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)."
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.
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.
The much less widely known/accept corollary to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is that online communication is the only place you can hope for something approaching real honesty or a real glimpse into how other people think. The lies and customs of 'RL' interaction are never more visible than when set alongside their internet equivalents. Truth and rationality may, in some distant future, win out as the default mode of human discourse. But if so, they will win out by the trial and error accumulations of a hundred million flame wars, not by forcing everyone to use their real names online or some other similarly horrendous scheme that asserts the superiority of traditional bullshit over internet bullshit.
I think WotC got rid of their forums just a year ago as well. This is... a bad trend. Because none of these major social media sites that are replacing the old forums, not a single one, takes a strong free-speech stance. At one time Reddit might've qualified as an exception but, sadly, this is no longer the case.
The human race invented "the lies and customs of 'RL' interaction" for good reasons
Rape is a sound evolutionary game-theoretic strategy for gene propagation too, thus explaining its prevalence. Therefore is ethical and an institution worth preserving?
probably to save civilization.
Civilization has very, very little in common with "civilization" as it existed when modern humans first evolved. The numbers of people one interacted with were much smaller, specialized jobs and leisure activities limited and probably rigidly formalized by cultural custom, dying of hunger or disease a constant risk, etc.
Letting the id roam free just because you can is not necessarily a good idea.
Honesty and id are not synonymous. The subs that were closed were apparently closed because someone was trying to "dox" the man who assault the white nationalist twat on camera. Trying to determine the identity of a criminal is now "doxing", which is worthy indiscriminate censorship. And the only feedback I got when I tried to point this out in Slashdot's article on this was a single -1 Troll mod.
Because regular, traditional RL interactions and ethics do not value a concern for the truth or consistency. We're supposed to be virtue signaling over the nazi. Duh. Ditto lying about the contents of Trump's pussy-grabbnig tape, inserting the words "for consent" after "I don't wait" when there was already sufficient context (including the phrase "they let you do it") to indicate that he was not talking about sexual assault. The lie is deemed completely acceptable by dozens of mainstream news organizations, actually bordering on "invisible", entirely because of the context surrounding it.
(I'm a leftist who's repeatedly spoken out against Trump, incidentally.)
The echo chambers of RL have been duplicated online, you see, and the vitriol is a result of those echo chambers being challenged. I'm not saying those challenges are widely successful, but they are at least happening and from what I've seen *some* progress is being made. For now. But there are very worrying developments at Twitter and Reddit and Youtube, and the current political climate certainly does not bode well.