“To serve you better, we are eliminating one of the features that you liked the most…”
Yes, there were lots of trolls and pre-teen pundits on those boards, but I found lots of useful information there as well. I’ll miss them.
“Because as much as you may like those features, they don’t make us any money and maintaining them COSTS US money. Thank you.”
Ah too bad. Takes me back to April 13 1998.
The last time I read a useful post on the IMDb message boards.
Oh my. I will miss it, but I’d have shot that horse long ago.
I will be archiving my many thoughtful and incisive posts and publishing an anthology titled Clothes Minded. Look for it.
Years ago there was an awesome debate between a creationist and an evolutionary scientist on the message board for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Someone got their ass handed. Lots of dreck on those boards but some gems too.
“Because as much as you may like those features, the vast majority of our visitors don’t use them or are aware of their existence.”
That was what I enjoyed about the IMDB boards. I’d watch some old, obscure movie on Netflix or Hulu, and afterward I’d go to IMDB and find discussion threads about it. Many of the messages would be years old, but they were mostly from people who—like me—had just finished watching the movie and were eager to talk about it. It reminded me of seeing movies with my friends in college and heading off to a bar to discuss what we had just seen.
But I can’t really blame IMDB for killing off their boards. More and more commercial sites are nuking their boards and comment areas and using Facebook for comments instead. Why would they want to go to the expense and hassle of hosting boards filled with trolls, negativity, and sheer ugliness?
Probably true, but what’s the impact of that? It’s almost always about $$.
As erysichthon said, “Why would they want to go to the expense and hassle of hosting boards filled with trolls, negativity, and sheer ugliness?”
Expense.
Hassle = expense.
The fact that many people use and enjoy the boards in a proper, civilized way doesn’t outweigh the hassle and expense.
This sucks. People made a lot of dumb jokes there (myself included), and I saw a lot of off topic fighting, but there were a lot of thoughtful questions and clarification of plot points on the boards.
So where do we go now for those things?
This has happened on other message boards and IMO will keep on happening.
It’s like what we were taught in Elementary School, when the teacher would instruct the class to be quiet, or behave and there was always one jackass who wanted attention and would act up. The whole class would then have to pay for the actions of that person.
The internet is just like one HUGE classroom and jackass trolls are screwing it up for everyone, just so they can get attention.
Perhaps because — regardless of those things — if they don’t host boards they will get a lot less traffic ?
Am I the only one that visited the site just for the message boards? I liked to go read the discussions about the movie/show.
Now I wont have a reason to visit the site… one less visitor… is that a good or bad thing?
I haven’t seen any evidence (other than anecdotes) that the message boards accounted for a significant fraction of IMDB traffic. If you’ve seen any such evidence, please cite it.
Amazon is considered a fairly savvy company, and I would be amazed if they didn’t do a cost/benefit analysis before making this decision. Monitoring message boards, and keeping trolls and spam out, is a time-consuming task on just one board; IMDB has literally thousands of boards. They evidently decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.
I suspect they will see a big drop-off in traffic.
There were (I’d guess) at least tens of thousands of unique daily visitors, most of them there for the boards.
That’s a business opportunity for someone.
How about the Straight Dope? While it’s true that anyone can come to Café Society and make a thread about a movie, we all know that the reason most of us would have gone to IMDb instead of the SDMB after watching some less-than-current, less-than-blockbuster film is that SDMB search is…not very good.
For example, I recently saw a 2000 movie that I’d been meaning to watch for years but had never gotten around to: The Cell. I was able to go to IMDb and see what people had to say about it (and join in) immediately. Whereas if I were to try to find any discussion of the movie here, I’d have to commit to a possible 15 to 20 minute stint of trying to get Search to work. “The” and “cell” would have brought up masses of posts, most of which wouldn’t have had anything to do with the movie.
How about SDMB grabbing some of that IMDb board business, without incurring the problems of troll-management, by doing something like this:
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Create a new sub-folder: Movie and TV Titles. (Or two sub-folders, one for each).
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Make the folder or folders readable by any guest—but make posting there dependent on EITHER an existing (or new) regular SDMB Membership, OR a “Sub-Folder” membership that costs only (say) $5. What that would accomplish: participants who have to identify themselves to the extent of registering and paying would be less likely to engage in trolling. Trolling wouldn’t be entirely absent (as is true of the present-day SDMB), but it wouldn’t be as severe as on the present-day IMDb.
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Make clear that the content of the new folder or folders would be threads named after the movie or TV show of interest–“Vertigo”, “Inception”, “The Time Tunnel”, etc. This would leave the usual Café Society topics (“Time Travel in Sitcoms”, “Which is Hitchcock’s Best Movie?”, “Movie Villains Who You Like Better Than the Hero”, “What’s the name of this tv show I’m remembering parts of?”, “Most Annoying Series Finale”, etc. etc.) fully intact in Café Society. It would also keep away those interested in making topics about Scarlett Johansson’s feet, and the like.
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Result: additional funds for SDMB! Also, a place for people to get into easy-to-find ongoing discussions of the problems of Prometheus and the glories of Duck Soup!
r.i.p. internet message boards.
According to various traffic stats sites there are hundreds of thousands - millions of visits each day. And according to alexa 27% of those are through search engines. I expect a significant additional percentage are people who use imdb primarily to look up who that woman was who was in that movie with that other guy. Message board users are a small percentage of overall internet users, and that applies to imdb as much as the internet as a whole.
Small percentage, perhaps. But it’s a lot of people.
By the way, were you aware that Alexa is owned by Amazon?
As is IMDB.
Yes, as discussed earlier in the thread; the entire point of IMDB for Amazon has been ‘sending people to the Amazon site to spend money,’ and apparently they don’t feel the message board participants are cooperating.
They cut the message boards down a few years ago–titles that had twenty pages of posts now had only three or four, and threads would drop off the cliff daily. I’d guess they lost some regulars at that point. Don’t know how much of a cost-savings it would have been–I believed at the time that the severe pruning was an attempt to pry people off the boards and onto Amazon to spend that cash. (It didn’t work, apparently.)