Posted on 02/03/2017 11:01:30 AM PST by Borges
IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. As part of our ongoing effort to continually evaluate and enhance the customer experience on IMDb, we have decided to disable IMDb's message boards on February 20, 2017. This includes the Private Message system. After in-depth discussion and examination, we have concluded that IMDb's message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide. The decision to retire a long-standing feature was made only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.
Increasingly, IMDb customers have migrated to IMDb's social media accounts as the primary place they choose to post comments and communicate with IMDb's editors and one another. IMDb's Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/imdb) and official Twitter account (https://twitter.com/imdb) have an audience of more than 10 million engaged fans. IMDb also maintains official accounts on Snapchat (https://www.snapchat.com/add/imdblive), Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/imdbofficial/), YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/imdb), and Tumblr (http://imdb.tumblr.com/).
Because IMDb's message boards continue to be utilized by a small but passionate community of IMDb users, we announced our decision to disable our message boards on February 3, 2017 but will leave them open for two additional weeks so that users will have ample time to archive any message board content they'd like to keep for personal use. During this two-week transition period, which concludes on February 19, 2017, IMDb message board users can exchange contact information with any other board users they would like to remain in communication with (since once we shut down the IMDb message boards, users will no longer be able to send personal messages to one another). We regret any disappointment or frustration IMDb message board users may experience as a result of this decision.
IMDb is passionately committed to providing innovative ways for our hundreds of millions of users to engage and communicate with one another. We will continue to enhance our current offerings and launch new features in 2017 and beyond that will help our customers communicate and express themselves in meaningful ways while leveraging emerging technologies and opportunities.
Hear about this?
I think its a mistake too
What they have concluded is that people are sick and tired of nasty ass celebrities mouthing off and saying so. This is just an effort to protect the slimy class of degenerates.
Blocking all communications between our users is one way we're making good on that commitment.
These guys could write the canned answers given by Nancy Pelosi.
Way too many websites have sections for user comments that have now deteriorated into lib-vs-conservative food fights and spreading of potentially libelous material. IMO, motion pictures and tv are an easy flashpoint for online posters to trash anything and anyone they don’t like.
Another enhancement that has been rendered worthless by hypersensitive and overly aggressive liberals.
NPR and many online websites for newspapers did this. I think it must be a good way to exclude generally older more conservative folks or folks who never got into social media for whatever reason but did do anonymous message boards and forums.
Freegards
Any message boards with liberals will inevitably degenerate into vile mud-slinging and rants. That is a sad commentary on what passes for “liberalism” nowadays, but it’s true.
This effort is also to protect films that are real stinkers by reverting solely to the mogul narratives. Free speech loses to Big Brother.
They were, unfortunately and inevitably, a haven for SJWs moaning about perceived violations of their dogma. Smug hindsight was their specialty and they, apparently, expected films of THE PAST to comport with PC of THE PRESENT.
They were occasionally valuable for discussion but usually were useless flame wars. The user reviews are decent but PC is often a problem there also.
Bottom line: leftists fear free speech again and apply collective guilt.
Tinfoil on:
I wonder if the new administration figured out that it was good platform for anonymous communications between terrorists.
/Tinfoil
Naw, Baynative is probably right. Hypersensitive liberals needed a safe space.
IOW: “readers are warning people about terrible movies and actors and actresses with insane PC view. This hurts movie sales and the only way to save ourselves is to silence the truth.”
I never hit their message boards. Browsed them once or twice, didn’t look that interesting. I only go to IMDB for “what else was he in”, and these days Wiki actually does that better.
That’s the only reason I ever went there as well.
Wiki doesn’t have every single person who worked on a given film...even people who were uncredited.
What I hear you saying is, because I use a pre-paid flip-phone, I’m missing out on the social interactions that occur discussing certain articles - outside of the “comments” section. Do I have that right?
IMD’s message boards made me worry about America. The people commenting mostly seemed to be in the intellectually dull 70-79 IQ range who hated anything normal and had violent fantasies.
The biggest thing separating printed magazines and web pages is the ability to interact via these message boards, forums, and comment sections. By removing them they are taking away a big reason to visit them. What if Facebook removed the ability to comment? Would it then just be another (fake) news outlet or maybe just like a Twitter board without the ability to respond to new info being posted unless you were allowed into a private group.
My local small town newspaper just did this with their online version. I used to check it several times a day to interact with it and the comments but now I look at it for a couple of minutes in the morning after 0600 and that’s it for the day. It’s no different than getting the print version of the paper now other than the convenience of not having to go out to the mailbox post to retrieve it. The visits to their pages will be cut to fraction of what it was before this change. Maybe they don’t care as long as it stifles free speech. Maybe ad revenue is not web page visit dependent any longer for some reason.
Which is fine, I probably don’t recognize those people anyway and don’t care what else I saw them in.
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