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

Accusations of "trolling" lose some legitimacy when the word "troll" becomes "anyone with a political believe I consider unacceptable".

Hi, I couldnt find the discussion boards for each movie. Either I am blind or this isnt a alternative.

I know that a lot of people don't frequent the boards so they might not see value in them, but I have a few experiences over the years that endeared this community to me. One was right after watching the second movie in the Matrix trilogy: the cliffhanger left so many open questions that the conversations around it were immensely interesting. I think actually that a few of the theories then (Zion in a zion and others) ended up being way more interesting than what actually happened in the third movie. In fact I think the Watchowskis were reading and following these theories themselves too or maybe I'm not remembering that correctly (it's been a while).

Another interesting one was right after watching Primer. A movie like that is meant to be talked about. I remember reading these boards and watching the movie again because there were so many interesting theories about what happened.

These are only two instances but over the years there were so many others where I'd watch a movie and then go to read about theories about the plot. The movie has to have a plot worth discussing for this to have value though, so in as non-condescending way as possible I wonder if perhaps people don't value that type of movie any more at all. Or maybe the number of boards where nothing interesting is being said dwarfs the ones that do. I don't know is, but I do feel like this is a huge loss because there are so many theories that will be lost forever.

Agreed. I used to moderate the largest English Starcraft forum. We had a pretty low tolerance for poor behavior, and people would cause shitstorms on other forums about our allegedly heavy handed moderation style.

I'm no longer active on staff duties but the site is going strong so I'm guessing we did something right.

I wonder if the current revolution in AI will accidentally kill online message boards.

Here's the line of reasoning. Some of these steps are probably already occurring.

- It will be easy write a bot that understands what's being said.

- A bot can follow many threads at once, multiplying the reading workload for humans.

- A bot can pull large amounts of information together into a cogent argument, or at least one that cannot be dismissed by a human without a fair few minutes of reading. For instance, if I want to troll people by coming with reasons why women should not be allowed to vote, my bot could spin a yarn about how Switzerland is an advanced industrial country that only in 1991 allowed its remaining women to vote. I could pull data about women being left-leaning, more emotional, and so on. And the data needn't actually be true, I can quote sources with wrong numbers, create new sources, and so on. You, the interested debater, would have to follow this pile of crap and debunk each item, eating up your whole evening.

- In order to defeat such a bot, someone will invent a fact-checking bot (Like a GAN, it could decide whether you were botting your argumentation). Sounds good, but wait. A fact-checking bot would have to present its side of the story. And how would it do that? Just like a human, here's your points, here's why they're wrong, here's the actual facts, and so on.

- So now every message board is bots talking to bots.

- Humans will have to fall back to heuristics, like "read the first line and decide if there's a point". But of course a bot can figure out what the weaknesses in your heuristics are.

- People will get sick of writing on boards, because well, they're not for people.