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).
They were implementing a rolling expiry of posts already, so the battle for posterity has probably already been lost (unless IMDB itself has historic records that it will release):
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