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IMDb is shutting down its message boards.

I always liked being able to post a question on the most obscure movie or TV show and have somebody provide some useful info that I absolutely could not find anywhere else.

On the other hand, there were all kinds of ugly insults, bigotry, etc., sometimes still there in posts several years old! It's obvious that there was almost no moderation.

Kor
 
Kor said:
I always liked being able to post a question on the most obscure movie or TV show and have somebody provide some useful info that I absolutely could not find anywhere else.

On the other hand, there were all kinds of ugly insults, bigotry, etc., sometimes still there in posts several years old! It's obvious that there was almost no moderation.

Kor
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Yea it made me wonder. It took forever for spam to be removed. Not to mention people to get warned.
 
So themoviedb.org now has a discussion function. Hopefully it will be a useful and informative forum, without the ugliness and unwieldiness of the IMDB message boards.

Kor
 
Kor said:
So themoviedb.org now has a discussion function. Hopefully it will be a useful and informative forum, without the ugliness and unwieldiness of the IMDB message boards.

Kor
Click to expand...

If it becomes popular, then it will just suffer the same fate. The problem with the internet now is that shitposting isn't just a thing that used to be limited to a small handful of trolls. It's now the cultural norm. It's why so many other mainstream sites have had to shut down their comments section and why many YouTube channels have started disabling comments on certain videos. I foresee a time when most websites will disable comments and forums altogether.
 
IMDb couldn't even wait until February 20. I checked the site about an hour ago, 9:44 EAST, February 19, and the boards were gone.

That's one itchy forum murdering finger!
 
I find many of the pro-silencing comments on here pretty upsetting. And wrong. There were hundreds, nay thousands of small e-communities that were all unceremoniously put to the sword. Like anywhere on the internet, the more popular items will attract more people, which in turn lead to more weirdos. Filtering the weirdos and trolls wasn't particularly hard.

Want to find like-minded individuals who love that obscure 1960s sci-fi movie? IMDB was the place. How about that one Indie director? His IMDB page would be filled with other people like you, who enjoyed these nuanced works, often times the director himself would interact with his fans and answer questions. This happened all the time.

The Buffy board, a show that ended in 2003 (and stopped being good in 2001) averaged 2,000 posts/day.

The Star Trek boards were wonderful. It was a joy to always check the various TV show and movie forums and find new people who were exploring Trek for the first time and had questions. Ditto other shows and franchises. Think those people are going to register on a site like this just to ask questions or see if other people are watching it for the first time too?

It was truly a golden age. Everything is going the way of "free speech, except when I disagree with the content" type of thinking. I was hoping a quick clone would pop up, but nothing really has. moviechat.org archived all of the IMDB posts and wholly duplicated the layout/UI, but it hasn't really taken off.

I love Trek and will stick around here, but I thought I'd put in my delayed $0.02 because seeing people celebrate the death of one of the last, great open forums irked my ire a little bit. Cheers.
 
Do you know how many times I get caught up with a show, or hear something got cancelled prematurely and yanked, or wonder how the renewal talks are going, and my first instinct is to jump right to imbd, because they would have ALL of that info already there and in ongoing conversations....
 
Phoenix219 said:
Do you know how many times I get caught up with a show, or hear something got cancelled prematurely and yanked, or wonder how the renewal talks are going, and my first instinct is to jump right to imbd, because they would have ALL of that info already there and in ongoing conversations....
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Yes, I miss them dearly. I would always go to IMDb for actor info, trivial, filming locations, and to see others opinions on whatever I was watching.
 
Go outside and enjoy nature more? Now excuse me I'm going to have to yell at Trump Trolls some more on Facebook.
 
I'm sorry, but as a person who was a longtime and very avid poster at the IMDB going back to 2000 (yes, 2000) and saw the forum decline precipitously in the last two years, I'm going to have to step in here.

People can post all the screenshots they want of how "idyllic" they were. The screenshots don't tell the whole story. The DS9 forums were barely visited; that's why you don't see a lot of troll posts there. Trolls didn't care enough about that forum to attack it and what few troll posts there were were easily moderated because of the lack of activity on that board.

Let's actually post a link to what the average IMDB board looked like:

A Dog's Purpose (2017)
Ghostbusters (2016)

I particularly love the scintillating discussions on the Ghostbusters board, too, like: "Natalia Is A Rape Enabler", "Steve Bannon is a White Supremacist...?" and "What's the difference between a feminist and an elephant?" Don't you?

Here are some additional "scintillating discussions" at the IMDB:

Alright men, be honest....(asks for a roundup of who "jerked off" to the rape scene in Irreversible)
Hottest scene ever (talks about how "hot" the brutally violent rape scene was in Irreversible)
This board is far more horrifying than the film (talks about the large number of rape apologist comments that had overrun the Irreversible forum)

Keep in mind, those are the threads that were left up at the Irreversible board and didn't include the dozens of other posts about the rape scene that had been taken down, such as "Hottest Rape Scene Ever?" So that board is extremely cleaned up compared to what it used to look like.

BTW, if the IMDB was such a bastion of wonderfulness, how come so many of the actual posters didn't share that view?

Where will the depraved racists/xenophobes of this board flock to next?
It's a good thing these boards are closing.
Thanks for shutting the board down Racist bigots

Now, in the end of the day, nothing I say or do is going to change people's minds about what losing the IMDB meant to them. But by the same token, I can't just idly stand by and watch those people try to present a completely false picture that it was this totally romantic, idyllic place full of fascinating, informative, constructive discussions. That may have been true in 2000, 2005, 2010 and even as late as 2013. That was not true in 2014 and beyond. By then, it had become a camping ground for trolls who had been booted out of other forums across the web. It was no longer the forum for diehard cinephiles. That's why the forums were closed. There was no point in maintaining them when practically 95% of the users were campers and refugees, not actual users of the IMDB itself.
 
imdbrefugee said:
Think those people are going to register on a site like this just to ask questions or see if other people are watching it for the first time too?
Click to expand...

Why not? That's exactly why many of us joined this board. If people signed up for IMDB they can sign up here just as easily. If they don't care enough about Trek to sign up in the first place, then nothing is really lost anyway.
 
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