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)."
Sad day now that this message board is ending. I always enjoyed reading the comments about old movies, although I never posted.
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.
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.
No, "passionate community" is the key. Likely it has completely devolved into people mindlessly screaming at each other that either Trump sucks or Trump rocks. It may even be so over the edge that he does both at the same time.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 message boards were the only reason I visited their site. While its true that trolls and SJW (pro and con) topics abound, there were also plenty of good information about the films in question. It seems to me that the real reason why they are shutting them down is because they aren't interested in the administrative overhead (dealing with complaints, etc.) to maintain them. Perhaps they are making enough money from the corporate side and paid subscriptions that they feel that they no longer need page hits from average users.
Only newer or very famous titles and people boards got heavy trolling and or crapflooding. It was annoying on GoT, but if you get out of that 10% popularity bubble the they dissolved if not disappeared completely.
Most older films and people boards had little traffic and often had useful trivia or information about the actors -- where are they now, etc. Some films really had useful discussion on the topics.
And the per-title/person board format meant you could post about a small-role actor from the 1940s or 50s and it wouldn't get lost in the shuffle and the low volume meant your post could stick around for years. I've gotten replies to posts 4-5 years later.
This was one way of doing message forums right.
So many others are borderline useful when useful at all.
And what's stupid is the forums themselves were so basic I bet they took no storage, little code and little cpu overhead.
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.