“We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards” • Hacker News Board

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#41

Post by henriquemaia » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:08 PM UTC

song wrote: post #21

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.

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#42

Post by exodust » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:13 PM UTC

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.

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#43

Post by Markoff » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:14 PM UTC

type0 wrote: post #26

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 con…

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

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#44

Post by Markoff » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:17 PM UTC

lpolovets wrote: post #13

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

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#45

Post by Markoff » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:19 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #5

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 th…

you are wrong, if you used flat thread settings you could see all comments at one screen at least in last ten years

their forums were horrible, but usable with flat layout and there was none alternative anyway, so no point complaining

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#46

Post by pcarolan » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:22 PM UTC

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.

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#47

Post by technopath » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:22 PM UTC

roryisok wrote: post #27

5_minutes wrote: post #19

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

> waste of digital resources

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)

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#48

Post by pestaa » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:24 PM UTC

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #32

dsr_ wrote: post #10

Translation: "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."

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 th…

So it's less work to simply just destroy one of the most used online forums because a few actors in California feel like they're too old.

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#49

Post by Markoff » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:24 PM UTC

anw wrote: post #23

Unfortunate, but not too surprising. 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 e…

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

Re: “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”

#50

Post by myf01d » Sun, Feb 05, 2017, 1:25 PM UTC

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?