10 ms·

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-

by exodust 10y ago

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.

bluedino 10y ago
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.
- virtuabhi 10y ago
  IMDB says the decision was based on traffic and data. They don't mention trolls.
  - alecco 10y ago
    Right
  - notatoad 10y ago
    "we have concluded that IMDb's message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority..." they don't explicitly say "we're shutting down because of trolls", but i think the message is pretty clear.
    - mynameishere 10y ago
      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.
      - tatoalo 10y ago
        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.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    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.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  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.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Real ID helps but no one wants that.
    - detaro 10y ago
      Looking at the Facebook comment sections some news sites include, I'm not convinced it actually helps.
      - naranana 10y ago
        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.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      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.
- quotemstr 10y ago
  Accusations of "trolling" lose some legitimacy when the word "troll" becomes "anyone with a political believe I consider unacceptable".
  - forgottenpass 10y ago
    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.
    - samatman 10y ago
      Your comment reminded me of the word netiquette. And now I feel grumpy and old. :\
Void_ 10y ago
I thought Reddit had pretty good discussions about movies.
- 5_minutes 10y ago
  Though it's just a crapshoot quality wise.
  - hbosch 10y ago
    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.
    - reportingsjr 10y ago
      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.
      - dewey 10y ago
        That's would be one of them: http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/karagarga-and-the-vulnerability-of-obscure-films http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/karagarga-and...
  - liviu- 10y ago
    Not at all: please check out /r/TrueFilm and /r/flicks.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  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.
amatix 10y ago
Head to https://letterboxd.com 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.
- GuiA 10y ago
  +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.
- Narretz 10y ago
  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?
  - dewey 10y ago
    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: https://trakt.tv/users/dewey https://trakt.tv/users/dewey
  - Markoff 10y ago
    trakt.tv and TMDb are better options than letterboxd
  - blubb-fish 10y ago
    the watched list is the list with your ratings.
    - Narretz 10y ago
Chathamization 10y ago
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.
- chris_st 10y ago
  Possibly an opportunity to create a website just for the "nomadic TV club"?
  - Chathamization 10y ago
    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).
    - malka 10y ago
      Reddit ?
- bobajeff 10y ago
  Hopefully the Internet Archive gets to archive these before Amazon deletes them in a couple of weeks.
erickhill 10y ago
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.
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  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.
  - wingworks 10y ago
    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.
    - exodust 10y ago
      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.
      - Markoff 10y ago
        well, at least they have now discussions for movie fans leaving IMDb
  - erickhill 10y ago
    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.
riffic 10y ago
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.
- exodust 10y ago
  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.
nikdaheratik 10y ago
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.
feld 10y ago
what you want is the Cinema Discusso subforum on SomethingAwful

by exodust 10y ago

bluedino 10y ago

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.

virtuabhi 10y ago
IMDB says the decision was based on traffic and data. They don't mention trolls.
- alecco 10y ago
  Right
- notatoad 10y ago
  "we have concluded that IMDb's message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority..." they don't explicitly say "we're shutting down because of trolls", but i think the message is pretty clear.
  - mynameishere 10y ago
    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.
    - tatoalo 10y ago
      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.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  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.
anigbrowl 10y ago
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.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Real ID helps but no one wants that.
  - detaro 10y ago
    Looking at the Facebook comment sections some news sites include, I'm not convinced it actually helps.
    - naranana 10y ago
      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.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    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.
quotemstr 10y ago
Accusations of "trolling" lose some legitimacy when the word "troll" becomes "anyone with a political believe I consider unacceptable".
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  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.
  - samatman 10y ago
    Your comment reminded me of the word netiquette. And now I feel grumpy and old. :\

Void_ 10y ago

I thought Reddit had pretty good discussions about movies.

5_minutes 10y ago
Though it's just a crapshoot quality wise.
- hbosch 10y ago
  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.
  - reportingsjr 10y ago
    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.
    - dewey 10y ago
      That's would be one of them: http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/karagarga-and-the-vulnerability-of-obscure-films http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/weekend-post/karagarga-and...
- liviu- 10y ago
  Not at all: please check out /r/TrueFilm and /r/flicks.
djsumdog 10y ago
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.

amatix 10y ago

Head to https://letterboxd.com 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.

GuiA 10y ago
+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.
Narretz 10y ago
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?
- dewey 10y ago
  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: https://trakt.tv/users/dewey https://trakt.tv/users/dewey
- Markoff 10y ago
  trakt.tv and TMDb are better options than letterboxd
- blubb-fish 10y ago
  the watched list is the list with your ratings.
  - Narretz 10y ago

Chathamization 10y ago

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.

chris_st 10y ago
Possibly an opportunity to create a website just for the "nomadic TV club"?
- Chathamization 10y ago
  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).
  - malka 10y ago
    Reddit ?
bobajeff 10y ago
Hopefully the Internet Archive gets to archive these before Amazon deletes them in a couple of weeks.

erickhill 10y ago

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.

Cthulhu_ 10y ago
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.
- wingworks 10y ago
  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.
  - exodust 10y ago
    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.
    - Markoff 10y ago
      well, at least they have now discussions for movie fans leaving IMDb
- erickhill 10y ago
  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.

riffic 10y ago

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.

exodust 10y ago
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.

nikdaheratik 10y ago

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.

feld 10y ago

what you want is the Cinema Discusso subforum on SomethingAwful