I wouldn't be indifferent, but also I wouldn't defend keeping them in terms of having value outside of my sentimental affection for what I've written that's been up-voted.
Since they had rolling expiry of messages, based on what I've seen, a couple of years of forum posts for less popular movies, and a few months worth for more popular ones.
This seems unlikely. IMDB has always been extremely possessive of their dataset. Even in the shutdown notice, they take the effort to explicitly state "for personal use".
On the low-volume boards for not-so-popular movies, I've found some of the posts incredibly valuable, and all of that is now going to be out of the reach of search engines.
IMDb is one of the biggest websites in the world, and they're deleting a large percentage of the content on their site. Seems front-page-worthy if only for the scale of the content being lost, whatever your view of the value of that content.
their boards are pretty much only unique feature they offered, if i wanna information about movie, rate something or create my watchlist i have plenty of options
if i wanna discuss ANY movie i watched, i have ONE option which is being shut down in two weeks
which also means after shutting down boards i have no more reason to use their site and not switch to competition which i am already doing since i learned this news (deciding between TMDb and Trakt.tv at the moment, the latter one has even thread comments for each movie or TV show)
And not much of value was lost. Those boards had terrible usability. IIRC not long ago you could only see one comment per page and had to click on every single comment to read the thread.
That changed a little while ago but you still have multi-pages for comments and it's hard to keep track of who replies to whom. They also have these weird signatures which are completely impossible to distinguish from the body of the comment unless the poster used a different color or something.
Not that the discussions were generally very insightful, mostly celebrity gossip and flamewars.
IMDB's been expiring messages all along, so there isn't much there to backup. After reading this announcment, I wanted to save the fanboy comments for Cloverfield (2008) back from when it was first released, since I regard it as a classic example of the phenomenon, and they are already long-gone.
That was a terrible default setting, but you've always been able to change it, or at least you have been since I started using it in 2003-ish. You're right, though, it was an extremely poorly-designed bit of forum software with some baffling choices.
"We thought we would get a community of fans for free. We didn't realize that maintaining a community requires active engagement, setting rules for behavior and enforcing them. We really didn't think anyone would bother being a troll. This is all too expensive to do properly."
To be fair, IMDB have been at this game for a long time, they're not a random startup pivoting after 6 months. They've probably learnt those lessons a long time ago, I guess something has changed of late whereby keeping the forums stopped being worth the effort.
i think it might have something to do with litigation.
Wikipedia says that they have been sued by actors that got their age revealed on the message board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb#Litigation
And now California has a new anti-ageism law; wikipedia says "The bill forces IMDb to comply with requests by the actors featured on its pages to remove information about their age"
so they might have decided to close the message board for fear of litigation.
For one, complying with the law is pretty important. For another, when your livelihood is based on (to a non-trivial extent) your physical characteristics and appearance, having your age revealed, and possibly aging you out of more glamorous roles, is an important protection to ensure.
I have no idea why this was down voted, it seems like it was a calculated decision. Litigation can destroy a company (just ask Gawker). Being responsible, legally with consequences, for monitoring the entirety of your site for age disclosure is expensive. Not only to do it, but the cost of litigation for when you miss one. That's probably a big part of the calculation.
Someone suggested that it's because moderating is expensive, which is true, but IMDB has been moderating their site for a long time. I don't think the cost of standard moderation was a big part in the calculation, simply because they have been doing it successfully for years. I think they are also aware of the value of their message boards simply by tracking page hits.
Having said that, public figures are excluded from privacies generally granted to the public. There are plenty of public records of everyone that discloses their age, even though they are not a public figure. To pass a law requiring IMDB remove age disclosure with consequences is very bad law. Not only that, the people that are the "victims" have the financial ability to litigate. It's even worse if other publications like tabloids are excluded from this requirement.
But that undoubtedly cost IMDb money. Litigation on its own can be enough to sway the risk/benefit scale, even if the civil complaint is entirely baseless.
Will the law prevent age information on wikipedia articles? If i google an actors name and age first there is Googles inline information and then links to Wikipedia.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects services from being responsible for what users post:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
They may not be responsible, but if they're asked to take it down via DMCA request or a court order, they have to either comply or go to court. Obviously if it's other user's content, it's just easier to comply. Once these start coming in more frequently and adding up, the maintenance costs of that user contributed content add up as well.
Although it's widely used for general censorship, the DCMA is supposed to only cover copyright issues. So the parent comment's concern about "anti-ageism" posts would not be a DCMA issue.
I don't think you can say that IMDB's management is unaware of how to manage community engagement. It is an offshoot of a usenet community from the early 1990s and the founder is still actively involved in the site. IMDB is one of the oldest and most successful user-contributed media sites on the web.
I found these message boards useful in the past. For example when searching for movies based on parts of a movie script, more if these were obscure mpvies. I don't care about closing the message boards but the data should be archived.
It is incredulous they are calling two weeks notice "ample time" for people to organise alternative contacts with friends they may only know via a handle and manually archive their years of messages. I expected better from IMDb.
IMDb's message boards have terrible UX and are mostly devoid of good content. That said, I wonder how loyal posters on the boards will take this. I can't imagine how frustrated I'd be with a site if they suddenly decided to delete 10 or 20 years of my commenting history. E.g. what if HN or Reddit decided to delete comments and just kept story links?
as active user using boards for 14 years it's very frustrating, i don't really care much about past comments, but about inability to discuss anything new i will watch, it's part of movie watching experience, without all those discussions you don't know how much you missed during watching movie
i can only hope other major website (tmdb, RT, trakt.tv, metscritic) will take advantage of this and introduce boards for specific movies and TV shows (never used general imdb boards), because essentially imdb is dead for me since February 20, i can have ratings and watchlist anywhere, only reason i really kept going there were discussions
Sad. Usually when I have some question after having watched a movie, I can find the answer on the forum. But it seems all good movies have been made anyway. Maybe the era of movies are over.
plenty of good movies are still released each year, just the ratio of good vs the rest seem worse than in past or it's maybe nostalgia and i an becoming old, for instance recent Arrival was decent movie
Perhaps I'm oldfashioned but all the discussions that happen on the "social web" are very scattered, volatile and basically instantly forgotten. So I don't really find that a good argument to delete these archives. That they're overal low-quality discussions, that's true, though.
I guess it has more to do with "Focus", and that comes before "Nostalgia".
I agree. Keeping archives of decade old arguments between random strangers seems like a waste of digital resources. It's like taking and storing minutes for the water cooler conversations in your office. I wonder how many petabytes of forum content there is out there on the web
Yes, that's exactly the same what Sumerians did say back a few 1000 years ago. Why keep all these clay tables about ordering wine? Who is gonna be interested in that kind of stuff in 10 years?
Don't you think that such an archive would offer a nice glimpse into our current culture a few hundred years in the future?
For a certain definition of "nice", possibly. It's a little bit of a depressing thought that some future culture might find only our online comments and study our culture through that.
I've posted about this in other places on this thread, but after feeling the same way as you, I looked at some old movies, and found that most posts are fairly recent. It turns out that IMDB has been expiring posts all along.
Your argument is sound though. Comments on websites, even if filled with trolls and fakes ought to be treated with respect and saved for posterity, since they give an important insight into the current zeitgeist.
Oh, I don't know. I was a daily user of Usenet for years, but the vast majority of the time I don't miss it. (Yes, I know Google still has some unevenly preserved and mostly difficult to access portion of the content.)
Here's the point: if you put some of the great content that was created there 25 or 30 years ago in front of the current generation, what is the general reaction? A yawn, that's what.
It might be fascinating in a few thousand years, but I won't be around then, and the planet might not be either, so why should I care?
text is both information dense and highly compressible. this means that whatever's there doesn't take much space, and then additionally you can compress it up to 10-fold.
for reference, you can get War and Peace in 1MB (compressed), and all Wikipedia articles without images or videos fit in 50GB (uncompressed)
it's not arguments, there are plenty of intelligent discussions which can help someone watching movie years later, there is no surprise to see thread old 10 years answering your questions about movie and also people joining old threads and reviving them with other new people and seriously, flat forum with few comments is really in 2016 any storage problem? so lame YouTube videos are OK but storing few gigabytes of comments or decades is issue?
I see your point, but looking at size, you could take the comments from Amazon, IMDB, and probably Reddit combined and it wouldn't come close to the size of Instagram's archive, let alone YouTube. Text is probably the smallest format we have in existence which may make it less valuable, but also less expensive to keep.
Welcome to HN, 5_minutes, are you really saying that because you think these interactions are "instantly forgotten," that that's a reason to keep the archives?
No I am merely stating that the discussions on the social web are perhaps the new trend, but not necessarily a reason to discontinue the classic forum setup. Perhaps, for example, IMDb could've invested a little bit more on the usability and interface of the forums, instead of letting it die just like that. And then at least the conversation would have had an honest chance to be hosted on their own platform. Because as it currently is, it's not just on another platform, it's just lost....
It's a pity, the boards of not popular movies sometimes had very interesting discussions. I got in the habit always check the message boards after watching a movie.
I've never really posted though, just been a lurker. I hope the Internet Archive archives this in some form.
I also do the same, but recently have been doing less and less because, well, obviously, the level of discussion is so low (at least judging by more mature standards like HN) that is just a total waste of time. Even the gems are too sparse and too few to be worth the time lurking there.
It's the same for me. I've never posted because usually other contributors have already provided interesting observations or interpretations. If I have a question, odds are someone else in the past two decades has already asked the same question. While, I've noticed the quality of the discussion in inversely proportional to the popularity of the film, even for mainstream films you can identify the useless threads quickly enough or back away if/when they get derailed.
I recall occasionally finding some interesting trivia on movies or actors/actresses that I would not have searched out on my own. Some very interesting stories on meeting a star in real life, or having grown up with them when they were a child provided a bit of depth that more cut and dry places like Wikipedia don't include, and places like the tabloids wouldn't find interesting enough to print.
Unfortunately these interesting comments are also hidden in the midst of users asking "who else think X actor looks like Y actor?" and the plethora of happy birthday threads.
I do wonder how many actors actually visit their IMDB comments section.
As far as there only being one post per comment, that can easily be changed by clicking on the "flat" view instead of the "thread" view. I agree that it may not be the best default, but it's at least available.
i almost never visited general boards or actor boards, they could shut down those and i would not mind, but shutting down boards for specific movies and TV shows where people just discuss those it's just shameful
heck i would even pay for those boards some small fee to keep trolls away (though they ratio was not any sure than other websites, do this is made up reason, you could just ignore them and not feed them), since there is no other alternative
The younger generation or even people newer at the internet never learned how valuable those boards where. IMDb failed with the newer generation and that's why they are shuting them down (the fact that they have to spend resources to keep them up doesn't help either). The comments here (up until now at least) are a representation of their failure as everyone states that nothing of value was lost and most didn't bother with IMDb's boards ever (Hacker News' biggest audience IS that younger generation).
project on HN apparently don't watch movie or search superhero crap and other sophisticated stuff, otherwise it's hard to understand why would anyone agree with shutting boards where movie fans discuss movies, especially those less known and especially since there is ZERO alternative to easily find discussion board for some obscure movie you just watched where would anyone head
Amazon, the owner of IMDB, does not understand the value of community, apparently seeing it as a cost instead of as an opportunity. So instead of taking advantage of the knowledge and interest of 250 million users, they have given that community to Facebook. Instead, they should have given better tools to their users by making IMDB into a social network for movies. What a waste.
I've found some of my favorite movies on iMDB in recommended movies threads. It's sad that they don't think it's worth it to keep. I get that their forums are infested with trolls, but they could just relaunch it on new a platform. Hell take discourse, pick some good posters as moderators, move the good threads and archive the rest. Amazon is already doing the forum thing on DPreview, why can't they just copy the concept to iMDB?!
Amazon acquired Dpreview in 2007, but as far as I can tell it didn't change anything to do with the site or forums. Those forums have pretty much remained unchanged for a long time.
Less trolls on forums where the subject matter is focused, and requires interest in digital photography. IMDB subject matter can be anything related to movies including how hot this or that actor is, or how ugly or crap they are! This will spawn heated debate, but that's fine by me. A sad loss, the IMDB forums are amusing and reveal a lot of varied opinion and expression.
if you are looking for recommendations then taste.io or taste monster are better anyway, automated recommendations by imdb were always horrible, recommendations from users in boards were OK but i think you are better off with websites i mentioned
i will be missing discussions about different interpretations of movies, things i haven't noticed, plot holes,etc., it was pretty much my ritual in last fourteen years, finish movie and head to imdb boards for better understanding of movie (yes i am not guy watching comics movies and most of the mainstream crap) or discussing ideas about things not actually shown in movie to viewer
note after shutting down boards will be my movie watching experience severely affected, i can only hope some other movie site will introduce boards and welcome imdb refugees
at the moment - rotten tomatoes has boards implemented by they are read only, trakt.tv has threaded comments but not boards, metacritic and tmdb have nothing and that's pretty much it from sites which mean something and have some visitors, different subreddits are just pure mess to discuss movies, it has to be on page with movie information i can find quickly through Google without going through tons of reddit results
This just shows how Amazon is only interested in selling movies, not building communities.
Can someone recommend any other movie forum with similiar scale?
Since the announcement I've looked and haven't found anything. This is a huge bummer since the value in the comments were discussions outside of the larger movies.
I've learned many things about movies I've enjoyed and appreciated the other takes of movies I hadn't thought of.
If you do come across something, please let us know.
update - TMDb launched discussions yesterday, currently linked only from desktop, on mobile you have to add "discuss" at the end of URL or wait few hours until it will be implemented for mobile layout too
This is incredibly sad news. I have been a regular reader of IMDb message boards for over 15 years now. It's the last actual forum that I still visit.
There's so much valuable information stored on those boards, it's a tragedy to see it get deleted. Sure the most popular movie threads might be filled with toxic flamewars, but the long tail of more obscure movies has reasonable discussion and human recommendations of other similar movies. It's precisely this why I'm extra sad about this whole situation. It's not difficult to find a community to talk about the next Star Wars, but there aren't really any places where discussion (in English) about 20 years old Dutch movies happens.
Exactly. The good finds on the boards are worth the bad contributions - which could be managed with a bit of effort and changing the format.
The value of attaching discussion to a movie database is unmatched by any alternative.
Take for example the old obscure film Stalker (1979). We see discussions 4 pages long about the meaning of the dog in the film. Or this one, "Other 'visually beautiful' films?", and people respond with suggestions. This information will be lost, and the opportunity to create similar threads in a sensible place in context with the movie, also lost.
The point I was making is that non-mainstream films released a long time ago still have active quality ongoing discussion on IMDB.
I didn't invest a lot time choosing an example film. You're not happy with my choice in Stalker, then replace it with whatever you like that happens to have good discussion on the boards. Perhaps "Celine and Julie go Boating (1974)" would qualify as obscure...
Is anything considered obscure anymore? Before the internet if you wanted to watch Salo (Pasolini), you'd be out of luck unless some film festival was showing it. Now you can just grab the torrent and head to IMDB to join the discussion.
same here, been user for 14 years. since there was no alternative everyone headed to IMDb boards to discuss movie so you could always find someone, now after destroying the boards not sure where to go, since everyone will try to find some place to discuss movies, though there is none really with critical mass of users
i am thinking about trakt.tv though it's just threaded comments, but better than nothing since rotten tomatoes have read only forums and tmdb and metacritic doesn't have even that. my movie watching experience will be severely affected by lack of discussion after finishing movie, might as well watch less movies because of lack of place to discuss them
Though it's no replacement for a forum, my side project has been a web app that finds thematic links between films. I use it to find hidden gems and such. I've had zero traction here on HN, but Gizmodo just did an article on it:
Thumbs down to whoever decided to close the boards.
I'll miss being able to argue about why a movie is rubbish with someone who thinks it's fantastic, or vice-versa.
There's some great discussions on some of the movie boards where people talk about the stories and motivations of characters etc. Sure it gets heated sometimes, but that's life. You just navigate around that stuff and find things worth responding to.
Sending people to "Facebook" is not an alternative as there is no facility to divide discussion per thousands of movies over there, and... it's Facebook, the fast food of online discussion. It's designed more for small packets of latest buzz more than dedicated threaded topics. What a joke IMDB, they should fix their boards with post-limits, voting up/down posts, and community moderation.
The sad part is it's due to a very small amount of trolls that did a lot of damage. I can't help but be disgusted that these guys are now laughing about IMDB shutting the whole thing down because of their actions.
It's not clear at all. Probably what they mean is that out of every million unique hits, only a small fraction actually use the message boards. Meanwhile, the message boards, being dynamic, are expensive to host.
It's definitely expensive, but aren't they heavily AWS based? More importantly, aren't they an Amazon sub-company??
I understand that they could rearrange the resources elsewhere but I don't think, at least this time, it's a merely cash problem.
Yeah but that's corporate bullshit to avoid litigation by admitting there's a problem. As a company IMDB is not especially interested in movies or in the quality of the service they provide to users, only in maximizing the revenue stream from them. They have a very aggressive approach to gathering data; if any of your personal information shows up in their database it's virtually impossible to get it removed, for instance.
Well, it's time to come up with a better solution than 'don't feed the trolls.' I have been saying for years that trolling (the aggressive kind, not the witty mutual banter kind) is a serious problem and the response is almost always 'oh just don't give them attention, that's what they feed on blah blah.'
this ignores the fact that trolls and bullies systematically pick on people who are vulnerable and target their specific vulnerabilities. Telling people to just ignore it is equivalent to telling them that their injuries don't matter and you're not interested enough to help, and can't think of a single suggestion to do anything the problem they're experiencing. That is an implicit endorsement of the idea that aggressively trolling other people is basically acceptable.
Tech people believe in real ID because most tech people are leftists.
Leftists call racists "racists" because under their own set of values that's a horrible thing to say. Imagine if a tech guy was outed as a racist. That'd be the end of his career. Look at what happened to Brendan Eich when it was discovered he doesn't support gay rights.
What they don't understand is that there are more economy sectors other than tech and places other than San Francisco where your life won't be ruined if someone discovers you're a racist. So, real ID is pretty much irrelevant for a big part of the population. That's why it doesn't work.
A bit but I don't think anonymity is the root of the problem, although it's certainly an amplifier of bad behavior. But FB's 'real name' policy is frequently used to harass people by falsely flagging their account as spam, triggering an auto-suspension until the owner shows FB a copy of their photo ID.
Which is fucking bullshit when you think about it.
I remember hearing recently that using real names doesn't help with online bullying. Here's an article I quickly found saying they're more hostile when using real names[1]
> Telling people to just ignore it is equivalent to telling them that their injuries don't matter and you're not interested enough to help
No, it's equivalent to giving them a toolset to make many attempts at injuring them unsuccessful.
I'll be the first to admit that "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is a porous filter. But removing it because it's not perfect only makes people more vulnerable. Rather than finding a way to address things that make it through that first-pass filter, now the new solution has to fix everything at once. (As we've seen, you've already established that partial fixes are unacceptable.) Good luck finding a solution.
> Telling people to just ignore [...] is an implicit endorsement of the idea that aggressively trolling other people is basically acceptable.
Telling someone that life involves exposure to things they might not like and they're going to have to find ways to deal with it, is in no way an endorsement of those things. All it is, is not coddling.
Pointing to the existence of unpleasant things in life is very different from just shrugging them off. If you're really concerned, do something about changing the behavior of the antagonist instead of worrying that you might be 'coddling' the victims.
If you're really concerned, do something about changing the behavior of the antagonist
Once you suggest a mitigation strategy that doesn't have laughably bad cost/benefit in comparison to teaching coping mechanisms, I'm all ears.
Until then: stop telling me to "do something." I can't figure out how to fix the world for you, rise to the occasion yourself. If you do find it, it'll be easy to convince me to join.
It's not my job to do all your thinking for you. It's yours to figure out what the best strategy is to uphold the morals you claim to support.
But here's some suggestions to get you started. If you see someone trolling and hurting another person online, get involved in the conversation and attack the troll. If you see someone behaving like a nazi, remonstrate with them and if they won't stop, punch them. If you see someone trying to commit rape or murder, fight them and kill them if they won't surrender.
Most places do have rules designed to remove trolls. Like everything else in life, a balance is needed; focusing solely on either end of the interaction is not productive. Both sides need to be addressed.
If aggressive trolling is occurring, the trolls should be punished appropriately, but in the meantime, the intended targets should do what they can to prevent escalation.
Yeah but the targets already know that advice. It's like telling a rape victim 'stay away from creepy men.' That's not helpful advice in most cases, and it's doubly annoying when the advice-giver isn't obviously making any effort to confront the bad actors, but handwaving about the existence of rules or laws. It's not enough to just put a rule in place, bad actors need to be confronted and attacked for the bad behavior they engage in.
But we need to call people who pick on others "bullies".
As for scum who post threats, email pictures of dead people to their family members [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikki_Catsouras_photographs_co...], etc, we may need a third word. I can't think of a good one -- is there something like "pervert" but without the sexual overtones? Maybe "thug", although that also might not be the best choice? "Stalker" is used ironically too often. "Scum" sounds too over-the-top.
You know, I'm past worrying about the feelings of trolls. They're not owed fun or any protection for the activities they enjoy, and if they don't like getting kicked out of civil forums for acting like assholes then too bad.
I quite agree with you. I'm only saying that when you talk about bullying to third parties using the word "troll", sometimes the third party will imagine something less serious than is actually happening.
Ah, I see - I overlooked the fact of being rooted in internet culture for longer and more deeply than the general population sometimes impedes communication.
I'm always on the lookout for better words to get key concepts across so I'll add 'troll' to my list of terms that need a better descriptor.
The issue is that everyone has a different perspective on what constitutes "trolling" and what doesn't. These "civil forums" frequently develop a habit of banning anyone who tries to do anything other than shout more echos into the echo chamber on the pretext that they're "trolls" or otherwise unsavory community members. A policy that encourages such casual non-concern for participants is likely to result in some very one-sided outcomes.
Sorry, I don't think that's an accurate reflection of online social dynamics. Echo chambers certainly exist and I've run into that same problem myself, but I managed to disagree without disputing other people's freedom to participate in such forums, doxxing people, making death threats, or engaging in any of the other activities that obnoxious trolls are well-known for.
Even the word "bully" isn't strong enough. "Bully" is a diminutive term that sounds like it describes an unimportant/childish problem. (The word originally meant "lover" or "friend" in Dutch.)
When the target is an online community, I use the term "attacker" in the infosec sense.
When someone sends threats, I think the best term is "harassment."
I think "attacker" and "harassment" are both accurate but I feel that they are too clinical/adult/long/abstract for people to get angry about. You want words that a 5-year-old understands, and you want words that conjure an image.
> The word originally meant "lover" or "friend" in Dutch.
That doesn't seem very relevant though; modern day Dutch language speakers have absolutely no such association with that word — the word it came from is not in modern use and is unknown to most. Only a dedicated linguist would recognize the Dutch etymology of 'bully'.
In many cases, the community can do an acceptable job of moderating when given the tools to do so. There is often a core group within the community that tries to keep things sane. Back in the days of usenet, we had people who would moderate because they cared about usenet as a whole and their news groups in particular. Shared kill files, honoring their cancel posts... and for the most part, it worked.
Now days there are three different structures of social software that are dominating - and dealing poorly with trolling. There is the "the community does it all" but lacking the necessary tools to moderate. Reddit and Stack Exchange are the two that most obviously fill this domain - community moderators that scale very poorly. On the other hand you've got the "use a third party like discus" to host the comments. And frankly, that which has some significant lack of moderation tools for the people using it. On the third hand you've got the self hosted forums run by a company - news sites often have this. All moderation is done by the staff and that fails horribly in terms of making sure the comments are something that one wants to read.
While the don't feed a troll worked back in the usenet days where the entire community could ostracize the people (or actively remove their attention seeking ways by canceling messages or just not accepting those posts), those moderation tools haven't made it back into today's social software along with the ability to have a site that is able to be moderated by the community and has a strong enough core group to do the moderation without rapid burn out.
Don't feed a troll was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. It meant much more than just ignoring them, and the tools to ignore them were more available.
Meatball wiki has developed a specific approach based on soft security[1], Consumerium has a similarly based approach based on leveraging the lowest troll[2] vs sysop power structure.
"today, the word troll are both verb and noun, and are applied loosely to any outsider. If you don't like someone's manners, he is a troll. If you don't like a gadfly, he is a troll. If you don't like a philosopher, he is a troll. If you don't like a inquirer, he is a troll. If you don't like a humorist, he is a troll. If you don't like a teacher, he is a troll. If you don't like witches, they are, well, witches and must be witch-hunted. Thusly, from weirdo to witches, from teachers to philosophers, from gadfly to firebrand, from loner to gay, they are all trolls online at your call. Quick spun the guild of killfilers and troll-criers. Anyone who has contrariwise things to say or the manner of saying it is a troll." - "troll ignorance", Xah Lee
If you still want to comment on movies on IMBD but don't want to direct your comments to Facebook or some other website sign up on "The New Internet" (areyoureal.com) you can comment ON TOP of ANY page of the internet including movie pages located on IMDB.
Also, to your point our platform eliminates these malicious "trolls" you speak of. By authenticating each user, their real name will be attached to comments which means they are less likely to "troll" if it is attached to their reputation.
The watering down of the word "troll" made me suspicious, but what I've found is that in the last 15 years it seems like we've regressed in our collective ability to reason about online conversation.
It used to be the case that "flame" was a word people knew, and that flamewars were treated as flamewars. Team "not getting involved" would peel off from the conversation and warn people with positions at stake not to get involved - there was no productive disagreement to be had in a flamewar. The people who couldn't stay away _knew_ they were in a flamewar. Everyone else knew to just let it run it's course. Nobody's opinion who mattered would be dumb enough to be swayed, so we just ignored the flamewar until it burned out.
Unrelated: In same time period, a lot of websites have popped up with content and editorial direction that profit off of the fact people get trapped in perpetual flamewars; maintaining/replenishing their audience by pouring fuel onto the fire. I'm sure this is a coincidence.
Some of the best discussions on movies that I've been a part of are taking place on archival movie torrent sites. There are many passionate, smart, and well-educated film buffs around those sites that have a depth of knowledge that I haven't experienced in many other corners of the web.
I'm very interested in learning more about that sort of topic. Would you mind sharing some of those websites? If you aren't comfortable sharing them publicly my email is in my profile.
I rarely go onto Reddit these days. After their warrant canary disappeared and their CEO was caught editing comments, I feel like it's no longer a website I want to support.
There aren't any real alternatives though. Voat is like 4chan fucked some YouTube comments and then had a Danares Targaryen style demon baby.
Head to https://letterboxd.com — besides looking and working beautifully, it's designed from the ground up as a social movie site to find, review, track and share great (and awful) watches. The list functionality is superb — Best car chases? Submarine films? Movies where white people solve racism? Got it.
+1 for letterboxd. It offers both great value as a "single player" and a "multi player" website, and is in my eyes a model for what a social network centered around a hobby/interest should be like.
This looks interesting, as I use imdb mainly for lists, and they are too inconsistent to me - there's a watchlist, but no watched-list, for example. Or I haven't found it, because the ui is so inconsistent.
Does Letterboxd have the option to export your activity / lists?
Maybe Trakt would also be an alternative for you? They have a "watched" list as it's their main feature. Lots of media centers automatically submit what you watched to the site so it's great to keep track of things.
Here's what it looks like for a profile with some data:
on TMDb you have discussions, can import watchlist and ratings from IMDb lots you can create any list you want (watched but not rated as you mention for instance) plus of course it has discussions for each movie
I've been using Letterboxd extensively for 6 months now - after 13 years of rating everything on IMDB. The experience of rating and reviewing a movie is superior on Letterboxd, definitely. But when I need discussions about a movie, or if I need to know an exact detail (revenue, soundtrack,...), I still head up to IMDB.
If you still want to comment on movies on IMBD but don't want to direct your comments to Facebook or some other website sign up on "The New Internet" (areyoureal.com) you can comment ON TOP of ANY page of the internet including movie pages located on IMDB.
it doesn't have boards so it's useless as replacement of imdb boards, better use comments on Trakt.tv or try to convince admin of TMDb to reenable forums for each movie again
That looks lovely, but as most other movie communities there's no import option. After having rated hundreds of movies on IMDB and Trakt, I really don't like the idea of starting from scratch, again.
There are some really interesting things you find on the message boards:
- I once came across a nomadic TV watching club - they'd decide to watch a classic TV series, and then go to the board for that series to hold weekly discussions (you go in one week and see them discussing the first episode, then go in the next week and see them discussing the second, etc.). When the series was finished, they'd announce the next series they would watch and migrate to that board.
- At one point the board for Kingdom of Heaven was a bunch of history buffs discussion history (and occasionally mentioning the movie).
- Coming across threads that had been going on for over a decade was always interesting. Someone made a comment, a year or two later (long after they've left) someone else comes along and responds to them, a couple years later someone else responds to that, etc.
- The discussion of movie finances could be really informative, and definitely gave me a much deeper understanding of how things work and what it means for a movie to be profitable (basically, it's really complicated).
And of course, the boards were a great place for things like recommendations, up to date news, and learning about things you missed in the film.
I imagine they'll migrate somewhere. But they won't have the same opportunity to pick up random people as they float from board to board (they won't be nomadic anymore).
If you still want to comment on movies on IMBD but don't want to direct your comments to Facebook or some other website sign up on "The New Internet" (areyoureal.com) you can comment ON TOP of ANY page of the internet including movie pages located on IMDB.
The nomadic thing! Used to do something like that with random Internet forums, it was great fun :)
We had a small group of friends and/or religious zealots (Discordians) from all over the world, and we'd pick a medium-smallish webforum on a random topic and we'd go on safari. Dress up our avatars with little pith-helmets, register an account and uh, explore the local wildlife.
We didn't really try to disrupt or actively troll anything, just have a bit of fun and, well, basically we'd roleplay stereotypical Bri'ish explorers and I dunno it was hilarious :-)
Reactions varied widely. Sometimes moderators just got spooked because five new accounts registered all at once and they were acting silly and it looked like a troll invasion (but we were always nice and polite and we offered them tea) depending on their sense of humour, sense of adventure, sometimes we'd get banned within minutes, otherwise we'd hang around for a day or two, check out some discussions, actually being helpful if we could, just play in the "general discussion" sub or photoshop some pterodactyls on their memes. The better forums really got in on the joke, great times were had, and occasionally some of their forum members joined our little band. If we didn't get banned, we'd try to leave a link to the next place we would explore.
The cost to moderate the boards is probably not insignificant. The revenue they provided (directly) I'm sure made the decision pretty easy to make when looking at it only through the lens of a cold spreadsheet.
I find that weird though; message boards generate a lot of pageviews and are generally rich in content, so they would also generate a lot of advertising revenue.
The message boards on IMDB is nearly the only reason I ever go on IMDB, just after watching a movie. I never go there for their content since there are much better sites out there presenting the info (themoviedb), + there trailers are terrible slow to load (at least where I live) compared to Youtube or even Apple hosted trailers.
I just checked out themoviedb, but there's a lack of information compared with IMDB. For example technical specs of the film like aspect ratio are missing.
Actually, the CPMs are probably fairly low compared to the high-dollar CPMs IMDB gets on its main movie pages. And half the time the discussion isn't really branded per se, it's just banter between fans (or trolls). Forums can create high engagement from a pageview standpoint, but the content isn't really "controlled", so the CPMs are (I'm guessing) rather minuscule in the grand scheme of things.
Thumbs down to whoever decided to close the boards.
I'll miss being able to argue about why a movie is rubbish with someone who thinks it's fantastic, or vice-versa.
This would be a great opportunity for you to start your own film community then.
Not a sensible remark. Making a huge network of message boards attached to a major database of film, TV, actors and crew is not exactly something anyone can just throw together in their downtime.
"Hey IMDB fans, good news I've installed a PHP message board on some shared web hosting where you can continue the discussion". Errr.. no. That's not gonna cut it.
Keeping a board that's gone toxic on life support is not a good idea. They can always restart it later on with a better system. IMO, once a community hits the point where people are fighting each other because they both have competing ideas of what it should be about, the people who provided most of the valuable conversation have already left and there's nothing to do but shut it down and learn from your mistakes.
This would be a good opportunity for someone to build an independent message board layer similar to gitter or genius. Its been tried before unsuccessfully but sooner or later someone will get it right. As the web becomes more closed, this could be a platform for more open discussion.
the thing is it must have already big database of movies and enough users, only other sites meeting this are rotten tomatoes (disabled read only forums so apparently not interested), TMDb (nothing, seem they are not interested in this opportunity judging by discussion in their forum), Metacritic (nothing), Letterboxd (nothing and too few users) and trakt.tv (has threaded comments for specific movies, but also not that many users)
i talked with my friend running one of the biggest subtitles website who had obviously enough database of movies and TV shows, but he ain't interested because of legal responsibility for content of comments and need of expensive moderation, though i would think this could be outsourced to Disqus and legally comments would be stored on their servers
I can't understand, is storing pure text too expensive for IMDB which is owned by Amazon which runs half the servers of the planet? Why don't they keep the threads while disabling new discussions?
I've battled spam at another film site. If my experience is anything to go by, even mentioning the word "spam" is enough to make smoke come out of the operators' ears. They tried to delete the spam and abuse when it was posted, but some slipped through and leads to new support requests and new complaints even now.
If you are certain that the post has been deleted and you didn't do it, then there are two possible reasons: the message has been removed by a moderator or it has expired. Our boards are not designed to store messages indefinitely: after a certain amount of time older threads are removed from the board automatically. This process is called "expiry".
The rate of expiry is adjusted dynamically according to the posting traffic for each board. Threads are removed sooner from a board that attracts a lot of posts than they would be from a board with less activity.
Please keep in mind that the boards system is not meant to be an archival medium, and all posts are subject to expire and disappear sooner or later. This is intended to allow us to manage the resources consumed by each board effectively, and also to promote the ever changing flow of discussion.
I'll miss inane arguments about movies, but I'll be glad to see the back of the "Oh she's growing up fine" comments on under age actresses' profiles. Creepers are creepy.
Another piece of Internet History gets deleted, that's a pity. Personally it literally was the very first url I memorized back in IE3 times, and eventually first online user account as well (June 1999, wow, time flies).
They seem to be adopting the same public comment that NPR did when they shutdown comments - "we aren't shutting it down but rather we are simply 'migrating' community engagement to Twitter(and perhaps other social media outlets.)"
I find relegating community engagement to Twitter creates an uneven experience in that I have to go "out of band" to participate when I am already on the IMDB site. Also discussing movies(or any art form for that matter) via 140 characters is hard for me personally to take seriously.
I wish they had provided numbers for the volume that uses the comments section vs Twitter as it would have been interesting.
Maybe this change will create an opportunity for an alternate movie site?
339 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 385 ms ] threadif i wanna discuss ANY movie i watched, i have ONE option which is being shut down in two weeks
which also means after shutting down boards i have no more reason to use their site and not switch to competition which i am already doing since i learned this news (deciding between TMDb and Trakt.tv at the moment, the latter one has even thread comments for each movie or TV show)
That changed a little while ago but you still have multi-pages for comments and it's hard to keep track of who replies to whom. They also have these weird signatures which are completely impossible to distinguish from the body of the comment unless the poster used a different color or something.
Not that the discussions were generally very insightful, mostly celebrity gossip and flamewars.
That's the case on medium.com right now for comment replies. I was surprised to see how nested comments and replies work there. It's terrible.
their forums were horrible, but usable with flat layout and there was none alternative anyway, so no point complaining
"We thought we would get a community of fans for free. We didn't realize that maintaining a community requires active engagement, setting rules for behavior and enforcing them. We really didn't think anyone would bother being a troll. This is all too expensive to do properly."
Too many trigger warnings. Instead they should had said to the trolls to move to 4chan and re-implement the whole thing again.
And now California has a new anti-ageism law; wikipedia says "The bill forces IMDb to comply with requests by the actors featured on its pages to remove information about their age"
so they might have decided to close the message board for fear of litigation.
Someone suggested that it's because moderating is expensive, which is true, but IMDB has been moderating their site for a long time. I don't think the cost of standard moderation was a big part in the calculation, simply because they have been doing it successfully for years. I think they are also aware of the value of their message boards simply by tracking page hits.
Having said that, public figures are excluded from privacies generally granted to the public. There are plenty of public records of everyone that discloses their age, even though they are not a public figure. To pass a law requiring IMDB remove age disclosure with consequences is very bad law. Not only that, the people that are the "victims" have the financial ability to litigate. It's even worse if other publications like tabloids are excluded from this requirement.
In 2013, Pechman dismissed all causes of action except for a breach of contract claim against IMDb; a jury then sided with IMDb on that claim.
Then after the plaintiff refiled the suit:
"All claims against IMDB were dismissed by the court in March 2015, handing Hoang zero damages.[41]"
That is the only suit regarding ageism for IMDB which is a 26 year old company.
We are talking about one frivolous law suit in 16 years of an online presence. I would say by that the risk/benefit ratio is pretty decent.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
i can only hope other major website (tmdb, RT, trakt.tv, metscritic) will take advantage of this and introduce boards for specific movies and TV shows (never used general imdb boards), because essentially imdb is dead for me since February 20, i can have ratings and watchlist anywhere, only reason i really kept going there were discussions
I guess it has more to do with "Focus", and that comes before "Nostalgia".
Yes, that's exactly the same what Sumerians did say back a few 1000 years ago. Why keep all these clay tables about ordering wine? Who is gonna be interested in that kind of stuff in 10 years?
Don't you think that such an archive would offer a nice glimpse into our current culture a few hundred years in the future?
Your argument is sound though. Comments on websites, even if filled with trolls and fakes ought to be treated with respect and saved for posterity, since they give an important insight into the current zeitgeist.
Here's the point: if you put some of the great content that was created there 25 or 30 years ago in front of the current generation, what is the general reaction? A yawn, that's what.
It might be fascinating in a few thousand years, but I won't be around then, and the planet might not be either, so why should I care?
text is both information dense and highly compressible. this means that whatever's there doesn't take much space, and then additionally you can compress it up to 10-fold.
for reference, you can get War and Peace in 1MB (compressed), and all Wikipedia articles without images or videos fit in 50GB (uncompressed)
I've never really posted though, just been a lurker. I hope the Internet Archive archives this in some form.
I recall occasionally finding some interesting trivia on movies or actors/actresses that I would not have searched out on my own. Some very interesting stories on meeting a star in real life, or having grown up with them when they were a child provided a bit of depth that more cut and dry places like Wikipedia don't include, and places like the tabloids wouldn't find interesting enough to print.
Unfortunately these interesting comments are also hidden in the midst of users asking "who else think X actor looks like Y actor?" and the plethora of happy birthday threads.
I do wonder how many actors actually visit their IMDB comments section.
As far as there only being one post per comment, that can easily be changed by clicking on the "flat" view instead of the "thread" view. I agree that it may not be the best default, but it's at least available.
If their forums was moderated properly, that comment section could have been an enormous help to their agents.
heck i would even pay for those boards some small fee to keep trolls away (though they ratio was not any sure than other websites, do this is made up reason, you could just ignore them and not feed them), since there is no other alternative
can't edit my comment in my HN client
Can you elaborate? I checked out the DPReview forums[1]. They seemed solid enough, but no obvious connection to Amazon.
Does AWS have some forum-as-a-service product I'm not aware of?
[1] https://www.dpreview.com/forums
Less trolls on forums where the subject matter is focused, and requires interest in digital photography. IMDB subject matter can be anything related to movies including how hot this or that actor is, or how ugly or crap they are! This will spawn heated debate, but that's fine by me. A sad loss, the IMDB forums are amusing and reveal a lot of varied opinion and expression.
i will be missing discussions about different interpretations of movies, things i haven't noticed, plot holes,etc., it was pretty much my ritual in last fourteen years, finish movie and head to imdb boards for better understanding of movie (yes i am not guy watching comics movies and most of the mainstream crap) or discussing ideas about things not actually shown in movie to viewer
note after shutting down boards will be my movie watching experience severely affected, i can only hope some other movie site will introduce boards and welcome imdb refugees
at the moment - rotten tomatoes has boards implemented by they are read only, trakt.tv has threaded comments but not boards, metacritic and tmdb have nothing and that's pretty much it from sites which mean something and have some visitors, different subreddits are just pure mess to discuss movies, it has to be on page with movie information i can find quickly through Google without going through tons of reddit results
I've learned many things about movies I've enjoyed and appreciated the other takes of movies I hadn't thought of.
If you do come across something, please let us know.
https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5894e6e0c3a368089b000e1e?pag...
https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5894e6e0c3a368089b000e1e?pag...
other than that only place to discuss movies are comments in trakt.tv but they are pretty dead
There's so much valuable information stored on those boards, it's a tragedy to see it get deleted. Sure the most popular movie threads might be filled with toxic flamewars, but the long tail of more obscure movies has reasonable discussion and human recommendations of other similar movies. It's precisely this why I'm extra sad about this whole situation. It's not difficult to find a community to talk about the next Star Wars, but there aren't really any places where discussion (in English) about 20 years old Dutch movies happens.
The value of attaching discussion to a movie database is unmatched by any alternative.
Take for example the old obscure film Stalker (1979). We see discussions 4 pages long about the meaning of the dog in the film. Or this one, "Other 'visually beautiful' films?", and people respond with suggestions. This information will be lost, and the opportunity to create similar threads in a sensible place in context with the movie, also lost.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/board/thread/138657635?
I didn't invest a lot time choosing an example film. You're not happy with my choice in Stalker, then replace it with whatever you like that happens to have good discussion on the boards. Perhaps "Celine and Julie go Boating (1974)" would qualify as obscure...
Is anything considered obscure anymore? Before the internet if you wanted to watch Salo (Pasolini), you'd be out of luck unless some film festival was showing it. Now you can just grab the torrent and head to IMDB to join the discussion.
i am thinking about trakt.tv though it's just threaded comments, but better than nothing since rotten tomatoes have read only forums and tmdb and metacritic doesn't have even that. my movie watching experience will be severely affected by lack of discussion after finishing movie, might as well watch less movies because of lack of place to discuss them
i think better option would be enable forums on TMDb as they discuss here
https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5894e6e0c3a368089b000e1e?pag...
http://gizmodo.com/a-way-to-search-for-film-recommendations-...
/plug
I'll miss being able to argue about why a movie is rubbish with someone who thinks it's fantastic, or vice-versa.
There's some great discussions on some of the movie boards where people talk about the stories and motivations of characters etc. Sure it gets heated sometimes, but that's life. You just navigate around that stuff and find things worth responding to.
Sending people to "Facebook" is not an alternative as there is no facility to divide discussion per thousands of movies over there, and... it's Facebook, the fast food of online discussion. It's designed more for small packets of latest buzz more than dedicated threaded topics. What a joke IMDB, they should fix their boards with post-limits, voting up/down posts, and community moderation.
they don't explicitly say "we're shutting down because of trolls", but i think the message is pretty clear.
this ignores the fact that trolls and bullies systematically pick on people who are vulnerable and target their specific vulnerabilities. Telling people to just ignore it is equivalent to telling them that their injuries don't matter and you're not interested enough to help, and can't think of a single suggestion to do anything the problem they're experiencing. That is an implicit endorsement of the idea that aggressively trolling other people is basically acceptable.
Leftists call racists "racists" because under their own set of values that's a horrible thing to say. Imagine if a tech guy was outed as a racist. That'd be the end of his career. Look at what happened to Brendan Eich when it was discovered he doesn't support gay rights.
What they don't understand is that there are more economy sectors other than tech and places other than San Francisco where your life won't be ruined if someone discovers you're a racist. So, real ID is pretty much irrelevant for a big part of the population. That's why it doesn't work.
Which is fucking bullshit when you think about it.
[1] https://qz.com/741933/internet-trolls-are-even-more-hostile-...
No, it's equivalent to giving them a toolset to make many attempts at injuring them unsuccessful.
I'll be the first to admit that "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is a porous filter. But removing it because it's not perfect only makes people more vulnerable. Rather than finding a way to address things that make it through that first-pass filter, now the new solution has to fix everything at once. (As we've seen, you've already established that partial fixes are unacceptable.) Good luck finding a solution.
> Telling people to just ignore [...] is an implicit endorsement of the idea that aggressively trolling other people is basically acceptable.
Telling someone that life involves exposure to things they might not like and they're going to have to find ways to deal with it, is in no way an endorsement of those things. All it is, is not coddling.
And, perhaps, depending on the forum and the degree of confidence that you have the whole story, one should take action against the bullies.
Once you suggest a mitigation strategy that doesn't have laughably bad cost/benefit in comparison to teaching coping mechanisms, I'm all ears.
Until then: stop telling me to "do something." I can't figure out how to fix the world for you, rise to the occasion yourself. If you do find it, it'll be easy to convince me to join.
But here's some suggestions to get you started. If you see someone trolling and hurting another person online, get involved in the conversation and attack the troll. If you see someone behaving like a nazi, remonstrate with them and if they won't stop, punch them. If you see someone trying to commit rape or murder, fight them and kill them if they won't surrender.
If aggressive trolling is occurring, the trolls should be punished appropriately, but in the meantime, the intended targets should do what they can to prevent escalation.
We can keep using "troll" for people who are saying things to get people riled up [http://www.flamewarriorsguide.com/warriorshtm/troller.htm].
But we need to call people who pick on others "bullies".
As for scum who post threats, email pictures of dead people to their family members [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikki_Catsouras_photographs_co...], etc, we may need a third word. I can't think of a good one -- is there something like "pervert" but without the sexual overtones? Maybe "thug", although that also might not be the best choice? "Stalker" is used ironically too often. "Scum" sounds too over-the-top.
I'm always on the lookout for better words to get key concepts across so I'll add 'troll' to my list of terms that need a better descriptor.
When the target is an online community, I use the term "attacker" in the infosec sense.
When someone sends threats, I think the best term is "harassment."
That doesn't seem very relevant though; modern day Dutch language speakers have absolutely no such association with that word — the word it came from is not in modern use and is unknown to most. Only a dedicated linguist would recognize the Dutch etymology of 'bully'.
This also touches on one of my favorite essays on social software: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html )
In many cases, the community can do an acceptable job of moderating when given the tools to do so. There is often a core group within the community that tries to keep things sane. Back in the days of usenet, we had people who would moderate because they cared about usenet as a whole and their news groups in particular. Shared kill files, honoring their cancel posts... and for the most part, it worked.
Now days there are three different structures of social software that are dominating - and dealing poorly with trolling. There is the "the community does it all" but lacking the necessary tools to moderate. Reddit and Stack Exchange are the two that most obviously fill this domain - community moderators that scale very poorly. On the other hand you've got the "use a third party like discus" to host the comments. And frankly, that which has some significant lack of moderation tools for the people using it. On the third hand you've got the self hosted forums run by a company - news sites often have this. All moderation is done by the staff and that fails horribly in terms of making sure the comments are something that one wants to read.
While the don't feed a troll worked back in the usenet days where the entire community could ostracize the people (or actively remove their attention seeking ways by canceling messages or just not accepting those posts), those moderation tools haven't made it back into today's social software along with the ability to have a site that is able to be moderated by the community and has a strong enough core group to do the moderation without rapid burn out.
Don't feed a troll was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. It meant much more than just ignoring them, and the tools to ignore them were more available.
[1]: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity [2]: http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/Lowest_Troll
"today, the word troll are both verb and noun, and are applied loosely to any outsider. If you don't like someone's manners, he is a troll. If you don't like a gadfly, he is a troll. If you don't like a philosopher, he is a troll. If you don't like a inquirer, he is a troll. If you don't like a humorist, he is a troll. If you don't like a teacher, he is a troll. If you don't like witches, they are, well, witches and must be witch-hunted. Thusly, from weirdo to witches, from teachers to philosophers, from gadfly to firebrand, from loner to gay, they are all trolls online at your call. Quick spun the guild of killfilers and troll-criers. Anyone who has contrariwise things to say or the manner of saying it is a troll." - "troll ignorance", Xah Lee
http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/troll_ignorance.htm...
Also, to your point our platform eliminates these malicious "trolls" you speak of. By authenticating each user, their real name will be attached to comments which means they are less likely to "troll" if it is attached to their reputation.
It used to be the case that "flame" was a word people knew, and that flamewars were treated as flamewars. Team "not getting involved" would peel off from the conversation and warn people with positions at stake not to get involved - there was no productive disagreement to be had in a flamewar. The people who couldn't stay away _knew_ they were in a flamewar. Everyone else knew to just let it run it's course. Nobody's opinion who mattered would be dumb enough to be swayed, so we just ignored the flamewar until it burned out.
Unrelated: In same time period, a lot of websites have popped up with content and editorial direction that profit off of the fact people get trapped in perpetual flamewars; maintaining/replenishing their audience by pouring fuel onto the fire. I'm sure this is a coincidence.
And now I feel grumpy and old. :\
There aren't any real alternatives though. Voat is like 4chan fucked some YouTube comments and then had a Danares Targaryen style demon baby.
Here's what it looks like for a profile with some data:
https://trakt.tv/users/dewey
https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5894e6e0c3a368089b000e1e?pag...
https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5894e6e0c3a368089b000e1e?pag...
- I once came across a nomadic TV watching club - they'd decide to watch a classic TV series, and then go to the board for that series to hold weekly discussions (you go in one week and see them discussing the first episode, then go in the next week and see them discussing the second, etc.). When the series was finished, they'd announce the next series they would watch and migrate to that board.
- At one point the board for Kingdom of Heaven was a bunch of history buffs discussion history (and occasionally mentioning the movie).
- Coming across threads that had been going on for over a decade was always interesting. Someone made a comment, a year or two later (long after they've left) someone else comes along and responds to them, a couple years later someone else responds to that, etc.
- The discussion of movie finances could be really informative, and definitely gave me a much deeper understanding of how things work and what it means for a movie to be profitable (basically, it's really complicated).
And of course, the boards were a great place for things like recommendations, up to date news, and learning about things you missed in the film.
We had a small group of friends and/or religious zealots (Discordians) from all over the world, and we'd pick a medium-smallish webforum on a random topic and we'd go on safari. Dress up our avatars with little pith-helmets, register an account and uh, explore the local wildlife.
We didn't really try to disrupt or actively troll anything, just have a bit of fun and, well, basically we'd roleplay stereotypical Bri'ish explorers and I dunno it was hilarious :-)
Reactions varied widely. Sometimes moderators just got spooked because five new accounts registered all at once and they were acting silly and it looked like a troll invasion (but we were always nice and polite and we offered them tea) depending on their sense of humour, sense of adventure, sometimes we'd get banned within minutes, otherwise we'd hang around for a day or two, check out some discussions, actually being helpful if we could, just play in the "general discussion" sub or photoshop some pterodactyls on their memes. The better forums really got in on the joke, great times were had, and occasionally some of their forum members joined our little band. If we didn't get banned, we'd try to leave a link to the next place we would explore.
"Hey IMDB fans, good news I've installed a PHP message board on some shared web hosting where you can continue the discussion". Errr.. no. That's not gonna cut it.
i talked with my friend running one of the biggest subtitles website who had obviously enough database of movies and TV shows, but he ain't interested because of legal responsibility for content of comments and need of expensive moderation, though i would think this could be outsourced to Disqus and legally comments would be stored on their servers
Sorry if that sounded exasperated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/5s0iiv/slug/ddbugy5
ftp.fu-berlin.de (Germany) ftp.funet.fi (Finland)
PS: I have not verified them yet.
archive.org, were the data usually ends up, is protected by the law.
Future generations are likely to be disappointed already, since it seems, sadly, that IMDB has had a rolling expiry of message posts.
http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?boardswhydeleted
If you are certain that the post has been deleted and you didn't do it, then there are two possible reasons: the message has been removed by a moderator or it has expired. Our boards are not designed to store messages indefinitely: after a certain amount of time older threads are removed from the board automatically. This process is called "expiry".
The rate of expiry is adjusted dynamically according to the posting traffic for each board. Threads are removed sooner from a board that attracts a lot of posts than they would be from a board with less activity.
Please keep in mind that the boards system is not meant to be an archival medium, and all posts are subject to expire and disappear sooner or later. This is intended to allow us to manage the resources consumed by each board effectively, and also to promote the ever changing flow of discussion.
I'll miss inane arguments about movies, but I'll be glad to see the back of the "Oh she's growing up fine" comments on under age actresses' profiles. Creepers are creepy.
I find relegating community engagement to Twitter creates an uneven experience in that I have to go "out of band" to participate when I am already on the IMDB site. Also discussing movies(or any art form for that matter) via 140 characters is hard for me personally to take seriously.
I wish they had provided numbers for the volume that uses the comments section vs Twitter as it would have been interesting.
Maybe this change will create an opportunity for an alternate movie site?