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TimeOfDeath

IMDb closing their message boards

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http://www.imdb.com

IMDb Message Boards Announcement

IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. As part of our ongoing effort to continually evaluate and enhance the customer experience on IMDb, we have decided to disable IMDb's message boards on February 20, 2017. This includes the Private Message system. 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. The decision to retire a long-standing feature was made only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.

Increasingly, IMDb customers have migrated to IMDb's social media accounts as the primary place they choose to post comments and communicate with IMDb's editors and one another. IMDb's Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/imdb) and official Twitter account (https://twitter.com/imdb) have an audience of more than 10 million engaged fans. IMDb also maintains official accounts on Snapchat (https://www.snapchat.com/add/imdblive), Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/imdbofficial/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/imdb), and Tumblr (http://imdb.tumblr.com/).

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). We regret any disappointment or frustration IMDb message board users may experience as a result of this decision.

IMDb is passionately committed to providing innovative ways for our hundreds of millions of users to engage and communicate with one another. We will continue to enhance our current offerings and launch new features in 2017 and beyond that will help our customers communicate and express themselves in meaningful ways while leveraging emerging technologies and opportunities.

They've received virtually nothing but negative reactions on their general message board (http://www.imdb.com/boards) and the movie/tv/actor/etc. message boards that I've been to recently. There's a dedicated message board for every movie/tv show/actor/crew member/etc. that's listed on imdb. How social media will replace that is beyond me.

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Finding it hard to see any downsides to this. I often use IMDB but I've never seen anything of value in those "message boards". IMDB should stick to their core mission of being a database.

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Honestly, I'm not surprised. They already made the first step of obscuring the forums behind an imdbpro link or whatever that's called.

And I stopped checking the imdb forums on a casual basis some years ago after the threads seemed to become more... toxic, politically driven and altogether less pleasant to read. The best thing about the forums was the obscure knowledge/insider tidbits, going even deeper than the trivia section, but over time it was harder to filter those out in the sea of "I hate this movie because stupid reasons" "well, ur a **** and should die". I find it hard to blame imdb for trying to make their lives less difficult, heh.

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I don't know if it's because I'm not a film buff, but I've never liked/trusted IMDB's ratings. Some great movies get mediocre reviews, and on the total flip-side, movies which are damn awful get really good ratings.

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I didn't even know they had one.

Forums are good for relatively small communities; when there are too many people there are just too many jackasses and the signal-to-noise ratio becomes infinitesimal.

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It's a shame to lose over a decades worth of posts, even if most of them are hilariously low quality. I guess they don't want people contradicting the high star rating and top 250 space the studios pay for.

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Dragonfly said:

I don't know if it's because I'm not a film buff, but I've never liked/trusted IMDB's ratings. Some great movies get mediocre reviews, and on the total flip-side, movies which are damn awful get really good ratings.


It's the general problem of any rating from the public. People only feel compelled to review something when they have a strong opinion (positive or negative), so you end up with a weird mid-point between extremes.

The Top 250 list also inspires insipid displays of fanboyism on the site. For example, thousands of people rating Planet Earth as 1/10 purely so Breaking Bad would leapfrog it into 2nd place. It's utterly saddening.

Personally I've always found Rotten Tomatoes a much more palatable method of compiling reviews.

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Trying to start a random discussion on Facebook about a specific movie is pointless, you'll either get no response or thousands which will take days to scroll through and read.

Nobody benefits.

IMBD is overreacting to the clusterfuck that was last year, punishing millions for the bad behavior of hundreds and sock puppet accounts. Really they just needed to have more mods and account limits.

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Gez said:

Forums are good for relatively small communities; when there are too many people there are just too many jackasses and the signal-to-noise ratio becomes infinitesimal.

I think they can scale *if* they're properly moderated. That's the main problem with such features - most sites just add social functionality without giving it much thought - "oh, I'll just add a comment field here". In reality when you invite social engagement like this you're opening the door to a community to form, and without supervision or oversight it has the potential to deteriorate into a toxic shitfest.

Far from being "just a comment box" this stuff is actually a really hard problem, one I'm not convinced even large social networks have solved yet (check out Twitter's continuing struggles to deal with abuse). It makes a lot more sense for sites like IMDB to just not bother with such features if they're not prepared to take them seriously - the Internet already has plenty of other mediums for discussing things.

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fraggle said:

seriously - the Internet already has plenty of other mediums for discussing things.


None as good as dedicated message board for even the most obscure movie, Facebook and Twitter are not good for long discussions. Layout is awful, Reddit is only good for the latest releases or popular movies.

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fraggle said:

Far from being "just a comment box" this stuff is actually a really hard problem, one I'm not convinced even large social networks have solved yet (check out Twitter's continuing struggles to deal with abuse). It makes a lot more sense for sites like IMDB to just not bother with such features if they're not prepared to take them seriously - the Internet already has plenty of other mediums for discussing things.

Right. Facing a choice whether to:
1) do nothing and keep the cesspit rotting, making imdb look bad;
2) throw tons of more money at proper forum administration;
3) excise the problem out entirely and redirect debate elsewhere,
it becomes a fairly obvious choice. It hurts the dedicated community, but imdb's scope is a bit beyond that, I'd guess. As Gez pointed out, most people probably don't even know the forums were there.

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Yeah this hit me pretty hard when I found out. Besides Doomworld this was the only forum that I frequented every day, so this shut down is essentially removing 40% of my online interaction with other people. There's no denying that the message boards have gone downhill recently, it started to get noticeably bad around 2014 so I figured that this was only inevitable. Still it makes me very sad that I won't be able to discuss the film that I like or dislike with others. Hopefully an alternative movie discussion board, with more moderation, appears sometime soon.

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I didn't even know IMDb had message boards. I thought it was just literally a database and nothing more this whole time. I can't imagine that though, a board for each and every everything to do with movies sounds like a total clusterfuck to manage.

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When I've dug far enough to find message boards they seemed pretty toxic and dated. Messages from years ago because no one posts on them. Then again maybe I'm only looking up 10 - 20 year old movies.

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Every movie/tv show/actor/etc. page has its own dedicated message board at the bottom of it, I wouldn't say it's hidden. It was an amazing feature where people could talk about something, no matter how obscure (assuming it's listed on the site). My ritual was pretty much "watch/remember/read about something and then go to the imdb page to read about it and lurk its message board" while ignoring the troll posts (seems like they're less prevalent in the more obscure/less-mainstream stuff).

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Message boards do seem to have very little business value to a site like IMDB. I think even comment systems will probably disappear similarly. All they do is concentrate a small group of non-unique visitors that cause lots of traffic and operational overhead without much in return. Better to have people talking somewhere else, like reddit, to drive unique views to your site instead. Ultimately that sort of social media talk is dull and useless to everyone but the business owner who is getting more unique visitors. This is the brave new world that we live in.

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Benjogami said:

I think even comment systems will probably disappear similarly.


If one good thing were to come from this it would be for other sites such as youtube and news websites to disable their comments as well. Those comments sections really attract congregations of the worst people to be found on the internet.

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Jaws In Space said:

If one good thing were to come from this it would be for other sites such as youtube and news websites to disable their comments as well. Those comments sections really attract congregations of the worst people to be found on the internet.


Yeah, news sites for sure should and probably will get rid of comments eventually. Although for something like Youtube where the content is user-made, I think comments are important to the ecosystem because it's a good way for content creators to communicate with viewers, to keep them engaged and measure their engagement. Things like subscribers and regular views are important there, so you want people to sort of "live in" your channel. I think stuff like IMDB, news, blogs, and other article-based formats benefit more from viral and clickbait sources than from people living in them. Transient traffic. But I guess it really depends what kind of content you have. If you're one guy writing for a very specific political perspective, for example, it's probably good to have a regular community visiting your blog. But if you're CNN, yeah, turn that garbage off.

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In most cases Youtube content creators specifically rely on fan interaction to thrive. Comment suggestions, giveaways, general feedback, etc.

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Benjogami said:

But if you're CNN, yeah, turn that garbage off.

Certain established news sources, like the BBC for example, have done a reasonably good job of providing discussion features in a decent way, by actively moderating and curating the comments they get. To some extent this kind of thing is an established journalistic tradition - most traditional newspapers have a comment page for example. It would seem silly to completely ignore the possibilities that the Internet presents. It just needs to be taken seriously, just like how it would be ridiculous for a newspaper to print every single incoherent and garbage comment it was sent in the mail.

There's also the problem of astroturfing - the extreme right in the UK learned pretty early on to mobilise its supporters on news boards, for example. There used to be a blog that did a pretty good job of documenting some of their awful comments.

Jaws In Space said:

Youtube

Youtube comments are of course renowned for their poor quality, although I think they have something of a worse reputation than they deserve. It really depends on the video owner to properly moderate their comments, and I've seen some channels that actually promote and foster good discussion. It's still relatively rare though. Reddit is another one that's similar - there are a few good subreddits where moderation is enforced, and a ton of shitty ones where either no moderation is enforced or the number of subscribers is too large for the moderation to scale.

My personal opinion is that we're still in something like a stone-age of moderation tools. We've seen a steady stream of new social networks appear (and disappear) over the years and the successful ones are usually good at carving out a particular niche. My expectation is that in the next few years we'll see a popular new social network appear that places moderation and anti-abuse features as its central, most compelling feature. I've seen a real hunger for such a network, it's just that nobody seems to have built it yet.

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If you told me ten years ago people would cheer for the death of Internet free speech as it's increasingly filtered to be "appropriate", and if you told me this would happen on video game forums about creating and sharing new content deviations from the original game, I would have called you a loonie.

The years to come are going to make the good old artists of the 90s "selling out" a joke. People who cave for money tend to be ambivalent about it, but nowadays people are trading their morals and feel justified in their new ideology. The hunger for authoritarian measures from either side of the political compass is unprecedented.

I'll agree with fraggle on one thing - I think we're going to see platforms with increasingly restricted freedom, and I think this will be well received. This is not a swing from left to right anymore, but from decades of individualism to ingroup mentality. Pick a side, one of two, else you're the enemy of everyone.

I have strong hopes in the next generation, though. Teenagers don't seem to care much for this partisan bullshit. (Leftist) media reports they're increasingly conservative, but it seems more a desire to give the middle finger to anyone trying to shoehorn them into a neat little box. Perhaps what the Internet really needs is for anyone over the age of 25 to fuck off. Widespread communications work when people are open to new experiences and perspectives. This is more true of young people than any other group, as our beliefs tend to fossilize with age.

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Phml said:

If you told me ten years ago people would cheer for the death of Internet free speech as it's increasingly filtered to be "appropriate", and if you told me this would happen on video game forums about creating and sharing new content deviations from the original game, I would have called you a loonie.


If you think that a messaging platform that is mainly used to distribute vitriolic hate speech, low brow insults and in general being the epitome of human stupidity is considered holding up the banner of free speech, yes, I might agree with you.

But as things stand, th IMDb 'forums' have no value, it's virtually impossible to go into any discussion that isn't tainted by retarded American political garbage. Most intelligent people only still go there to gloat at the ongoing shitfests. The one thing that doesn't happen there is some civilized discussion of the movies the forum is supposed to be about, you can be sure that sooner or later some idiot comes along and screws it up, and if you have something with even a remote political context, expect to enter a virtual shithole of epic proportions.

As a recent example, have fun reading the discussions about "Hidden Figures". It makes you lose faith in humanity's future reading that virtual diarrhea that's getting posted.

Also, take one good guess why here at Doomworld most political threads end up in Post Hell. It's for the same reason that you cannot discuss matters with people which have strongly biased political opinions. I haven't seen a single such discussion which did not turn bad over the course of its existence because at the end people were at each other's throats.

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Those 'Things I learned from watching X' threads can be mildly entertaining. Otherwise, very little of value will be lost. The fact that they still refer to themselves as "message boards" is probably an indication that they've outstayed their welcome.

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This extremist view of "freedom of speech" actually appears to be a relatively recent invention (past 7-8 years at most) that lots of techies seem to have taken to mean that no moderation may ever be enforced, lest you be accused of the unforgivable sin of "censorship". In reality all the good discussion forums / sites I've ever used on the Internet in the past two decades have been ones that have taken moderation seriously and taken active measures to promote good discussion.

The Internet supports free speech because anybody can set up a website to say whatever they want. That doesn't mean that private website owners have to allow people on their site to say whatever they want, but plenty seem to have been convinced by this idea that they're a bad person if they moderate their sites, and that they have to act as common carriers (like the Internet itself) in order to stay neutral. Honestly, I think we have more than enough such sites at this point and I'd much rather see some alternatives where that explicitly isn't the base assumption. Once such sites exist, I think that's where the most interesting discussion is going to be occurring.

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I'm Kinda of sad that this is happening, It was always so entertaining to go read the message boards of a particular movie after just seeing it.

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Jaxxoon R said:

I didn't even know IMDb had message boards. I thought it was just literally a database and nothing more this whole time. I can't imagine that though, a board for each and every everything to do with movies sounds like a total clusterfuck to manage.

Same with me.

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Apparently, the message board is actually closing because dumbasses in management think they can somehow get more traffic and ad revenue by using Facebook than their own site. Makes no damn sense considering the huge amount of traffic they get from the boards alone.

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