The Popular IMDB message board ENDING

[vorlon13]

Sorry to post this, I really enjoyed this one.

From IMDB management:

IMDb Message Boards Announcement
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.

[vorlon13]

[HairyCyclist]

[Redoubtable]

That's a shame, I love the IMDB boards as a reader. I love to see what people think about a film that I either love or hate.

[vorlon13]

Reading between the lines of the announcement + my experience there and I think the trolls and the daily crap assaults have made managing it too much of a headache.

Still upsetting, when its good there, it's really good. Stuff you'd never find out any other way.

[SteelCurtain]

Reddit is your friend for this kind of stuff.

[Ravenshire]

Nor sure the message boards will be missed by that many. I gave up reading them long ago because of the vast number of trolls and assholes.

[Amarok]

Once again trolls ruin everything

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Once again trolls ruin everything

This why the internet can't have nice things

[Rev. Rye]

I used to be part of them when I was an ignorant kid just barely figuring out how to talk about politics. I'm not proud of my time there. It really doesn't help that most of the people there weren't much better. Good riddance.

[Aroura]

Almost all social interactions on the internet have become a toxic cesspool. Due in part, imho, to anonymity and lack of accountability or consequences, people can let out their inner asshole. It seems more and more people are choosing to do so. It's like any fight, with escalation, only in this case all of humanity is getting escalated online.

I used to read them to get an idea of what people thought about films, but int he last 6 months or so, they have become pretty useless.

Thread starts out, I don't like this movie, comments go right to, you must be immature and only like Michael Bay movies. a few posts later you've hit Godwin's Law, and it just keeps going downhill from there. Basically, ALL open message boards are like this now. The comments under any news, youtube, etc. It's really distressing, tbh.