly many of the members and mods were women, and mothers. The joke was they deleted all posting that wasn't nice to people 14 years old and younger! As the competing site one went into a downward spiral, this site grew by leaps and bounds. Yes, it is moderated: appropriate for people 14 years or older, politics, religion, and hot button topics (Global Warming references are deleted quickly) are urged not to be discussed, with the mods having the final say. The mods have a mild slant--they cut a little more slack to one side of the the political spectrum than the other (not my side), reflecting the membership which I would is slightly more toward one side of the spectrum. But, mostly it works. I like to go there because it is free of political reductionism (where any topic can be twisted to supporting a political viewpoint, or conversing attacked for promoting a viewpoint), free of trolling, and hostility free zone, pretty much. This is my conclusion: it is possible to have a website with forums that do not deteriorate. It requires a community, volunteers, and a vision that a high percent of the members like, or accept--maybe accept as a necessary trade off, but accept, and agree on--maybe not consciously.
Now, I don't know if this can be scaled up to something like imbd. It works because there are a bunch of volunteer mods who make it work. Imbd or, say, The Wall Street Journal would need either 1,000 time or more the number of moderators or some software to make a go, and we all know how accurate software is about doing this!
Prediction: this post will get some snarky comments by several assh*ts.
Thank you.
Oh, site 5: /. Is the other option. In seems to be thriving but also has a lot of snarky comments. Hmmm.
I use IMDB a bunch, but the comment sections are mostly drivel
a) X looks like Y.
b) X is Hot!
c) Are X's boobs real?
d) X looks old in this movie.
e) X should be in Z next movie/show.
Inside each of these threads are usually people who agree and claim to be related, have met the person and found them kind, generous, nice.
Or
people that have met the person and found them to be nasty.
As proof,
All drivel.
Movie fans are by far the most obnoxiously opinionated, toxic motherfuckers on the internet.
I often watch a movie or TV show and then go to IMDB to see what others say. I did it three times last week. It's rarely been as bad as following a few CNN comments or other negative venues. This is a shame and I feel sure is being ended not for any real reason other than somebody had nothing better to do couldn't leave things the way they were.
I noticed IMDB forums starting to turn into crap during Breaking Bad. Tons of people were jumping on and seriously discussing the show, but a lot of other people just logged in to crap all over everything.
Then I guess about 1 1/2 years ago they changed things a bit - requiring either a credit card or a phone number to post - and I wasn't giving either of those things out so I stopped posting.
I think the forums were manageable until they got too popular. I still sometimes hop over and read comments on things that I'm watching and was even tempted to chime in yesterday when I remembered I can't post there anymore.
I've appreciated the IMDB forums, only posted a few dozen times in ten plus years.
So where are the alternative sites for forums? Rotten Tomatoes?
Thanks
Office Space had a long message board thread in which people shared their depressing work experiences, with unlikable coworkers and terrible bosses, and it was really funny, but it's been deleted. It's the only thing I would have missed, but since it's already gone, who cares?
I imagine that you're right about the cost/benefit analysis, but the problem for them is that for every user that posts, there are probably 50 that only read the message boards. I'm one of these users, having only posted about 4 or 5 times in over 10 years there while on the other hand reading them relatively frequently. I agree completely with the GP poster.
This was the main reason why Id go to IMDB (even tho I did not post often). Sure there would be troll post, but it was very easy to just ignore them. Finding interesting discussions and point of views was well worth ignore the odd comment. Seems like a drastic move. What alternatives do we have now?
Can't have anyone complaining about Hollywood, can we?
Sucks that they shut down - I really used to love reading through the posts there, even if there were lots of trolls. Starting to see quite a few replacement boards pop up. Best I've seen is MovieChat (moviechat.org). Anyone seen anything else?
Am I the only one who THAT is the reason you went to IMDB?
The message boards is where you could find people discussing when the next season of a show was going to premier, talk about how the filming of an upcoming movie is going and if it is delayed, discussion about a recent episode, talk about a plot, alternative theories on what something in the plot meant, news about long lost actors/actresses, tidbits about a show/movie etc..
Other than looking up the list of actors which you can just do on Wikipedia, the message boards WAS THE REASON you went to IMDB.
Now there will be zero reason to go there, and just go to wikipedia insted.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.