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

imdb.com

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

#271

Post by bshanks »

dfabulich wrote: post #251
bshanks wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#272

Post by brownbat »

I have no idea why we decided that everyone who makes content or provides a service must also be great at moderating commenting systems.

Disaggregating comment from content is a great move for the web. It's part of the process of offloading commenting systems to people who are good at running them.

There's no reason we couldn't eventually have a browser plugin that appends a forum to a side-panel on every page online. In fact, Google had one of those, called Sidewiki. It was one of the most visionary ideas for the web that no one ever used.

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

#273

Post by teach »

malz wrote: post #206
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…

I developed and ran social networking features for a fashion site with an almost entirely female audience, age range 20-50. I was fully expecting bad behavior but was surprised as it grew that people were unfailingly nice, supportive and encouraging to each other, with only a few exceptions. Of course I'm aware that females, like anyone else, can be nasty to each other, but it barely happened here with membership in…

> membership in the thousands

This is pretty tiny, by Internet messageboard standards.

Even a tiny subreddit has tens of thousands of users, and "smaller" subs have over a hundred thousand.

I suspect that your good experience had more to do with the small number of people than the topic or demographics.

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

#274

Post by knodi123 »

briholt wrote: post #229
malz wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I developed and ran social networking features for a fashion site with an almost entirely female audience, age range 20-50. I was fully expecting bad behavior but was surprised as it grew that people were unfailingly nice, supportive and encouraging to each other, with only a few exceptions. Of course I'm aware that females, like anyone else, can be nasty to each other, but it barely happened here with membership in…

I would guess fashion-interest is a better selector for positive interaction than female. Try an all-female board about veganism and watch them eat each other alive in a race to the righteousness bottom.

> I would guess fashion-interest is a better selector for positive interaction

Wow, I would have guessed the opposite. Devil Wears Prada? Mean Girls?

Oh well, that's what I get for forming opinions without real-life evidence.

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

#275

Post by jomohke »

ch0wn wrote: post #180
amatix wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 is an import option for pro users: https://letterboxd.com/about/importing-data

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

#276

Post by LeonB »

jaimex2 wrote: post #224
lucker wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For a message board run extremely well see whirlpool.net.au It's basically the forum for all of Australia. They seem to have found the perfect balance between moderation and creating a good culture.

^^ This comment is being discussed by Australians on twitter here: https://twitter.com/decryption/status/828462981096710149

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

#277

Post by erickhill »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #181
erickhill wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#278

Post by hkmurakami »

spbaar wrote: post #239
hkmurakami wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for the compliment :)

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

#280

Post by frik »

IMDb seems to be in low maintenance mode for years. I don't understand why Amazon doesn't invest more in it's valuable sister company.

Every slight renovation of the old IMDb website design makes it worse. They should just modify they CSS if they don't understand their job.

IMDb is the Wikipedia of movies, started as community mailing list (or usenet?) and became one of the first websites.

The forum softwares never got improved, it worked the same for 15+ years.

So sad, as really a lot of insightful comments can be found related to movies. Yes, there are the usual troll threads "Person X looks like Person Y", etc but those could be shadow banned really easily. Even if the comments ate archived by Archive.org/etc there will be no method to ask questions or use the forum in future - and all upcoming movies will have no comments. Very sad.

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