
“We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards” - ivank
http://www.imdb.com/board/announcement
======
exodust
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.

~~~
amatix
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.

~~~
Narretz
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?

~~~
blubb-fish
the watched list is the list with your ratings.

~~~
Narretz
That's not the same, as I rarely rate movies I've watched.

~~~
Markoff
on TMDb you have discussions, can import watchlist and ratings from IMDb lots
you can create any list you want (watched but not rated as you mention for
instance) plus of course it has discussions for each movie

------
ransom1538
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 example revolts). One
of the largest being niketalk.com. THIS, while making NO MONEY. Users that use
generic message boards are extremely hostile towards ads and refuse to pay for
anything. _EVERYTHING_ done by the moderators is overblown and people working
there are publicly quartered.

Yeah no thanks. I would have removed the boards too - then got a coffee.

[1] [http://mashable.com/2010/08/30/users-revolt-against-new-
digg...](http://mashable.com/2010/08/30/users-revolt-against-new-
digg/#IbYcilA7MkqY)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/07/reddit-
re...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/07/reddit-revolt-ellen-
pao-fate)

~~~
malz
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 the thousands. It would be an
interesting social experiement to replicate that on a larger scale while
limiting the demographic by gender, age, and so on to see how it affects the
behavior of the group.

~~~
briholt
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.

~~~
dorianm
Seems pretty civil and reasonable to me:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/4hnzyz/why_are_most_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/4hnzyz/why_are_most_vegans_women/)

~~~
carapat_virulat
Reddit doesn't really work like a traditional forum. In a traditional forum
everybody has the same visibility, in reddit it's very easy to create like-
minded communities because anything controversial gets out of view very fast.

------
chippy
This is pretty bad move and here's why: IMDb relies on users using the site,
editing entries, facts, quotes and correcting things.

These are the community, and they are movie fans, hardcore fans, the reason
why IMDb continues. The "db" in IMDb has been created, by hand, by volunteers
- the users who use the message board.

IMDb has totally overlooked the value of the Message Boards - they are for the
community. Remove this and IMDb as a whole will suffer.

Consider this comparison: Imagine if Wikipedia said that it was only going to
have Facebook logins for editors. All user pages were being deleted, no user
meetups were allowed and no meta discussion about pages was allowed, but only
that normal articles, the main thing non editors read were to be kept. Thats a
stretched comparison - the idea is the the message boards are how the
community works, not just some little addon that non community members don't
use.

~~~
degenerate
It would be like Y Combinator shutting down its "message board", citing "
_Increasingly, Y Combinator customers have migrated to Reddit_ "

~~~
madgar
If hacker news doesn't stem the growth of trolling (which has pushed out
plenty of my friends) then it probably will eventually "shut down" new signups
for a while.

~~~
cloakandswagger
Odd, I don't see a lot of blatant trolling on HN at all. Care to name some
examples?

------
Strom
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 other similar movies. It's precisely
this why I'm extra sad about this whole situation. It's not difficult to find
a community to talk about the next Star Wars, but there aren't really any
places where discussion (in English) about 20 years old Dutch movies happens.

~~~
exodust
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 respond with suggestions. This
information will be lost, and the opportunity to create similar threads in a
sensible place in context with the movie, also lost.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/board/thread/138657635](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/board/thread/138657635)?

~~~
pvg
'Stalker' is not an 'old obscure film' and reams have been written about it.
For instance, a recent book -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/books/review/geoff-
dyers-z...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/books/review/geoff-dyers-zona-
examines-the-film-stalker.html)

~~~
exodust
The point I was making is that non-mainstream films released a long time ago
still have active quality ongoing discussion on IMDB.

I didn't invest a lot time choosing an example film. You're not happy with my
choice in Stalker, then replace it with whatever you like that happens to have
good discussion on the boards. Perhaps "Celine and Julie go Boating (1974)"
would qualify as obscure...

Is anything considered obscure anymore? Before the internet if you wanted to
watch Salo (Pasolini), you'd be out of luck unless some film festival was
showing it. Now you can just grab the torrent and head to IMDB to join the
discussion.

------
Anthony-G
Another nail in the coffin for the open web!

As I mentioned in another comment [1], I read the discussion threads but have
never actually contributed to them. I can easily click a link to view all past
discussion related to the film I'm interested in without having to sign up and
become a member. This would be impossible in Facebook or Twitter where
discussion is ephemeral, not conducive to thoughtful expression and not
intended for archival or organisation.

It's a real shame that IMDB are just going to remove the boards. Even if they
didn't want to allocate resource for maintaining a community, IMDB could have
opted to make the forums read-only and keep them as an archive for posterity.

On a tangential note, IMDB is one of the few sites where I see ads because
they're not using third-party trackers (as far as Privacy Badger can tell).

1:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571893#13572081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13571893#13572081)

~~~
shostack
Agreed on keeping them up. Even if just for the SEO value and organic traffic.

~~~
Markoff
i never stumbled upon in boards in Google search results, are they even
searchable from outside?

------
dsr_
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."

~~~
MichaelMoser123
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](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 the message board for fear of litigation.

~~~
pestaa
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.

~~~
huac
For one, complying with the law is pretty important. For another, when your
livelihood is based on (to a non-trivial extent) your physical characteristics
and appearance, having your age revealed, and possibly aging you out of more
glamorous roles, is an important protection to ensure.

~~~
Clubber
I have no idea why this was down voted, it seems like it was a calculated
decision. Litigation can destroy a company (just ask Gawker). Being
responsible, legally with consequences, for monitoring the entirety of your
site for age disclosure is expensive. Not only to do it, but the cost of
litigation for when you miss one. That's probably a big part of the
calculation.

Someone suggested that it's because moderating is expensive, which is true,
but IMDB has been moderating their site for a long time. I don't think the
cost of standard moderation was a big part in the calculation, simply because
they have been doing it successfully for years. I think they are also aware of
the value of their message boards simply by tracking page hits.

Having said that, public figures are excluded from privacies generally granted
to the public. There are plenty of public records of everyone that discloses
their age, even though they are not a public figure. To pass a law requiring
IMDB remove age disclosure with consequences is very bad law. Not only that,
the people that are the "victims" have the financial ability to litigate. It's
even worse if other publications like tabloids are excluded from this
requirement.

------
trengrj
It is incredulous they are calling two weeks notice "ample time" for people to
organise alternative contacts with friends they may only know via a handle and
manually archive their years of messages. I expected better from IMDb.

~~~
bsenftner
I would be very surprised if your issue was even realized or considered.

~~~
ClassyJacket
It explicitly says that it was.

------
5_minutes
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".

~~~
roryisok
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

~~~
yoodenvranx
> seems like a waste of digital resources

Yes, that's exactly the same what Sumerians did say back a few 1000 years ago.
Why keep all these clay tables about ordering wine? Who is gonna be interested
in that kind of stuff in 10 years?

Don't you think that such an archive would offer a nice glimpse into our
current culture a few hundred years in the future?

~~~
buyx
I've posted about this in other places on this thread, but after feeling the
same way as you, I looked at some old movies, and found that most posts are
fairly recent. It turns out that IMDB has been expiring posts all along.

Your argument is sound though. Comments on websites, even if filled with
trolls and fakes ought to be treated with respect and saved for posterity,
since they give an important insight into the current zeitgeist.

~~~
sverige
Oh, I don't know. I was a daily user of Usenet for years, but the vast
majority of the time I don't miss it. (Yes, I know Google still has some
unevenly preserved and mostly difficult to access portion of the content.)

Here's the point: if you put some of the great content that was created there
25 or 30 years ago in front of the current generation, what is the general
reaction? A yawn, that's what.

It might be fascinating in a few thousand years, but I won't be around then,
and the planet might not be either, so why should I care?

------
song
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.

~~~
Anthony-G
It's the same for me. I've never posted because usually other contributors
have already provided interesting observations or interpretations. If I have a
question, odds are someone else in the past two decades has already asked the
same question. While, I've noticed the quality of the discussion in inversely
proportional to the popularity of the film, even for mainstream films you can
identify the useless threads quickly enough or back away if/when they get
derailed.

------
type0
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 concept to iMDB?!

~~~
edraferi
> Amazon is already doing the forum thing on DPreview, why can't they just
> copy the concept to iMDB?!

Can you elaborate? I checked out the DPReview forums[1]. They seemed solid
enough, but no obvious connection to Amazon.

Does AWS have some forum-as-a-service product I'm not aware of?

[1] [https://www.dpreview.com/forums](https://www.dpreview.com/forums)

~~~
exodust
Amazon acquired Dpreview in 2007, but as far as I can tell it didn't change
anything to do with the site or forums. Those forums have pretty much remained
unchanged for a long time.

Less trolls on forums where the subject matter is focused, and requires
interest in digital photography. IMDB subject matter can be anything related
to movies including how hot this or that actor is, or how ugly or crap they
are! This will spawn heated debate, but that's fine by me. A sad loss, the
IMDB forums are amusing and reveal a lot of varied opinion and expression.

------
numerlo
The younger generation or even people newer at the internet never learned how
valuable those boards where. IMDb failed with the newer generation and that's
why they are shuting them down (the fact that they have to spend resources to
keep them up doesn't help either). The comments here (up until now at least)
are a representation of their failure as everyone states that nothing of value
was lost and most didn't bother with IMDb's boards ever (Hacker News' biggest
audience IS that younger generation).

~~~
Markoff
project on HN apparently don't watch movie or search superhero crap and other
sophisticated stuff, otherwise it's hard to understand why would anyone agree
with shutting boards where movie fans discuss movies, especially those less
known and especially since there is ZERO alternative to easily find discussion
board for some obscure movie you just watched where would anyone head

~~~
Markoff
people... watch...

can't edit my comment in my HN client

------
sparkzilla
Amazon, the owner of IMDB, does not understand the value of community,
apparently seeing it as a cost instead of as an opportunity. So instead of
taking advantage of the knowledge and interest of 250 million users, they have
given that community to Facebook. Instead, they should have given better tools
to their users by making IMDB into a social network for movies. What a waste.

------
endgame
Archive Team link:
[http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=The_Internet_Movi...](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=The_Internet_Movie_Database)

------
Yhippa
If bulletin board software was made today and was free of the archetypes and
styles of the 90's and 2000's would they be more popular today? Spent a lot of
time on them during those years and I still find valuable information there
whether it's how to fix a car or what strategy should I use to play a certain
game.

I think these communities were more tight-knit. They had some modicum of
moderation as you typically had to sign up and typically you had to be a good
citizen for a while before posting threads. This is in comparison to many
social media where you can begin trolling with little to no effort.

Reddit favors gamification or conforming to popular opinion. Many of the
forums I frequented didn't have any sort of rep other than post count and
maybe join date to see seniority.

I see a lot of sites I used to visit go this way including the forums for
Magic: the Gathering. Based on user numbers and the rise of social media
platforms they are very likely going to substitute for the old tight-knit
forums of yesteryear.

~~~
distances
Discussion boards also provide much longer-lasting content. Twitter and
Facebook are totally ephemeral.

Reddit content seems to be somewhat valid even after the discussion has
ceased, but once discussion leaves a subreddit front page it basically dies.
That applies to HN too, of course. Discussion boards usually resurface a topic
when someone answers, resulting in a longer discussion and a chance to revisit
the topic.

------
bogomipz
They seem to be adopting the same public comment that NPR did when they
shutdown comments - "we aren't shutting it down but rather we are simply
'migrating' community engagement to Twitter(and perhaps other social media
outlets.)"

I find relegating community engagement to Twitter creates an uneven experience
in that I have to go "out of band" to participate when I am already on the
IMDB site. Also discussing movies(or any art form for that matter) via 140
characters is hard for me personally to take seriously.

I wish they had provided numbers for the volume that uses the comments section
vs Twitter as it would have been interesting.

Maybe this change will create an opportunity for an alternate movie site?

------
ptrptr
This just shows how Amazon is only interested in selling movies, not building
communities. Can someone recommend any other movie forum with similiar scale?

~~~
pgrote
Since the announcement I've looked and haven't found anything. This is a huge
bummer since the value in the comments were discussions outside of the larger
movies.

I've learned many things about movies I've enjoyed and appreciated the other
takes of movies I hadn't thought of.

If you do come across something, please let us know.

~~~
Markoff
check trakt.tv comments and support this feature in TMDb discussion

[https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5894e6e0c3a368089b000e1e?pag...](https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5894e6e0c3a368089b000e1e?page=3)

------
pcarolan
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.

~~~
Markoff
the thing is it must have already big database of movies and enough users,
only other sites meeting this are rotten tomatoes (disabled read only forums
so apparently not interested), TMDb (nothing, seem they are not interested in
this opportunity judging by discussion in their forum), Metacritic (nothing),
Letterboxd (nothing and too few users) and trakt.tv (has threaded comments for
specific movies, but also not that many users)

i talked with my friend running one of the biggest subtitles website who had
obviously enough database of movies and TV shows, but he ain't interested
because of legal responsibility for content of comments and need of expensive
moderation, though i would think this could be outsourced to Disqus and
legally comments would be stored on their servers

~~~
coffeeCashew
I think the PP is referring to an independent, content agnostic system for
layering discourse and messaging on top of third-party content systems.

------
lordnacho
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.

------
lpolovets
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?

~~~
Markoff
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

------
wildpeaks
Another piece of Internet History gets deleted, that's a pity. Personally it
literally was the very first url I memorized back in IE3 times, and eventually
first online user account as well (June 1999, wow, time flies).

------
OliverJones
Strategic mistake. The so-called "open web", even with crude user interfaces,
is a more credible source of information than easily manipulated and falsified
"news" feeds on closed platforms like FB.

------
MaudTheNovice
STOP BEING SAD!

I mean, stop being sad as in feeling defeated. It's not an end, it's a problem
in the continuation. You are hackers, and the announcement gives a very clear
clue as to what you can do to solve this problem; archive the content, mirror
it, and launch your own decentralized movie discussion platform!

Think about how The Pirate Bay is backed up these days; dozens of TPB mirrors
exist to guarantee the continued existence of the service. Decentralization is
good. This is good as in it's good to be reminded not to put your eggs in a
centralized (and commercially motivated) basket!

------
Markoff
The Movie database (TMDb) added yesterday (February 6th) Discussions
functionality for each title (movie/TV show).

[https://www.themoviedb.org/](https://www.themoviedb.org/)

You will find it in top left of the page next to poster under Discussions
button with Bubble icon, so feel free leave IMDb which abandoned users and
plan to delete their content.

You can return back to movie page by clicking on name of movie. Discussions
have two categories - General, for general topics regarding movie, Content
issues is self explanatory regarding content on main page.

Link from mobile view is currently NOT available, should be rolled out today
accoding admin (Travis Bell) words. As temporary solution you can add
"discuss" in the end of mobile URL.

I am not in any way affiliated with TMDb and registered there like 2 days ago
when finding sad news that IMDb is going to delete my comments I wrote for 14
years and what's worse won't let me discuss movies with other movie fans.

After doing research of alternatives (Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic, Letterboxd,
Trakt.tv and other) I consider TMDb the best alternative to move on with your
ratings, watchlists and discussions, none of other sites mentioned earlier
have proper discussions, only other alternativ are threaded comments at
Trakt.tv.

------
burger_moon
It seems crazy that in this time of wanting to hoard and mine user data Amazon
(who owns imbd) would close down a direct channel for collecting user
information.

If trolls really were the issue then why not use that as an opportunity to
devise a new bot to watch and moderate that. amazon is always exploring new
ways to use machine learning and this could have been a great use case.

It all seems to go against their core principles.

------
cdelsolar
This is such a terrible idea. By far the main reason I go to IMDb is to see
and participate in the discussions on the movie I just watched.

~~~
teach
Really?

By far the main reason I go to IMDb is to look up actors and movies. And when
I did accidentally see a comment, it was usually pretty low-quality.

~~~
Markoff
there are tons of alternatives if you just look for movies and actors without
discussion - letterboxd, rotten tomatoes, metacritic, etc

TMDb would be one of them, plus now they launched discussions for each title,
so i am moving there,i like the free concept managed by users like Wikipedia

------
jimmydouglas
Hi all! I am a co-founder of Trakt and I thought you would all like to know
our thoughts on this.

We are planning on significantly revamping our community engagement
experience. In fact, it is our most significant project for 2017 and we
sketched out the plan over a weekend last month.

Trakt has a form of threaded discussion on our web app today. But of course,
it has a long way to go before it can fill the shoes of IMDB. The feedback we
are seeing here about what people appreciated about IMDB is extremely helpful,
so please do keep it coming, or feel free to reach out to us directly. That
said, our approach will be different from traditional forum-style discussions
because we see an opportunity to vastly improve the experience by following
the lead of today's well-executed communities.

Of course, our intention is to facilitate discussions within Trakt that are
categorized within specific media like a TV episode, a movie, and likely more
options such as directors and actors. While doing so, we have two major
priorities that I hope will set us apart from what you previously had
available to you:

1) A community built on respect and reputation. A great example is Product
Hunt, where I can always count on having a productive discussion should I
decide to provide feedback to a maker or hunter.

2) A composition experience that helps you make beauty out of words. Of
course, Medium has done a wonderful job with this and I hope to apply some of
the lessons learned from their platform as it has evolved.

In the meantime, if you're interested in seeing your IMDB data imported to
your Trakt account, there are multiple members of our community who have built
wonderful tools to enable you to do this. Here's one:
[https://github.com/damienhaynes/TraktRater](https://github.com/damienhaynes/TraktRater)

Thank you!

~~~
Markoff
trakt is cool, but it's more on side of sharing and social aspect, i was
recommending your website until TMDb launched their discussions, since it's
closest alternative to IMDb (plus as bonus pretty open platform), you have
there movie and actors info plus you have proper discussions since yesterday

diversification and competition is healthy but too much fragmentation ain't
good either

------
jug
I understand the gigantic task of moderating boards on the scale that IMDB's
probably were, but social network accounts are definitely no substitute as
history on these is not tuned for searching. They're flat streams of haphazard
comments to whatever is posted on these accounts.

I just now chose to search IMDB's Facebook page for "Star Wars The Force
Awakens" for a recent huge movie, using IMDB's supposed "replacement" to these
forums. It ought to get no better than this. Top three results:

1\. Which film do you think will be the next $2 billion dollar movie?

2\. John Boyega to star in Pacific Rim 2

3\. Daisy Ridley to star in novel adaption Chaos Walking

None of these are even about the movie I searched, much less a focused
discussion! It's completely useless. But that's not because Facebook's search
engine is bad. It's searching what has been posted. No, it's because Facebook
is not a search engine for catalogued knowledge to begin with. Why? Because
Facebook doesn't even contain organized information. It's the wrong tool for
this job. It's like going to a pub to extract information rather than going to
a library.

This is in extent a problem I've felt has grown worse lately. The big social
networks are eating up the web which is not only a loss due to consolidation
and reliance on what the giants decide to do (a ton of eggs in very few
baskets), but because social networks are tuned to be live or at best "the
fresh of today". That works when chatting daily with friends, but not to look
up thoughts and opinions on a movie from 1995, or anything else for that
matter.

There is also a conceptual difference here, even if social networks did
catalogue information to be browsable. They usually work as advertisement
platforms and people write reactionary comments, while on a message board
people go there in order to indulge themselves in a discussion or get
questions answered = much higher discussion quality. Even if the IMDB boards
weren't exactly always top quality, they were often much better than the
swamps of Facebook.

~~~
Markoff
TMDb which is in service since 2008 just launched discussions for movies and
TV shows, feel free to discuss them there, it's also pretty open system which
style be preferred by HN readership

------
intopieces
Eh. They were mostly people starting threads with the title "This movie
sucks." Not much valuable discussion there.

~~~
jl6
The signal to noise ratio was poor, but there _was_ some signal. It would be a
tragedy for it to be deleted.

~~~
intopieces
I think tragedy is going a bit too far. Unfortunate for some hardcore fans,
sure, but some things are just not worth keeping around and most of those
things are message boards.

It's time to admit that message boards, as a genre of open-web feature, are a
failure without clear topics and strict codes of conduct.

IMBd's boards had neither, and I'm glad to see them go.

------
oliwarner
Mixed feelings about this.

I'll miss inane arguments about movies, but I'll be glad to see the back of
the "Oh she's growing up fine" comments on under age actresses' profiles.
Creepers are creepy.

------
simias
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 the
comment unless the poster used a different color or something.

Not that the discussions were generally very insightful, mostly celebrity
gossip and flamewars.

~~~
emn13
Not a great loss, but it's amusing to read imdb's definition of "ample time"
to backup anything of value.

~~~
buyx
IMDB's been expiring messages all along, so there isn't much there to backup.
After reading this announcment, I wanted to save the fanboy comments for
Cloverfield (2008) back from when it was first released, since I regard it as
a classic example of the phenomenon, and they are already long-gone.

------
electrichead
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.

~~~
Cyph0n
Agreed. One of the only times I contributed to the board was on a thread
discussing why time travel in Timecrimes[1] (superb movie!) was not
consistent. Without spoiling it, we ended up discussing all sorts of alternate
theories in an attempt to have it make sense.

Another cool thing is visiting the boards of interesting movies or shows that
are still far out from release. You usually find details about estimated
release date based on current progress and photos from production.

[1]: [http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0480669/](http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0480669/)

~~~
Markoff
yep, time crimes was very good, i remember very good discussions also in The
Prestige board regarding teleportation

btw TMDb just launched discussions yesterday so feel free to participate
there, of course don't expect years of comments, but feel free to copy
interesting topics you made from IMDb

------
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.

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

I think the key here is this has been one of, if not the biggest movie rating
/ db site in the world for years and years and they won't do it. This isn't
some poor bloke in his basement struggling to moderate, it's a massively
popular website that should have some resources.

Everyone doesn't have to be great at moderating when they start up forums, but
a hugely trafficked website that's been there forever should maybe get a
handle on it, if they've been offering it for a long time.

------
hkon
Sad. Usually when I have some question after having watched a movie, I can
find the answer on the forum. But it seems all good movies have been made
anyway. Maybe the era of movies are over.

~~~
Markoff
plenty of good movies are still released each year, just the ratio of good vs
the rest seem worse than in past or it's maybe nostalgia and i an becoming
old, for instance recent Arrival was decent movie

------
JoeAltmaier
Its tragic when every niche web facility gets axed because it isn't mainstream
enough. This is what gives us watered-down media and bland food. Aim for the
middle is ok, you gotta survive in the market - but to actively axe the ends
of the bell-curve is irresponsible. Even though only a percent of the visitors
used the boards, isn't that still hundreds of thousands of people? Aren't they
a special demographic? How do they know its nobody they want to support?

------
gurkendoktor
Sigh. I actually had hope that IMDb would eventually fix its social
functionality. That's obviously never going to happen.

There is (was?) a way to add friends on IMDb, but I found it ridiculously hard
to find, and even now I can't see their movie ratings or watchlists. The
message boards were stuck in the 90s, but at least they got the job done.

Maybe I should write a script to migrate all my ratings to Letterboxd...

~~~
Markoff
check out TMDb, it has watchlists, ratings, API for apps and also discussions
launched yesterday plus it's by no means some newcomer, they are around since
2008 as alternative to IMDb

~~~
gurkendoktor
Thanks! Will do.

------
dirkg
This is the worst news I've read. IMDB boards are where I always go to learn
about a movie/tv show, there is decades worth of interesting threads and
contributions from people who'd never use a 'social network', even with their
stupid policy of deleting threads.

Its an insult the way they're going about this. Pretending that the majority
of their users would prefer to use the cancer that is FB/Twitter, which even
if you wanted to, is in no way even close to being a substitute to having a
board for every single movie/tv/actor/cast ever.

The cost to run these boards is less than a rounding error to Amazon, they
waste more money on their many projects that never go anywhere.

The real reason is that the people who actually use the boards are dedicated,
you can't sell these people's profiles and 'monetize' them, you can't exploit
them, and you can't sell them other junk.

I don't even care about moderation - any big forum will have trolls, let
people self moderate.

~~~
Markoff
fully agree with you, importance of trolls is overstated

if you look for alternative check TMDb which just launched forum discussions
for reach title so don't expect decades of collective wisdom available but at
least it's somewhere to move on

------
colinstrickland
I'm one of the original developers and the primary author of the IMDb boards
system, started way back in 2001. I wrote up my thoughts here -
[https://www.beatworm.co.uk/blog/internet/imdb-boards-no-
more](https://www.beatworm.co.uk/blog/internet/imdb-boards-no-more)

------
anw
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 enough to print.

Unfortunately these interesting comments are also hidden in the midst of users
asking "who else think X actor looks like Y actor?" and the plethora of happy
birthday threads.

I do wonder how many actors actually visit their IMDB comments section.

As far as there only being one post per comment, that can easily be changed by
clicking on the "flat" view instead of the "thread" view. I agree that it may
not be the best default, but it's at least available.

~~~
Markoff
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

------
r721
Interesting comment on reddit (by Manhattan_Writer):

"This is no surprise whatsoever. I've worked at IMDb (the worst and most
discouraging experience of my professional life ) and believe me, the company
is a soulless, empty corporate shell that has one goal: to sell advertising.
It's not about movies, TV, or being 'guardians of data' \- everything is about
making money. The entire site is setup to sell advertising, and movie data is
simply a means to achieve that. End of story.

The reason IMDb is getting rid of the message boards is simple: they can't be
monetised. If IMDb could make money out of the boards, they'd be staying, but
there's no cash in it for them, so they're getting axed. The sell-outs who run
IMDb will have looked at the 'metrics' (a risible corporate buzzword the Data
Team loves so much) and decided that traffic is not high enough for them to
make any real money.

It really is that simple. I've experienced first-hand the obsession with
metrics, and making money (at the expense of customer satisfaction), and it
really is pathetic to behold. No decision is made at IMDb without greed being
factored into the equation, and believe me, they will also shut down certain
data sections at some point if they get in the way of making money. Forget the
fact that the site has compiled 20+ years worth of important data - if one of
the sections can no longer be monetised effectively (Literature, for example),
they'll just get rid of it, and dump the hard work of thousands of
contributors without batting an eye.

In financial terms, keeping the message boards live costs IMDb basically
nothing, bar the human cost of maintenance, which - when considered in the
context of the site's huge annual profit margin - is less than miniscule.
Still, community cannot get in the way of making money, and trying to increase
the site's earning by 5-10% every.single.year.

There's no point complaining about it, making suggestions, or suggesting
alternate, viable solutions - the hacks at IMDb don't give a toss. There's no
money in it for them, so they're not interested. They'll fob you off with the
usual hollow platitudes, but make no mistake, the IMDb that people love died
years ago. Now, the site is just a shiny, corporate plaything, pimped out by
Amazon for the purposes of making money, with greed - not customer focus -
being its primary driving force.

One final note: it probably burns IMDb that the majority (over one third) of
their users come from China, the audience for which is far less valuable to
advertisers than, say, the USA and the UK. Only about 5% of IMDb's users come
from the UK, which is ironic considering the site originated in England. But,
I digress - IMDb stopped having relevance years ago; Letterboxd is far
superior."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/5ruzwc/imdb_message...](https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/5ruzwc/imdb_message_boards_shutting_down_effective/ddawdo7/)

~~~
JoeDaDude
But without the message boards, I (and many others) have no reason to visit
the site. I expect this will have an indirect effect on page views and
advertising sales.

------
stevewillows
It's a shame to see the boards go, but I can understand their reasoning.

Letterboxd and the others are handy for tracking movies, but I found that
using Google Sheets with the OMDB API is much better. I can pull the
information that I want and easily input titles from lists on Letterboxd and
other sites. Add 'Cloud Ignite' instead of pulling from the XML though. Going
straight to the XML isn't reliable.

For those looking for good conversations, /r/flicks is the best bet.
/r/truefilm is fantastic, but is geared toward long-form discussion.

Its unfortunate for the community. The IMDB boards have been handy over the
years. I'm surprised they didn't move to something like Disqus.

~~~
Markoff
reddit is too messy, you don't have subreddit for every single movie ever
released plus thanks to voting system you will see only popular opinions,
controversial but valid opinions will be hidden

i would recommend checking TMDb which launched discussions for each listed
title just yesterday, so don't expect there will be much content, but at least
each movie or TV show had its own page and own forum, much more neat than
reddit

~~~
stevewillows
TMDB is great. It's awesome that they have discussions now.

I agree that reddit isn't ideal. With the size of truefilm and flicks, the
threads aren't usually very big.

Thanks for the heads up re: TMDB!

------
wslh
I found these message boards useful in the past. For example when searching
for movies based on parts of a movie script, more if these were obscure
mpvies. I don't care about closing the message boards but the data should be
archived.

------
dorianm
I like the irony that it started in a message board.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb#History_before_website](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMDb#History_before_website)

------
robbrown451
It amazes me that no one has yet been able to build a self moderating message
board that uses a combination of crowd sourcing and machine learning to lower
the volumes of the microphones of bad actors. (while balancing it against the
general concept of freedom of expression)

Hacker News is one of the better ones out there, but I think it comes more
from having a smallish community and active moderation from above. Quora does
a pretty good job of suppressing the content of trolls and spammers and those
who are unable to provide positive content. But all of them could be improved.

~~~
dwaltrip
One big problem is "garbage in, garbage out". How do we ensure the auto-
moderators are trained well? Especially given the effort and cleverness
certain destructive individuals are willing to expend?

The community sets the tone and norms, but it is a dynamic, evolving thing,
and I think it would be incredibly difficult to robustly formalize in a system
that doesn't possess human level intelligence.

Additionally, almost all online communities see a decrease in signal-to-noise
ratio as they grow. I think this is one reason reddit has been so successful
with their sub-reddit concept, so that groups can splinter off, reformulate
their main principles, and start anew.

------
hkmurakami
Call me cynical but all I can picture is one passionate longtime PM on IMDB
losing a protracted political battle inside Amazon. If you're out there,
thanks for fighting to keep it alive all this time.

------
therealdrag0
Off topic: I've found that IMDB has the best advanced search of any media
website I've seen:
[http://www.imdb.com/search/title](http://www.imdb.com/search/title)

Amazon, Audible, Goodreads, etc are all crap / offer nothing compared to this.
I love it, but it makes me sad that other systems don't support such well
featured sorting. I wonder if it's because other ones are using document
stores instead of relational or something that makes it architecturally
difficult.

------
diimdeep
I constantly check for meaning or interpretation of films there, so sad.

------
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.

------
areyoureal
If you still want to comment on movies on IMBD but don't want to direct your
comments to Facebook or some other website sign up on "The New Internet"
(areyoureal.com) you can comment ON TOP of ANY page of the internet including
movie pages located on IMDB.

------
hugh4life
I completely disagree with this... when I get on nostalgia kicks I often find
useful bits of information about the current lives actors and actresses from
my childhood who haven't had much work recently in the imbd comments.

------
krisgenre
Well, we anyway have
[http://movies.stackexchange.com/](http://movies.stackexchange.com/). Would
have been nice if they had moved to some other platform.

------
utopcell
Weird move. Why not make the boards read-only (or at least, delete-only) ?

------
Pxtl
It's good for companies to stick to what they're good at. If social isn't a
core part of your offerings, don't half ass it and let the poo flinging
monkeys take over.

------
wnevets
I used to enjoy their message boards years ago but then it seemed like every
single one was filled with trolls claiming the movie/show was terrible.

------
wooptoo
Couldn't they replace it with something like Disqus? It's a great way to have
social comments without the fuss of maintaining the whole system.

------
sgustard
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 moviemakers? Seems like a lot of potential here not being used.

~~~
zeroer
Probably an interested and intelligent community never developed because the
commenting and threading tools are so poor. Any discussion of a movie on
reddit is 1000x better.

------
vermooten
I didn't know they had a message board.

~~~
theDoug
Forums were the social add-on of the mid/late-90s that generally produced
orders of magnitude higher traffic to a site higher than its core content.
Especially if topics were contentious and people insisted on always being
“right.”

Pair it up with CPV ads in the early days, and folks had a guaranteed income
source with little work, and even less if administration of comments were lax.

~~~
buyx
IMDB introduced message boards in 2001, and it was pretty mature by then.

[http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/3/14501650/imdb-message-
boards...](http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/3/14501650/imdb-message-boards-
shutting-down)

------
pasbesoin
Calling back to times of yore (both Internet and real world, I guess): "Don't
be a sharecropper."

------
leah221
Congratulations IMDb. Where can I go to talk about hollyoaks then?

------
scottmcdot
Can someone scrape all the boards material and make it available?

------
dbg31415
Seems foolish to not at least replace them with Disqus.

------
awqrre
Pressured by the movie industry?

------
leah221
Nice choice IMDb nice choice IMDb... is all I have to say....

Where else can I talk about hollyoaks with non trolling people.

------
JCDenton2052
This is great news. Quality of conversation is abysmal on those boards.

------
RileyKyeden
I didn't even know IMDB had a message board.

------
myf01d
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?

~~~
Notre1
There is a comment on Reddit saying that the ArchiveTeam is working on
archiving them:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/5s0iiv/slug/ddbugy5](https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/5s0iiv/slug/ddbugy5)

~~~
pthreads
Thanks for the link. Following the link it appears that the db can is
available for download from these two ftp sites :

ftp.fu-berlin.de (Germany) ftp.funet.fi (Finland)

PS: I have not verified them yet.

~~~
secabeen
Unfortunately, that's just the DB itself, it doesn't include the boards at
all.

------
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.

~~~
Markoff
actually TMDb is closer to Wikipedia, it can be literally edited by users plus
they launched just yesterday discussions, feel free to replace it with closed
sourced IMDb not honoring its long-term users

------
roryisok
Makes sense. I don't see what the big deal is, surprised to see this at the
top of the front page? I had to double check I wasn't looking at /new

~~~
voltagex_
What information are we going to lose when it's deleted? Will IMDB consider
handing the data to the Internet Archive?

~~~
onion2k
I'd argue we won't lose anything. IMDB message boards aren't exactly a
trustworthy source of information.

~~~
sgift
Neither is HN for that matter, would you be as indifferent if HN decided to
delete all comments?

~~~
onion2k
I wouldn't be indifferent, but also I wouldn't defend keeping them in terms of
having value outside of my sentimental affection for what I've written that's
been up-voted.

