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

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

#231

Post by anigbrowl »

bshanks wrote: post #222
anigbrowl wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I think the problem is just that people use one word, "troll", for too many different things. 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_Ca…

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.

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

#232

Post by anigbrowl »

forgottenpass wrote: post #188
anigbrowl wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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 mor…

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.

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

#233

Post by bshanks »

lucker wrote: post #209
ransom1538 wrote: post #192

Developed/ran a message board software for 4 years. Running a large message board network is one of the worst experiences I have ever had. You are constantly wasting time moderating people, blocking people, recalculating algorithms, dealing with attacks and explaining to the police you don't have the IP address in question. Every large message board I have developed or managed revolted or sued us ([1][2] random examp…

Seems like a lot of that can be solved by simply not moderating or censoring anythng.

Out of all of the people who would like to frequent message board, some of them can't stand boards with a lot of censorship; and others can't stand boards which don't have strong moderation.

Surely some forum hosts will desire to serve those users who desire strong moderation, and for these forum hosts, not censoring or moderating isn't a solution.

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

#234

Post by anigbrowl »

brianwawok wrote: post #185
anigbrowl wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Real ID helps but no one wants that.

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.

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

#235

Post by v0v »

This is exactly why we never had any forum/prv-msg/comments on our project at TVnfo.com :-) With previous projects, we learned that using those... especially open to public and not require any login to view posts is a very bad idea. Because people tend to post spam/scam and advertise there own products, and not provide any useful information about the actual content on website. In recent years, we've seen a lot of this abuse happening on iMDb as well.

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

#236

Post by nikdaheratik »

exodust wrote: post #42

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. Sen…

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.

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

#237

Post by Strom »

sgustard wrote: post #211

Just picked a movie at random (Rogue One) and the top featured message board posts are: Krennic or Hux? I want a Chirrut Imwe & Baze Prequel What other genres could be transplanted to the Star Wars Universe? Just saw the film tonight - It was OK. To me, that's a pretty random collection of fringe topics or opinions. Are these really the top things up for discussion about the movie? How about an AMA with the moviemake…

The ordering is classic phpBB last post timestamp style. This means that it's not about popularity, but all about when the last post was written.

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

#238

Post by nikdaheratik »

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

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.

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

#239

Post by spbaar »

hkmurakami wrote: post #197
ransom1538 wrote: post #192

Developed/ran a message board software for 4 years. Running a large message board network is one of the worst experiences I have ever had. You are constantly wasting time moderating people, blocking people, recalculating algorithms, dealing with attacks and explaining to the police you don't have the IP address in question. Every large message board I have developed or managed revolted or sued us ([1][2] random examp…

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.

Team liquid is what I think of when I think of active moderation done right

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

#240

Post by dagenleg »

exodust wrote: post #51
Strom wrote: post #40

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…

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 res…

Old and obscure? That's Tarkovsky, man.
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